An email a few weeks ago announced a one-day environmental film festival to be held at the MadCap Theater in Tempe, Arizona, hosted by the Arizona Wilderness Coalition. The first short film which was also the best in my opinion was titled The Fun Theory: Piano Stairs – you can watch it on YouTube. It is under two minutes long and looks at a set of stairs next to an escalator leading to a subway in Stockholm, Sweden that is set up with sensors and covers to look and act as a piano keyboard. As people make their way up and down the stairs, musical notes are played. The goal of the experiment was to see if you could change people’s behavior by making something mundane and taken for granted fun – it worked, a significant percentage of people were drawn to using the stairs as opposed to the escalator, and this was a nice little film. The next films were ok, I don’t know what I was really expecting but it was something more than what was delivered.

It was the last film of the evening though that gave me food for thought, it is called Fresh. This film by Ana Sofia Joanes really isn’t much more than a rehash of Food, Inc. although it is more to the point and focused. What provoked me is the part of the film that is becoming a cliche amongst this genre of documentary – namely, the idea of the farmer as a wholesome folksy person of real wisdom, the true earth steward, wearing jean bibs that act as the new age superman’s environmental cape, who is ready to strip the criminal corporate farmers of their kryptonite false advertisements by exposing the corrupt and hollow image of the dangerous foods they peddle on the downtrodden masses. Well as much as I am all for small farms and healthy foods, I think these filmmakers are neglecting that 6.2 billion people eat approximately 12 billion pounds of food daily. Where do people think this food is going to come from if not from super farms that are destroying the very soil they are exploiting to grow corn syrup-laden products that people can afford?

Food awareness, eat local, slow food, organic, these are all brands of their own now. I would like to know what the real intent is of fostering this unreasonable expensive proposition upon the public. The majority of the earth’s population is priced out of participating in this privileged method of consuming food. While some of us may not blink when spending $12 on an organic chicken or $5 on free-range organic eggs, for the majority of earth’s inhabitants it isn’t always easy to pay even $3 for a normal old dirty chicken or $0.79 for a dozen of stressed-out battery caged eggs. Never once do the narrators discuss how it is a luxury of available time and disposable income for one to go about preparing a meal from fresh ingredients that were purchased locally and in season, but that also demand you give up two to three hours of your day shopping for, prepping and cooking your meal. And just how is this supposed to be accomplished when the typical family sees both adults in the household working?

Fresh meals are great. I for one have the time; I have access to the veggies from my volunteering on a farm, Caroline and I will travel to Willcox, Arizona for fresh apples, or to Yuma to pick blackberries. If I buy meat it is from an all-natural farm, I make my own sauerkraut, can jam and pasta sauce, make my own dehydrated granola, and grind raw organic nuts to make my own almond milk – heck I’ll just go ahead and admit it, I am a food snob. But I also realize that there is a sanctimonious crowd out there who would like to force our luxury on the masses so us environmental snobs can feel like we are saving the world. I think we need to put our energy into doing the best for ourselves and then doing whatever it takes to alleviate starvation – in the time it took you to read this approximately 36 children died from hunger-related causes. Yeah, I know, let them eat organic gluten-free non-GMO cake.