As a
father of a young toddler, I'm often faced with the decision to buy organic
food. I've heard various accounts on the issue, know the most
contaminated vegetables, and feel skeptical every time I see a huge food
conglomerate promoting their latest organic offering. I was excited to
watch and learn some helpful ideas from Kip Pastor's new documentary that
investigates these claims. His movie, "In Organic We Trust" is
now available on Amazon, iTunes and wherever digital movies are virtually sold.
We spoke
last week over fair-trade organic coffee.
Michael
Carvaines: What inspired you to make a documentary about
organic food?
Kip
Pastor: When I decided to get into film, there were two
things that attracted me the most. One was the storytelling, and the
second was the idea of disseminating important social messages to a broader
audience. And food is an amazing confluence of every single socio,
political, and economic issue. It touches every single one. And
corresponds to what we do every day: eat. I've been watching food
documentaries for a long time, and I saw two that were inspirational:
"The Future of Food" which introduced me to GMOs, and "King
Corn." The storytelling was great, the characters were great, but neither
one talked about organic. It seemed to me that this was something people
wanted and hadn't had yet. And all these things combined to say this is
the first film I want to do. It's a long answer, I know.
MC:
It's a good answer. Did you worry that you might be preaching to the choir?
KP:
Documentaries in general tend to preach to the choir, but every now and then
you get an outlier, someone whose life is really changed by a film. I
knew that going in. But documentaries also excite the base. The
choir knows a lot, but they also need new information, new excuses to get
together. And with today's distribution, a lot more people see it than
just the choir.
MC:
Did you grow up eating organic food, or did something change during your life?
KP:
My mom was always concerned with nutrition, so we never had sugary cereals in
the house. But I still ate at McDonald's after baseball games. But I
learned about nutrition, the importance of fruits and vegetables, and whole
grains, but I didn't learn about pesticides or soil. That didn't kick in
until I moved to California which brought me closer to where food is
produced. That illuminated my views on food and agriculture. It
wasn't one event, it was a compilation of life experience. And frankly,
that's what this documentary journey is. You don't turn a film around in
six months. This movie took three years from start to finish.
MC:
Did you begin the filmmaking process with a written script?
KP:
For documentaries, it's particularly hard to write a script, but I had to write
proposals for fundraising and grants. And I wrote them different ways, as
first person, with specific characters, and the final film covers most of the
issues that I set out to address. The writing part is fundamental
though. You can create the spin on
the page, but when you go out and start shooting, the story evolves. And it evolves again during the
edit. Just like in narrative
filmmaking, the story is written three times – the page, on set, and lastly, in
the editing room. I tried to make a very solution-based film, which
documentaries tend not to be. They tend to scare the crap out of you, and
present solutions at the end over text. My movie is not about fear.
Half of the movie is about solutions. And some of these were solutions we
didn't know we were going to get when we started. That’s really the beauty of the process.
MC:
The movie shows how your interview requests were turned down by the USDA.
Were you denied access to any food companies?
KP:
Yeah, it was a shame about the USDA. They agreed to an interview and
approved questions, but then canceled at the last minute. They said they
would respond in writing, and still never responded. I had basic
questions I wanted to ask them like what is 'Certified Organic?' For an
organization that is supposed to protect and support average Americans, they
failed. Their lack of transparency
is unacceptable, and they got dinged for it in the movie. Most other
companies wouldn't even respond. Not even a 'No thank you.' I was
interested in exploring GMOs, but I realized very quickly it would be
impossible to make a balanced movie where I couldn't get an interview.
And I think some other documentary filmmakers have made it difficult to get
interviews - people are very worried you will skew what they say.
Corporations have nothing to gain by speaking on camera. And with most of
the really big corporate-owned organic companies I'd want to be exposing
something. Most of them have something to hide and something to lose, so
there's no benefit for them to speak in this film. But I
think there are always creative work-arounds.
MC: The section in your film about school lunches was very
interesting, because it seems like the best place to start nutrition
education. What did you learn about those programs?
KP: We hadn’t planned on getting a school lunch
program. It was a beautiful, spontaneous part. One of our other characters
said, 'Have you talked to Chef Bobo? You have to!' So we did. You take a
private school in Manhattan that can afford a great chef to prepare healthy,
natural lunches, and you can teach children how to eat healthier. It was
really an incubator. Chef Bobo
would train the other chefs how to cook on a budget and send them out and
become a head chef at other schools, usually public. And they take all
that knowledge about how to order, how to create variety and make it healthy
for a lot less money. The hardest and strongest lesson of the journey for
me was that we're in trouble. The way we grow and process food is not
good for us or the environment.
But we can change that. And
if you can get school gardens, that will help change school lunch
programs. If you change what kids eat in school and what they know about
food, then in one generation we're going to take care of so many public health
issues.
MC:
So is it better to buy organic food no matter what, or is it better to always
buy from a local, farmers' market?
KP:
When we were editing the film, my editors would say to me, 'Well is it good or
not good?' Because for storytelling we need to make it black or
white. But unfortunately it's a gray area, and no one wants to hear that organic
is much more complicated than a simple 'yes' or 'no.' The question of how
do you buy and what do you buy is a difficult one. If it's a certified
farmers' market, you can rest assured that if they have an organic sign it's
truly certified organic. But you can also talk to the farmers, because no
one is going to lie about what they do. And nine times out of ten, the
farmers there have smaller farms and they are very conscientious of what
they're spraying or inputting because it's where they live. They don’t want to be living in toxic
pesticides either. For me, I buy from farmers that I talk to. When
it comes to organic, you're either buying for the environment or your own
personal health. If it's for your own health, you can really stick to the
'Dirty Dozen'/'Clean Fifteen' fruits and vegetables that have the most pesticide
residues [according to the Environmental
Working Group]. Those are the ones to buy organic, and that list
changes every year. If it's for the environment, then you should be
buying local organic. And that may cost you an arm and a leg, but it
depends on where you live and what season it is. For me, I try to buy
seasonally, which is very important.
MC:
What's your next project?
KP:
I'm making another film that I've already been working on for a year.
It's a documentary called "Canary in the Kitchen." It's about
the toxicity of everyday things. We're looking at seven different
chemicals that we interact with on a daily basis. It's about where they
come from, what they do to the environment, and what they do to us.
MC:
Great, more fear for parents.
KP:
Don't worry, it will be solution based.
