New Documentary-The Future of Food-Fires Up Consumer Activists

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http://www.organicconsumers.org/party.htm

Fighting for the future of food

Deborah Koons Garcia's film documents how genetically engineered foods
slipped into our supply
- Carol Ness, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, November 7, 2004

"Just about everybody is pretty serious about their chow," says Deborah
Koons Garcia, enjoying the understatement. "Even if they don't eat good
food, they're serious about their junk food."

No matter how serious they are, though, Garcia knows most people don't
realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of
the American food supply, mostly from corn and canola. They're in an
estimated 60 percent of all processed foods.

She wants people to understand the risks, in her view, while there's still
time.

"We are at a crossroads," says Garcia, fending off the wet affections of
her three Dalmatians as she explains why she's spent the last three years
and a chunk of what she calls her "Jerry money" making "The Future of Food,"
a documentary about GMO (genetically modified organism) foods. Though Garcia
has made films all her life and runs her own production company, Lily Films,
she is better known as the widow of Jerry Garcia, the legendary Grateful
Dead lead singer and guitarist who died in 1995.

"Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn't
challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn't
stopped, at some point it will be too late," says Garcia, her back to the
sweeping ridgetop view from the Mill Valley home she and Jerry bought not
long before he died. She went ahead with their plans to add on, and made her
film with a staff of six in the vast downstairs room that would have been
her husband's art studio.

"The Future of Food," finished in July, will get a special two-day
screening at the Castro Theatre on Thursday and Friday.

The first night's showing is a benefit for Slow Food, the international
society dedicated to wresting our breakfast, lunch and dinner back from
industrialization. Introducing the film will be Alice Waters, local/seasonal
food guru and a Slow Food International officer, and afterward, "Botany of
Desire" author and UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan will lead
a panel discussion on the issues it raises. Both Pollan and Waters are just
back from Terra Madre, Slow Food's annual gathering in Turin, Italy, a
center of organizing against GMO foods.

Appearing on the panel along with Garcia will be two of the anti-GMO
authorities who appear in her film: Andrew Kimbrell, head of the Center for
Food Safety in Washington, D.C., and Ignacio Chapela, an assistant professor
at Berkeley, whose work tracking the invasion of American GMO corn into
Mexico stirred a furor.

It will be the film's highest-profile showing in the Bay Area. It's been
hot on the film festival circuit. And activists have been showing it all
over the country, especially as part of campaigns to ban GMO crops in Marin,
Butte and San Luis Obispo counties on Tuesday's ballot. Marin voters passed
the ban, following Mendocino County's lead in March, but it went down in the
other counties.

"The Future of Food" is Garcia's first major film project since regrouping
from a barrage of lawsuits over her husband's estate. Jerry loved film, she
said, and would approve of her using some of his money -- less than $1
million -- to make it. When they lived together in the '70s, he supported
her craft and would take her around to see all the films "he considered
must-sees for me as a filmmaker -- 'Shadows of Our Forgotten Houses,' 'The
Thin Man.' "

"He was a closet director himself, and did do some rock-'n'-roll film
directing of the Dead," she says. "A fact that almost no one knows is Jerry
could sing many musicals literally from beginning to end -- 'Showboat,'
'South Pacific.' "

Telling the story of how she got to where she is, it's hard to believe she
began making films more than 30 years ago, at the University of North
Carolina, before heading to the Bay Area for a master's in fine arts from
the San Francisco Art Institute. She looks a good decade younger than a
child of the '60s, lithe with glossy dark hair, on this day wearing a simple
white jersey pullover and white calf-length skirt over knee-high lavender
Uggs.

Making films "was really just fun," she says. "I didn't think of it as a
career."

She made "All About Babies," a series on early childhood development
narrated by Jane Alexander, a feature film called "Poco Loco," and
instigated and helped make "Grateful Dawg," about the musical collaboration
of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

"The Future of Food" evolved out of her longtime interest in food and
desire to make a "really serious film and do something that wasn't about
me."

Garcia became a vegetarian when she was in college (she does eat fish now),
and "became one of those organic people who are evangelical and totally
boring -- you know, telling people every pound of beef takes 8,000 pounds of
water. I'm better now."

But she's still hyperaware of the "consequences that certain food choices
have on society and on the land and on people's health."

