Set Your DVR's - Food, Inc & Polycultures Airing on PBS Apr. 21

How much do you really know about the food you are eating and serving your family? Do you even care where it comes from, how it's raised, or what's in it? It never ceases to amaze me how people don't even bat an eye when it comes to buying designer label clothing, fancy cars, decorating their homes, and spending money other luxuries in life, but when it comes to food - the fuel that keeps us all healthy - most people search for the cheapest, fastest food they can get their hands on.

PBS / WVIZ (Time Warner Cable HD channel 1010 at my house) is airing two must see movies that aim to change your way of thinking. This Wednesday, April 21, starting at 8 p.m, PBS will air Academy Award nominated Food, Inc and Northeast Ohio based documentary, PolyCultures: Food Where We Live. Movies like these, along with movements like Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution are just what the doctor ordered to help change the way this country views the food it eats.  

Set your DVR's now!

Food, Inc. lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

PolyCultures: Food Where We Live is a feature-length documentary movie that portrays the diverse communities around Northeast Ohio coming together to grow a more sustainable and local food system. PolyCultures is firmly rooted in the idea that local/sustainable food is good for the health of individuals, communities, local economies, and the environment. To balance the advocacy perspective, it features many national and international experts who place area food production in the bigger picture of sustainability. The term “polyculture” refers to the ecologically-minded technique of growing a diversity of crops/animals on one farm, but it also represents the documentary’s participants coming from very different backgrounds to arrive at similar conclusions and take coordinated action. The aesthetic is a mix of “agrarian” camera techniques portraying post-industrial Cleveland and surrounding farmland, symbolizing the ground-level nature of this movement.