Food System Doc ‘Fork In the Road’ Premieres at Sonoma Film Festival

“Watch what you eat” used to be a commonly heard saying, often recommended when it comes to fasting. But the maxim works differently in documentary fork in the roadwhich made its world premiere on Saturday at the Sonoma International Film Festival in California’s wine country.

The film directed by Vivian Sorenson and Jonathan Nastasi invites viewers to re-evaluate the current American food system that has reached a large scale, providing cheap calories to consumers and big profits to big corporations but at the expense of healthy food and sustainable practices.

“The antagonist of the film is really the food industry,” Nastasi noted in a Q&A after the world premiere. But this isn’t a movie about bad guys – it’s about good guys connecting people to the land, inventing farming methods, and working towards a sustainable future of quality food and carbon reduction.

“We wanted to highlight those people… who were working around that challenge, creating solutions and solutions through non-profit organizations that supported their work,” Nastasi continued. “That was an amalgamation of all the themes. Everyone in the film… is looking at how we get food to people who are healthy and well, making a living, creating jobs.”

Among the film’s creators is Dune Lankard, an Eyak Athabaskan Native of the Eagle Clan who grew up in south-central Alaska. Part of his work focuses on promoting kelp harvesting on the Alaskan coast.

“Kelp is like sea hemp,” Lankard explained in the Q&A. “It has all these amazing things, if you take 3 percent of the red seaweed and put it in animal feed and feed it to cows and pigs, it reduces their emissions by 60 to 80 percent. [grew] green, fast, strong, needs less water. So, we are going to start a campaign from the countryside to the heartlands and work with all of you farmers who want to grow things differently and think about how we can change these effects from climate change.

Lankard noted, “We’re going to have to change the way we live, the way we behave, the way we think, the way we grow our food. So, when this opportunity arose to make this film with all of you, I said, ‘I’m in. people.'”

Chef, restaurateur and Food Network star Marc Murphy, who appears in the documentary, shows people how to incorporate kelp into recipes after learning about its healthy properties and amazing functionality. He first met director Vivian Sorenson when they worked on the Food Network.

“When this kelp thing came along [Vivian] he told me about it, and I met Melissa [Clark, New York Times food columnist]my old friend, and we were just like, ‘Wow, we can try to make this sh*t popular, man. Let’s do it.’ And we got together and did this,” he said at Q&A. “For me, it was like, if we can make it popular and we can put it in every grocery store and everyone can start eating it, it’s like in the days of arugula – nobody knew what it was and suddenly everyone is eating arugula. “

Actor Nick Offerman, a native of Illinois whose family is a farmer, participates in the script and serves as an executive producer.

“One of the worst diseases that plagues our modern society is cheap food, because it doesn’t have a lot of nutrients,” he explains. fork in the road. “I worry that our consumer culture, if we don’t make fundamental changes, will be the death of the small American farmer.”

In this film, Offerman expresses his admiration for the work of author and environmental activist Wendell Berry and visits the author’s home in Henry County, Kentucky. The author, writer and farmer, 91 years old, is interviewed on camera in the film, his deep, shouting voice has created the article with words of wisdom. “The future of food is inseparable from the future of the country, which cannot be distinguished, and the future of human care,” Berry says. But care also includes love.

The Berry Center, started by Wendell’s daughter Mary Berry Smith in 2011, is one of the non-profit organizations emerging from. fork in the road. The organization’s website says it is “dedicated to bringing focus, knowledge and unity to the work of transforming our wasteful industrial agriculture system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, does not accept permanent damage to the environment, and takes into account the lives of people in local communities.”

In fact, there has been an organic change in the documentary project, going back almost a decade.

“We started in Missouri with John and Holly Arbuckle,” Sorenson explained, referring to the couple who pioneered the regenerative agriculture of Singing Pastures. “We’re like, ‘…How do we get to the next part of the story?’ And then we started shooting in Kentucky and that’s when we met the Coombs [Curtis and Carilynn Coombs of Jericho Farmhouse] and we started to see that connection, and we met Nick Offerman. Then of course we met Dune and Dune came to us from GreenWave [and executive director Brent Smith]and Lisa Holmes, who is the executive producer.”

Sorenson added, “It was very important that we start helping the non-profits that support these farmers… because without the non-profits, these farmers would cease to exist or be able to farm the way they want to farm…

fork in the road is screening today at the Skyfire Environmental Film Festival in Phoenix, AZ. It will also play in April at the RiverRrun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, NC, the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in Dubuque, IA, and the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival in California. Additional festivals are also on the schedule.

“It’s a huge accomplishment to turn a documentary film from a young kid’s idea into a feature film,” Sorenson said at the world premiere. It takes a lot of blood, sweat, tears, arguments, love, passion, giving up, starting over. And I can’t believe we are here today.