First, she thought about doing a film on pesticides. But her research led
her to the genetic revolution of agriculture. Biotech breakthroughs allowed
the gene-splicing of plants from different species or even plants and
animals to create crops that resist disease or can withstand pesticides,
even the "terminator" gene that kills off crop seeds after one season.

"It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue ... And it was
really clear that there hadn't been a really good film that told the whole
story from the cellular, from the microscopic level, all the way up to the
global, which was a huge challenge -- but I just thought that's what people
need to know," Garcia says.

Her 90-minute documentary feels more educational than polemic -- though it
expresses a strong point of view against letting new life forms loose on the
land without long-term testing of the health effects and real government
controls, especially labeling of foods.

It's an issue with special resonance in California, where the economy
depends on agriculture and GMO crops are gaining a toehold. Test fields of
grapes, cotton, rapeseed, alfalfa, wheat, onions, corn, rice and other
fruits and vegetables have won permits for California. Nationally, 100
million acres of GMO crops -- mostly corn, soy, canola and cotton -- were
under cultivation by 2003, according to the film.

The issues are complicated and technically daunting -- one reason people
have a hard time grasping them. But Garcia threads a clear path through the
history, science and politics of GMO foods to a clear call for action.

She sets her stage with nostalgic, black-and-white shots of traditional
farming, before the "green revolution" of fertilizers, chemical pest-killers
and mono-cropping grew out of World War II weapons research. Agriculture
became industry, and then recombinant DNA technology upped the ante in the
1990s. Chemical companies like Monsanto created Roundup Ready canola, and Bt
corn with a spliced-in gene that makes its own insecticide.

Garcia leads carefully from one point to the next -- showing how the
chemical companies have succeeded in first patenting their own GMO seeds,
and then slapping patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life
forms for the first time without a vote of the people or Congress.

To make the point, Garcia goes to Saskatchewan grain farmer Percy Schmeiser
to tell his story. He's one of hundreds of grain farmers sued by Monsanto
after the company's Roundup Ready canola drifted into his field.

Monsanto accused Schmeiser of violating its Roundup Ready patent, even
though Schmeiser never planted the GMO canola and didn't want it in his
field. He fought the suit where many other farmers settled, but lost, and
must pay Monsanto to plant his next crop from his own seed.

Garcia travels with UC Berkeley's Ignacio Chapela to Mexico, where hundreds
of varieties of corn thrive in different climates and soils, to show how GMO
crops threaten such biodiversity. It was here that Chapela found
controversial evidence that genes of GMO corn had already jumped the border
to contaminate native species.

The uncontrolled spread of genetically engineered plants -- recently proven
again with tests of GMO grasses -- far beyond the fields where they were
planted is one of the strongest arguments the film makes for introducing
safeguards.

The film questions why the U.S. government hasn't required GMO foods to
undergo the rigorous testing required of medicines created by recombinant
DNA technology, and why it has resisted efforts to require GMO labeling on
foods, as Europe does.

Suggesting an answer, the film ticks off all the government officials who
have links to Monsanto, including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and
Attorney General John Ashcroft.

It also briefly debunks claims that GMO foods are the answer to world
starvation.

Ultimately, the film is a call to action -- for people to think more about
the consequences of their food choices and to use their consumer power to
push for labeling and regulation.

While some people are seeking to ban GMOs, Garcia thinks labeling would
drive GMO foods off the market, as it has in Europe.

"I want people to watch the film and say we have to stop this," says
Garcia.

Long gone are the days when Garcia believed "we could have our healthy
foods over here, and they could have their food over there. You do your
thing and I do mine."

With genetic engineering, she says, "You can't drop out anymore -- it'll
come and get us."
"The Future of Food," at the Castro Theatre, Thursday and Friday, Nov. 11-
12. Thursday's 7 p.m. screening is a benefit for Slow Food; tickets are $10,
available in advance at the theater or at www.ticketweb.com. Panel
discussion to follow with Michael Pollan, Deborah Koons Garcia, Andrew
Kimbrell and Ignacio Chapela. Post-party hosted by Om Organics at Lime, 2247
Market St.; tastes of organic foods, wine, beer; $10 in advance from
www.omorganics.org; $15 at door if available. Benefit for Om Organics
programs in the Bay Area.

E-mail Carol Ness at cness@sfchronicle.com.

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