Deborah Garcia

The Ashland Independent Film Festival, Coming Attractions Theatres and the Ashland Food Coop present The Future of Food, as a special benefit for the AIFF. The film won the 2005 Festival’s "Audience Award for Best Documentary." The director, writer and producer of The Future of Food is Deborah Koons Garcia, widow of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. Garcia will be the Film Festival’s guest in Ashland for the screenings and she will join local farmers for a post film discussion with after the 6:00pm and 8:30pm screenings Friday evening, August 19.

The Future of Food examines the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods filling the shelves of U.S. grocery stores and the crops affects on small farmers. The film was given credit for the passage of Measure H, the first law banning genetically engineered crops and livestock, in Mendocino County.

Proceeds from the two screenings will directly benefit the non-profit AIFF and assist in the production of the 2006 festival (April 6-10). Tickets for the benefit screenings are available now at the Varsity box office. Tickets are $5 for current aiff members and $7.25 for the general public with no other discounts for the two benefit screenings. More information is at ashlandfilm.org.

From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by new technology. The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization connected with the introduction of genetically altered crops into the U.S. food supply are given a close examination in The Future of Food.

Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, it examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as multinational corporations gain more control the world's food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis today.

The Future of Food was shown over a dozen times as a work in progress in Mendocino County before the March 2004 election and was seen as the primary element in passing the measure which bans the planting of genetically engineered crops in the county. It is the first time U.S. citizens have voted on this issue.

Deborah Koons Garcia’s educational series All About Babies won a Cine Golden Eagle and a Gold Medal from the John Muir Medical Film Festival, among other awards. Her feature film, Poco Loco, "finds its groove in gentle romantic fantasy" according to Variety, and won awards at the Philadelphia, Rivertown and Orlando Film Festivals. She was the instigator and chief Creative Consultant for Grateful Dawg, a documentary about the musical friendship between her husband Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. "All the people who worked on The Future of Food are proud that our efforts have had a real impact in the real world," said Garcia.

"If you eat food, you need to see The Future of Food..." www.Newstarget.com

"This stylish film is not just for food faddists and nutritionists. It is a look at something we might not want to see: Monsanto, Roundup and Roundup-resistant seeds, collectively wreaking havoc on American farmers and our agricultural neighbors around the world. In the end, this documentary is a eloquent call to action. "The Telluride Daily Planet"

The Future of Food provides an excellent overview of the key questions raised by consumers as they become aware of GM foods... [The film] draws questions to critical attention about food production that need more public debate." Thomas J. Hoban, Nature Biotechnology Magazine, March 2005, Volume 23 No. 3

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By Jason Silverman | Also by this reporter

02:00 AM Jul. 08, 2004 PT

Last March, the food-safety organization GMO Free Mendocino did something no group had ever done: It ushered through a law banning genetically engineered crops and livestock.

It was a David-thrashes-Goliath victory. Opponents of the legislation, led by the agricultural trade group CropLife America, outspent the anti-GMO activists by a nearly 10-1 ratio. But GMO Free Mendocino had a secret weapon: a film, then a work in progress, called The Future of Food.

The new documentary, created by Deborah Koons Garcia, uses archival footage and interviews with farmers and agriculture experts to argue that GMO foods are jeopardizing our food safety. During the past 10 years, the film tells us, genetically engineered crops have infected our food supply and undermined cultivation methods that have been refined over thousands of years.

The Future of Food lays out a detailed case against genetically engineered crops. Exploring a gamut of issues from so-called suicide seeds to lax food-safety enforcement laws, and from the controversy over patented genes to infected cornfields, the film is a comprehensive and chilling example of anti-GMO rhetoric.

GMO Free Mendocino spokesman Doug Mosel described The Future of Food as a major factor in the passage of Measure H, which banned the use of GMO farming within Mendocino County, California.

"The Future of Food could be the Fahrenheit 9/11 of the genetically engineered food battle," Mosel said. The film is currently touring festivals and other events, including an upcoming screening in San Francisco.

