When we walk through the supermarket we are bombarded with choices, fresh or frozen, low fat or lots of fat, cool ranch or nacho cheese, with so much variety we assume that some of it is healthy and that some of it junk food but at least we have a choice, but do we really have a choice? Is picking the best from a pile of flavorless tomatoes really a choice? Or are key choices about what we eat made for us, long before we even step foot into the store?
The industrial food system is not doing what a food system needs to so which is not just produce lots of food, but to keep a population healthy. The simple fact of the matter is that the industrial food system in America is making the population very sick in many different ways. There is the obesity epidemic, diabetes, four out of ten leading killers in the United States are food-related chronic diseases.
Over the course of the 20th century, the American food system was co-opted by corporate forces whose interests do not lie in providing the public with fresh, healthy, sustainably-produced food but instead are just out to make a profit. However, fortunately for America, an alternative emerged from the counter-culture of California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This movement saw a group of political anti-corporate protesters, led by Alice Waters voice their opinions by creating a food chain outside of the conventional system. As such the birth of a vital local sustainable organic food movement came to be, it has brought back taste and variety to our tables.
FOOD FIGHT is an amazing look at how American agricultural policy and food culture developed in the 20th century, and how the California food movement has created a counter-revolution against these big agricultural business.