“A PLACE AT THE TABLE” My rating: B+ (Opening March 15 at the Tivoli)
84 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
How can one in six Americans not know where their next meal is coming from?
I mean, this is the land of plenty where supermarkets routinely throw out millions of dollars in perfectly edible food because they’re nearing their expiration dates or the produce is bruised.
Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush’s “A Place at the Table” provides an easy to understand (if not easy to stomach) overview of how we got to this sad state of affairs where even those who do have meal money often opt for high-calorie, low-nutrition foods.
This doc blends a reasoned approach (no indignant grandstanding) with extremely slick presentation (excellent cinematography, a killer score by T-Bone Burnett). The results aren’t exactly grab-you-by-the-lapels dramatic, but seeing this film pretty much guarantees you’ll never look at the American diet in the same way.
“Table” examines the crisis of “food insecurity” by focusing on families in both small towns and big cities.
The film traces the history of farm subsidies, created in the last century to preserve family farms. Of course, today farming is largely a corporate affair, but those agribusinesses still suck up subsidy money.
Jeff Bridges
Just as bad, most of that money is funneled into the production of certain crops (wheat, corn, rice), thus artificially depressing their prices. As a result, poor families can afford heavily processed fast food but not fresh produce, which is more expensive.
And there’s yet another problem: In many urban (and even rural) areas, there simply are no groceries offering fresh food. Everything available is out of a can, a box or a freezer. Eating unprocessed food on a few dollars a day is impossible.
The bigger story, of course, is that in our current economy families that thought themselves middle class now find themselves among the impoverished. (Even more insulting is the case of the hard-working mom who earned $2 too much to qualify for food assistance.)
“A Place at the Table” even boasts of a little star power, thanks to the presence of Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, who two decades ago created the End Hunger Network.
We’re due for a big national discussion of hunger. This is a good place to start.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 