If you haven’t heard of “What’s On Your Plate?”, a sensational food-focused documentary about two urban 5th graders who, through dogged detective-work, figure out how to improve their own and their friends’ access to healthy, fresh foods, you will soon.
Directed by Catherine Gund and starring her daughter, Sadie Hope-Gund, and her daughter’s best friend, Safiyah Kai Riddle, “What’s on Your Plate” is a solution-oriented movie that gets children to ask the basic question “Where does our food come from?” In an unpreachy way, the film introduces kids and tweens to concepts such as “food miles” as well as to locavore solutions such as farmers’ markets and CSAs. (For more info on the film, see my blog for the Atlantic Monthly’s food channel.)
If you live in New York City, you’ll have two chances in the next week to see it: tonight at 6P.M. at the Neighborhood School in the East Village (located on 3rd Street between Avenues A and B) and on March 20th at El Museo del Barrio at 4 P.M. (Future screenings, including one at the Hammer Museum in L.A. with actors/activists Ed Begley, Jr. and Esai Morales, can be found here.) Chipotle (the healthy Mexican restaurant chain) will also be hosting private screenings of the film in elementary schools, libraries, and after-school programs throughout the year.
I sat down with Catherine, Sadie, and Safiyah to talk about “bad” vegetarians, how to get kids excited about farming, and why good food should not be a luxury.
H: What inspired you to make this film?
Sadie: I had become a vegetarian at the end of 4th grade. And a lot of my friends were vegetarians but they didn’t eat vegetables—they ate pasta and pizza all the time. I was like well, if they’re eating these things and they’re vegetarians…it doesn’t really add up. We were originally going to make the movie about bad vegetarians.
H: Safiyah has been a vegetarian from birth and Sadie has a genetic predisposition to having high cholesterol, but were you both healthy eaters prior to making the movie?
Sadie: Well, yeah, we had salads every night and stuff like that.
H: So making a film in which you traced the food chain didn’t spur you to change your eating habits at all?
Sadie: Well we did a little bit. We joined a CSA.
H: In the film, activist and author Anna Lappé tells you that there are more people in prison in the U.S. than there are farmers. How can we encourage young people to be farmers?
Safiyah: I’m not sure how this would work but it would be cool if you had a program where if city kids who wanted to try working on a farm did a week of farming but they paid for it. So the farmers made money, and the kids learned how to farm and cook— like a day camp. That’d be cool. I would do that. During harvest would make more sense.
Catherine: And also, growing in the house. Whether it’s in a window garden or in your backyard, or however it is—in a pot. (See the Action Points in the Family Cook-In tool kit.)
When you say, “Do you want to be a farmer? “—maybe not. But I could imagine both of you having gardens where you grow all your herbs.
H: Despite your activism and despite various reforms to lunchroom food in New York City (Rachael Ray, Wellness in the Schools, etc.), an article in the Daily News just charged the New York Department of Education is still serving foods such as chicken nuggets and packaged grilled cheese sandwiches that contain high-fructose corn syrup. Have public school lunches really gotten better since you started this project?
Sadie: At our school (Manhattan Academy of Technology) nothing has changed that much. Not yet, at least, because we haven’t shown the movie there.
H: Do you guys eat school lunch?
Sadie: No, we bring our own.
Safiyah: There’s not a very good salad bar. I mean, it’s OK, but it’s not well advertised. Nobody really gets the salad bar. It’s just like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. On Friday’s there’s pizza, there’s hamburgers, chicken nuggets…
H: And the vegetables that SchoolFood orders are rarely local. In the film, you interview Richard Ball, at Schoharie Valley Farms in upstate New York, who eventually wins the contract to supply carrots to the NYC public school system (over bigger farms in California, Canada, and Mexico). Yet it was a big challenge for him to get that contract and the whole process was so bureaucratic.
Catherine: But then this year, it’s gone again. I walked in to the kitchen in November and saw the bags—and they’re not Ball’s.
H: I’m curious to know what you say to those critics out there who say that the sustainable food movement, Slow Food, etc. is somehow elitist, and not geared towards those who are low income?
Safiyah: Well, I’ve never heard that before.
Sadie: But, what about the food stamps at farmers’ markets? In Harlem they get organic food with food stamps!
Catherine: But so many people don’t realize that. That was one of the very first basic questions for these guys. They weren’t saying, “Where can we shop at Union Square or what can we buy that’s the fanciest thing.” They were just saying, “How can everyone eat better?” That was their question.
H: Do you guys find yourselves trying to get your friends who eat in the cafeteria to eat less processed junk?
Sadie: A lot of kids don’t eat it. And they’re like, “Do you have an apple or something? Or, “Can I have half of your orange?” And I’m like, “Sure!”
Safiyah: Some of them eat badly, but well number one, they all exercise a lot. And number two, we can’t really—the thing about the movie, we don’t actually tell people how to eat. I would feel hypocritical if I would tell someone like, “don’t eat that.” They’ be like, “you’re not my mom!” So it wouldn’t help.
H: Are you guys both still vegetarians?
Sadie: Yeah. Definitely.
Safiyah: I have these weird moments where I’m like, I really want to try meat. And then, like, five minutes later, I’ll just be like “I love being a vegetarian.” This is what I’m meant to do!
I’m not opposed to meat. People are like, oh, I’m sorry, I don’t want to eat this in front of you. I’m like, I’m not allergic to it. It’s just, I choose not to eat it. It’s my choice, you have your choice. I’m just as opposed to bad eating. I’m just as against a vegetarian who doesn’t eat well, as a meat eater who doesn’t eat well. The only thing I really don’t like is baby back ribs. I mean, it’s baby. Back. Ribs. I mean, it’s a baby! You’re eating his back ribs! It might taste good, but I’m just like “ewww!”
H: What’s your weakness, when it comes to processed and/or fast foods?
Catherine: You should tell her about Michael Pollan’s rule, the one you mentioned yesterday.
Sadie: You can eat junk food as much as you want only if you make it yourself. Cookies, ice-cream, scones.
Catherine: There’s never packaged cookies in our house. But we make cookies every couple of weeks. I always think, “Oh, that’s so bad—we make way too many cookies!” But when she told me that, I felt so good about it!
Safiyah: My mom makes these types of french fries, it isn’t fried exactly, it’s sort of like scalloped potatoes. But they’re still really good. I’ve also always had a weakness for pretzels.
H: At the end of the film, you lay out the specific projects you’ll keep working on—raising money for Harvest Home Farmer’s Market, pressuring politicians to give more money to school lunches, helping the Angel family organize a CSA —to ensure that your younger brothers will have access to fresher food. Have any of these things panned out?
Sadie: The Angel family got a CSA!
Catherine: We did it last year. We did it at the Neighborhood School — it went last year from May through to November. There were 30 families, and two classes.
But then, wait until you get this.
Sadie: The Angel family also bought their own land
Catherine: Look—I’m getting little goose bumps! With the money they got from the CSA, they bought ten acres of land, right near the land they rent. We hooked them up with Just Food—they’re incredible. They also got them a second CSA. So last year, their first year, they did two: one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan. And now they’re going to have chickens and there will be eggs and some type of fruit. We’ve said we’ll go up to fifty shares this season.
Safiyah: That was my favorite thing about the movie. Wow—I actually did that. Like, I did that. All the hard work and all the complaining—like, “ah, more voice overs!” Now we just get to look back and be like, this is what I did.
