FYW 102: Food, Glorious Food: Documentaries & Films

Fresh celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.

A solutions-oriented documentary chronicling the current state of the U.S. meat industry. First explaining how America arrived at our current industrial system, the story shifts to the present day, showing the feedlots and confinement houses, not through hidden cameras but through the eyes of the farmers who live and work there.

Nourish explores the provocative question: What's the story of your food? By providing a "big picture" view of our food system, Nourish reveals the many ways that food connects to our environment, our health and our communities. Most importantly, Nourish offers specific action steps that viewers can take to help create a sustainable food future.

Lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing how our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profits ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. Reveals surprising--and often shocking--truths about what we eat, how it's produced and who we have become as a nation.

Shocked by stories of government bureaucracies taking drastic action to shut down small family-owned farms that provide their communities with healthy, non-genetically modified foods, filmmaker Kristin Canty embarks on an eye-opening cross-country trip to find out why our right to seek out natural foods is slowly being stripped away. The result is a look at the ways that onerous regulations are having a detrimental effect on our health, and our freedom to choose what we feed to ourselves, and our children.

Documentary about kids and food politics. Over the course of one year, the film follows two eleven year old multiracial city kids as they explore their place in the food chain.

A feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.

Documents the trend of unlabeled genetically-modified foods which have become increasingly prevalent in grocery stores. Unravels the complex web of market and political forces that are changing the nature of what we eat. Explores organic and sustainable agriculture as alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture.

A documentary that takes a look at the trillion dollar worldwide 'Sickness Industry', and exposes a growing body of scientific evidence indicating that nutritional therapy can be more effective, more economical, less harmful and less invasive than most conventional medical treatments.

This film examines the claim that most if not all degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting animal-based and processed foods.

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock embarks on a journey to find out if fast food is making Americans fat. For 30 days he can't eat or drink anything that isn't on McDonald's menu; he must eat three square meals a day, he must eat everything on the menu at least once, and supersize his meal if asked. He treks across the country interviewing a host of experts on fast food and a number of regular folk while downing McDonald's to try and find out why 37% of American are now overweight.

Colin Beavan is a New York City writer and self-proclaimed liberal. He has big plans for his new book. He decides on a grand experiment: to live one year with as little impact on the environment as possible. The problem is, the project requires his wife Michelle, an espresso-guzzling, Prada-worshipping business writer, and their young daughter to be fully on board. The family embarks on a year of no electricity, television, cars, toilet paper, elevators, or newspapers.

Monsanto Company is the world's leader in agricultural chemicals, seed and genetically modified crops, as well as being one of the most controversial companies in industrial history. This film uses hitherto unpublished documents and testimonies of victims, scientists and politicians to expose Monsanto's lack of care in protecting the environment and the health of those exposed to their products. Shows how the company promoted such products as Roundup (glyphosate), bovine growth hormone, and genetically modified plants.

Examines some of the attitudes that make food a fascinating focus of powerful cultural and individual differences. In this film food choices are divided into 7 primary categories and a variety of individuals from various cultures and ethnic and religious affiliations are interviewed concerning what they are willing to eat and why.

The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country's most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.

When a marketing executive for a huge burger chain finds a nasty secret ingredient in their burger recipe, he goes to the ranches and slaughterhouses of Colorado to investigate and finds that the truth is sometimes difficult to swallow.