Plow to Plate Films Presents: Talking Food with Ted

Next month’s Plow to Plate presentation, Talking Food with Ted is a departure of sorts.  Instead of the usual feature length documentary as the main course, the series will serve four small, different tasting plates.  These talks, which all run less than 20 minutes, are concise, delivered simply and with little fanfare, using just a microphone and perhaps a few PowerPoint slides.  They pack a lot of flavor into a small portion.  If you prefer appetizers to an entrée, if a meze platter is your thing, then you’ll want to Talk Food with Ted in June.

My subversive (garden) plot is presented by Roger Doiron, founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI), a Maine-based nonprofit network of over 30,000 individuals from 100 countries.  Doiron’s tongue and cheek premise is that gardening a small patch of grass on your front lawn can subversively and radically alter the balance of power.  Gardeners can take power from other actors, namely the big food corporations, and return it to themselves.  Doiron hypothesizes that gardening is a healthy gateway drug into other activities – cooking, food preservation, farmers’ markets.  By growing the movement through practical advocacy and strategies he hopes to transform the history of gastronomy from one whose endpoint is obesity to one where obesity is but a passing phase towards a world where we are all tenders of the land.

Tristram Stuart is a young Brit whose talk, The Global Food Waste Scandal, reveals the dark underbelly of increased food productivity, namely the massive amounts of food that literally is thrown into the garbage, mostly in the developed world.  Schools, supermarkets, bakers, regular households, and farmers themselves, all discard perfectly good food, not because it is rotten but because it’s unsold or is the wrong shape.  Massive hemorrhaging of food takes place because items do not meet cosmetic standards.  Thousands of pounds of parsnips that are too small or misshapen tomatoes, bananas, or oranges find their way each day to dumpsters.  Stuart believes in Freeganism (minimizing dependence on the "conventional economy," Freegans scavenge, barter or create their own goods).  He’s a former pig farmer who believes they are the ideal receptacle for all this waste.  This talk may convert you into a dumpster diver too.

Marla Spivak does a great job of describing the importance of bees and the threat to humans from Colony Collapse Disorder in her talk, Why Bees are Disappearing.  Not only do we learn about the pressure bees are under from many fronts, we learn that the honey bee is only one of 20,000 different kinds of bee, all of which contribute to pollination.  Bumblebees, for example, vibrate in the note of C, a tone that is perfect for pollinating tomato plants.  Spivak makes the strong case that the dying off of bees is the result of our dysfunctional food system.  Bees are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.  We can play our part in healing this broken system by planting bee friendly flowers and gardens, refraining from pesticides and herbicides, and restoring nature to our areas (Roger Doiron would heartily agree).  These small individual acts, taken together, would have an impact that far exceeds the sum of their parts.  In this way, human beings can mimic the emergent power of bees.

Finally, Robyn O’Brien, in an unnamed talk, discusses her awakening to the dangers that lurk in our food.  O’Brien, a self-proclaimed non-foodie, became the Erin Brockovich of the food industry upon discovering that the youngest of her four children had a severe allergic reaction to either Eggo waffles, blue yoghurt, or scrambled eggs.  Upon learning from her doctor that these foods were among the top three of eight common food allergens, O’Brien began digging and discovered some other alarming things.  Between 1997 and 2002 there was a doubling of peanut allergies.  One out of seventeen children under the age of three has a food allergy.  There has been a 265% increase in the rate of hospitalizations related to food allergies.  O’Brien concludes that these scary statistics are due to genetically modifying milk, soy, and corn in the 1990s and allowing these new foods to be sold in the United States without any human trials or testing under a justification the Department of Agriculture calls “substantial equivalence.”  Meanwhile Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and all thirty-four countries in Europe have banned these same GMO products until they are found safe (as opposed to proven to be harmful here in the U.S.).  O’Brien makes a strong case for more transparency, consumer choice, and consumer protection.

Talking Food with Ted leaves you a lot of food for thought.

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Talking Food with Ted: Tuesday, June 10th, 2014

Park Slope Food Coop – 2nd Floor

7:00 p.m. Free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be served.