Last night, I saw a documentary called Edible City, http://www.ediblecitythemovie.com, about efforts in Oakland, California and other places to establish community gardens on unused land. It began with the hard truths about fossil fuel use, about the future of the middle class way of life, with its foundation in cheap food and an international food market system. I saw the film at WUK in Vienna, counter-culture centre with performance spaces, theatres, a school, and workshops - a nicely repurposed old building that attracts idealistic kids. I had gone there to meet a student who was returning to his grandparents’ farm. He fed me new grapes and herbs from a basket. The people were so familiar: from meetings in South Minneapolis, many trips to new farms, CSAs, hopeful new city gardens.
When I left the movie, during the testimonial time — “we tried this, and it really worked, but it’s harder than you think,” — I was hungry, and not much was open that would be fast, so I stopped at a wurst stand by the subway. Wurst stands are cheap fast food, tastier than we have, but clearly part of the Other System. It was natural to stop. I was getting mildly squirrelly from not having eaten. The stop set up the opposition in my mind: “The Truth” versus “What’s Natural.”
I also thought: why am I doing interviews the way I do? Here was a little documentary with nice graphics to present the underlying economics, which a bright pig could grasp, and pleasant people endorsing sensible solutions. What more is there to do, besides remaking Edible City a thousand times, just to repeat the food message, and also to apply the same template to species extinction, nuclear power, the loss of rural population, air pollution. One could do a whole film festival of documentaries that present the truth; after those are all made, what need is there to do anything different? It can be a nice hobby to keep doing interviews, but where is the need?
I think some of the guests on my television show come on the show wanting to contribute their own version of “Edible City” to the world, to blow the trumpet once more for truth. And what I am trying to do both allows that and thwarts it, or re-directs it. Messages work best when they are pithy; my interviews go about an hour. Also, I ask for the personal story first, the origins story. And then, I don’t usually edit, so the point people want to make is not lifted up out of the conversation. It coexists with everything else. From one standpoint, what I make is just: bad documentaries, examples horrible for video classes, exercises in self-indulgence at the other extreme from the discipline of documentary production (in company with, I might note, Frederick Wiseman and David Susskind).
So, what is the point? When the truth and what is natural diverge, as they usually do, there are several possible responses, all aimed at producing a new natural state — beloved carrot and celery stands by the subway entrances. These include: new laws (stricter wurst regulation), a change in public opinion and attitude (big posters to celebrate the carrot), and, hardest of all, a redirection of the whole cultural life, away from scarcity, from haste, from stress, from emphasis on the future — so that a person coming out of a film at 9 wouldn’t feel rushed to get home, wouldn’t be concerned to eat the cheapest thing available, wouldn’t rush through his meal barely tasting the food. Such a person might find it natural to stop at a little veggie restaurant, chat with the waiter, sample the new dishes. Most plausible solutions to the problem sketched in Edible City are some combination of these three: laws and public relations in concert leading to changes in the cultural landscape.
This does work. For better and worse, it does work. Vienna doesn’t have a big pigeon problem, that I’ve seen anyhow, maybe because some combination of pigeon control and the pr campaign “Doves are really just flying rats” has changed their place in the city. It is no longer cool to sit in the park and feed the pigeons. So one can imagine one’s role as a public intellectual: beginning a process of ethical and scientific consciousness-raising leading to intelligent social engineering — something very appropriate for the city of Franz Joseph. Most ethical leadership seems to fit this formula. It’s not a bad formula.
So far as I can see, it’s the formula that everybody we get to hate also used. Think: “Birds are evil” in China; think “Protocol of the Elders of Zion.” That should at least give us pause.
My concern is with two matters. First, I am concerned to find the roots of motives, before they get amalgamated into ideologies and movements, to see what the first expressions are. Also, I am concerned to show the exercise of a muscle, the action of saying, “Why am I doing what I am doing? Where did that come from?” (In some body work, you have to show people what is required to move just one muscle, by itself.) I agree that change is important, that Edible City to some extent tells the truth, but I want change to have such deep roots that it can stand against the formidable resources of those who are basically users of humanity, or corporate robots with very simple programming.
Also, when I was a kid, I learned a lot about food and agriculture, by osmosis from university extension brochures, conversations between enlightened and unenlightened farmers, and very colourful health studies books detailing the four basic food groups. What ties all the stuff I learned together is that it was, on contemporary standards, all wrong, and inhumane, and unsustainable. And the combination of brochures and classes for farmers and health texts brought about just the revolution that landed us in this mess. I don’t want to be part of the next wave of taken-for-granted stupidity.
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