Dear Friends,

It’s time for an update on our film, Back to the Garden, especially for those of you that we can’t see regularly. The amazing news is that this letter is going out to over 150 individuals, one family foundation, and a half dozen businesses and food co-ops who have donated to our production: that’s community supported filmmaking!

Now for a progress report. We have scheduled two more interviews and then two and a half years of gathering footage will be complete. We are editing now, the hardest part, but we are fueled by a sense of urgency to add to eater awareness about the need to switch food tracks. “Urgent” is a well-worn word among the scientists, authors, doctors, farmers, and activists we have met. Although BTTG will weave in and out of the larger context of toxic food and ailing farms, it is foremost about a few individuals and how food has influenced the trajectories of their lives.

Our post-production process is slowed by fund raising and the usual requirement that we continue to earn a regular income. We’ve talked with the directors of Food Fight and Dirt and they also experienced financial hurdles and delayed production – by years. It’s the way it is right now. Once we have a rough cut we feel confident we can raise the final stretch of necessary dollars which is about $10,000, not that much!

We’re working hard and we can’t wait to invite you to a screening. Please call or email if you have comments or questions; we’ll be posting updates on the website periodically, too.

And again, thank you so much for coming forward with your help and support.

All best,

Wendy and Michael

“The food system is going to change, it’s going to change quite drastically and the real question is: will we be ready? Will we have models ready to help people understand how they can eat in a different way?”

Dr. Joan Gussow, author, former chair & professor emeritus (nutrition), Columbia University Teachers College

This month completes two years of research and filming dedicated to Back to the Garden.  Where did the time go?  In the beginning we thought we would have a final cut by now. Here’s where it went: first there’s the pesky time-consuming business of earning a living. Then there’s more time than usual spent raising additional funds from outside support, necessary to complete the film.  In that regard we have been extremely fortunate.  Many individuals as well as the LOJO Foundation and a number of Maine’s food co-ops and natural food stores have responded with great generosity.  We hope that the fund raising event hosted by friends in Cambridge, MA on May 14th (contact us for an invite) will help us along in raising the funds necessary to finish the film.

Time spent in practicalities, but also time keeping abreast of the whole evolving food paradigm.  Food is a big subject touching many separate but interlocking topics – history, global warming, tradition, science, health, art, community, and psychology, just to get started.  While researching and talking with farmers and ranchers, chefs and community activists, scientists and writers, we found our perspective on what matters in our lives shifting; the story that started out as an objective treatise on beautiful food turning into a personal pilgrimage back to the garden.   Instead of tunneling down into food as nourishment, we found ourselves expanding into a larger community of people and ideas, a loosely held, pleasantly independent, open and generous tribe of (fairly) quiet revolutionaries.  Their life choices are leading us deep into the issues of what real food is/could be and why the provenance of the food we eat matters.  And even better, this new community is incredibly diverse and interesting, ranging from visionaries in the Bronx to post hippie farmers who are mentoring the young, ambitious, grounded generation of new farmers taking up spade and shovel.

One of our newest and biggest passions is grain.  Have you eaten bread, ever, made from freshly-milled flour?  It is not the same stuff as bread made from shelved flour at all.  Think of the difference between canned coffee grounds and freshly-roasted and ground coffee beans.  Sweet, nutty, none of the bitterness imparted by what we now understand is the rancidity that begins the moment a wheat berry is ground and exposed to oxidization.  Over the summer months we will be making a determined effort to add more footage and stories from grain farmers, millers, and bakers to our documentary.

We are also scheduled to interview Sharon Astyk.  She has two new books Depletion and Abundance: Life On the New Home Front, available now at booksellers and explores the path to finding a good life in spite of tough times. And A Nation of Farmers:Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil , co-authored with Aaron Newton. Here is a bio from her web site.

I’m a 35 year old writer and subsistence farmer, author of two forthcoming books on Peak Oil and Climate Change Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front and A Nation of Farmers (And Cooks) the latter co-authored with Aaron Newton. Both books are forthcoming from New Society Publishers. I used to run a small, Jewish themed CSA, but now we’re concentrating on subsistence agriculture, growing food and teaching others to grow food. My training was in literature, focusing on the Renaissance and demographic and cultural crises of the 17th century. I’ve switched to focusing on the demographic and cultural crises of the 21st century for the moment, but retain an interest in all things literary. In my spare time (of which there isn’t much), my husband Eric and I are raising Eli (7 1/2), Simon (6), Isaiah (4) and Asher (2), and assorted critters and livestock, building an agrarian future.

These are the people, businesses, and foundations who share our vision of a world made better by real food and all the tangential health that implies:

LOJO Foundation

Associate Producers:  Joan FitzGerald, Scott Cooper, Maryanne Seredynski

Co-ops and Businesses:  Rising Tide Co-op; Belfast Co-op; Axis Natural Foods; Fedco Seeds

OUR COMMUNITY OF SPONSORS: FEDCO SEEDS, LOJO FOUNDATION, RISING TIDE COOP, BELFAST COOP, AXIS NATURAL FOODS, ISLAND GROCERY, AND OVER SIXTY FRIENDS OF REAL FOOD!

We’ve been spending enough time around farmers the past year and a half that some of their ways are rubbing off on us.  For instance, Community Supported Agriculture.  What a fine idea.  Farms survive, participants eat well, and everyone is assured that next year the farm will still be there. Farms are as much about people coming together as they are about food, or so we have come to believe.  And in a similar vein, our film is as much about the community that surrounds great food as it is about the food itself.  So, snagging a page out of the new farmers’ unspoken guide to making things happen, we are launching

COMMUNITY SUPPORTED FILMMAKING!

The idea here is that we are half-way to the finish.  We have nearly completed the essential interviews for our documentary and we are beginning to find our way through the story.  To date, we have invested and raised about $40,000.  Everyone involved in the interviews has donated 100% of their time and expertise.

To wrap it up we are short about $20,000, depending on the final costs of the musical score and the manufacturer’s quote for the DVD.  Ellen O’Connor and Bruce Swift (in absentia) hosted a women’s fundraiser a week ago, raising close to $3500.  That was more than we had hoped and on top of that we took home an unforgettable experience: a room full of passionate, caring women who in short time collectively elevated the level of creativity and commitment.

From that first fundraiser two more were born: one in our home town of Damariscotta and one in Cambridge, MA.  The local event was hosted by Dr. Tim Goltz who heard about our first fundraiser from his wife, Karen Kleinkopf, a force behind the state’s Farm to School program.  By inviting his medical colleagues, Dr. Goltz is sending a welcome message about the level and nature of the medical establishment’s commitment to our personal and community well-being.  This is a cause for celebration! The party was held on January 31st at the beautiful home of our hosts Mike Herz and Kate Josephs.  The event brought together about thirty individuals who in an astonishing variety of ways are working to bring good food to everyone.

The final fundraiser will be in Cambridge, MA at the home of Joan FitzGerald on Thursday, May 14th, 2009.   If  you would like to know more about the Cambridge event, please email wendyhebb@roadrunner.com.

Additionally, with the support of our local food co-op, under the dazzling leadership of co-managers Scott Cooper and Maryanne Seredynski, we are mailing requests to the markets and co-ops that sell the fantastic produce the farmers bring in.  We are asking them to join our spread-the-word mission by investing $100 in our documentary which will entitle them to receive 10 DVDs of the completed film.  The DVDs, advertised in beautiful posters, will sell at a profit to the investor.

The idea behind “community supported filmmaking” was to come up with enough funds to finish our film.  It was a clever idea, we thought, but the reality is that this project is, in fact, about how a common purpose furthers a sense of community. The people who commit their time, energy, and money to healthier families, schools, and towns have demonstrated that food matters.  We are the beneficiaries of their dollars and equally significant, their encouragement, suggestions, and hard work.

If you can donate, any amount, we are greatly appreciative and you will be credited in the film.  $1,000 or more and you are a PRODUCER!  $5000 or more makes you an executive PRODUCER!!!  Please join us!
For more information please call us, 207-563-2149 or email us at wendyhebb@roadrunner.com.

A MESSAGE FROM SCOTT COOPER AND MARYANNE SEREDYNSKI, co-general managers of Rising Tide Co-op:  “Please consider joining us in support of this project.  Rising Tide has invested $100 in the Community Supported Filmmaking Project.  We were blown away by Michael and Wendy’s film OURTOWN as they documented Damariscotta’s successful grassroots effort to prevent Wal-Mart from developing an out of scale store in our community.  We believe so much in this new film, we have also signed on as co-producers and invested our own money in this project.”

We have pretty much wrapped up filming (we think, at least for now) and now we are spending a lot of time trying to raise enough money to finish the film. Wendy has been grant writing, and networking, and we are fund raising. It’s difficult of course but our morale is still high. We have become so committed to the ideals and spirit of the movement that we are energized by it. We feel as though it is our mission to spread the word about what we have discovered by traveling from farm to farm  – a deep and enduring sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves.  The earth is a democratic place, responding to how we vote with our actions.  At least, until we act unconscionably.  We have definitely mistreated the planet and now it is our realization and possibility to make good.  Change has certainly become a populist term in this last year and that’s what has to happen with food. Change all around. It will happen when people really understand in their bones why rethinking our food patterns matters significantly. That’s our goal, to create a film that is an ice-breaker, inviting more people to join in and put real food at the core of our personal and communal lives.

We are in the early stages of editing. It’s going to be difficult. We have so many distractions, like jobs and economic survival. It’s most difficult at the beginning because there is so much inertia. Getting the whole thing moving and keeping it moving – getting the ball rolling -  is a metaphor that comes to mind. And we are just at that point. Who knows it could come together quickly. We still want to do a couple of more interviews and if we get the funds will travel to the midwest and California. We’ll see. We would love to do them but we will be fine regardless.

One of our goals in making this film is to interview people who remember what food was like before the giant corporations took over and homemade meals became processed products. Most of the significant changes in agricultural practices that affect what we eat and how we eat have taken place within the last two generations.

The line of demarcation really becomes obvious at the end of World War II. This was the beginning of a great new era of modernization in our society. It was a time when the government cast its lot with the auto companies and the car became king. We begin to see a mass exodus to the suburbs and the beginnings of the runaway development that accompanied this flight. The G.I. Bill makes it possible for returning soldiers to be the first in their families to attend college. The middle class surges and American companies ride a wave of consumerism that has never been seen before.

As for agriculture, we see the advent of the “green” revolution or, as some of us might remember, “better living through chemistry”. The idea that science could solve many of society’s ills was the message that was being drilled into us. We were told we could dominate, harness, control, subvert, alter, and exploit Nature and there was no hint in this discussion of limitations.  Farming changed radically: small diverse family farms with low inputs are replaced by large corporate-owned commodity-based monoculture operations with high inputs and heavy mechanization based on a centralized production model. Livestock, once integral in the life and health of the farm, are pushed to confined operations that use less land and labor and basically run as factories.

It’s silly to think that during all of these modifications food wouldn’t have changed along with everything else. Now the evidence that it did is everywhere: obesity, rising rates of diabetes and heart disease, “new” food inventions in the supermarket aisles, and concerns about contamination and food security.  The surprise is that not everyone is aware of the dramatic transformations that have altered the American diet.  For those of us who have noticed, the surprise is that it took so long. The reason in part is that we forgot what good food is.  We needed to be reminded. We are interviewing people who can tell us how food has changed and what food used to mean in the traditions of their families.  What has been lost and what has been gained.  It’s exciting to meet these people who still remember where their food came from and to realize that it wasn’t that long ago; it is still within reach.