Garcia, Jerry Garcia's third and final wife, has been interested in the ways plants can be mutated since childhood. At 15, she won a science fair award for an experiment involving irradiated plants, and she has followed the evolution of genetic engineering for years.

"My goal was to make a film that gave the average person a clear understanding of how genetic engineering works, from the cellular level to the global level," Garcia said. "I'm hoping this film can be a combination of Silent Spring and The Battle of Algiers. Once you see it you'll feel compelled to act, even if that means just changing the kind of food you eat."

Though The Future of Food is not intended as a two-sides-to-the-story analysis, Garcia said she requested interviews from representatives at Monsanto, the multinational seed and pesticide giant that is driving the genetically engineered food movement. She did not receive a response.

Perhaps Monsanto is trying to keep a low profile. The company has suffered a string of well-publicized setbacks to its genetically engineered crop initiatives in recent years, including closure of its GMO wheat project in May.

According to agriculture expert Chuck Benbrook, Monsanto and other biotech agriculture companies are "retrenching -- reducing their research, reducing projections for profits, watching the range of viable applications shrinking."

Benbrook served in the Carter and Reagan administrations before becoming executive director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences. In his various positions, he watched as biotech companies rushed products to market. The first GMO foods reached shelves in 1997.

Though scientists were initially supportive to the point of being myopic -- Benbrook described early reports from the National Academy as "unadulterated boosterism" -- biotech foods today look less promising than they did even a few years ago. According to Benbrook, genetic engineering has failed to solve the problems advocates hoped it would. And, he added, food-safety concerns remain unresolved.

"The biotech industry is beginning to recognize that there are lots of reasons why it's hard to move genes across boundaries," Benbrook said. "Scientists have found ways around the natural protections, but there are really good reasons for them being there, and we violate them at some cost."

For five-sixths of the problems that genetic engineering promises to address, Benbrook added, genetic solutions are not necessary.

GMO companies are also finding increased resistance on the legal front. In April, Vermont became the first state to require registration and labeling of genetically modified products. According to one anti-GMO site, nearly 100 towns in New England have approved some sort of anti-GMO legislation.

Since the Mendocino law was signed, Garcia said as many as a dozen other California municipalities have drawn up similar legislation.

"The Future of Food has already helped change policy," Garcia said. "I think it is possible to make California GE-free, and it's exciting to think that the film could have some role in that."

Fighting for the future of food
Deborah Koons Garcia's film documents how genetically engineered foods slipped into our supply
- Carol Ness, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, November 7, 2004

"Just about everybody is pretty serious about their chow," says Deborah Koons Garcia, enjoying the understatement. "Even if they don't eat good food, they're serious about their junk food."

No matter how serious they are, though, Garcia knows most people don't realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the American food supply, mostly from corn and canola. They're in an estimated 60 percent of all processed foods.

She wants people to understand the risks, in her view, while there's still time.

"We are at a crossroads," says Garcia, fending off the wet affections of her three Dalmatians as she explains why she's spent the last three years and a chunk of what she calls her "Jerry money" making "The Future of Food," a documentary about GMO (genetically modified organism) foods. Though Garcia has made films all her life and runs her own production company, Lily Films, she is better known as the widow of Jerry Garcia, the legendary Grateful Dead lead singer and guitarist who died in 1995.

"Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn't challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn't stopped, at some point it will be too late," says Garcia, her back to the sweeping ridgetop view from the Mill Valley home she and Jerry bought not long before he died. She went ahead with their plans to add on, and made her film with a staff of six in the vast downstairs room that would have been her husband's art studio.

"The Future of Food," finished in July, will get a special two-day screening at the Castro Theatre on Thursday and Friday.

The first night's showing is a benefit for Slow Food, the international society dedicated to wresting our breakfast, lunch and dinner back from industrialization. Introducing the film will be Alice Waters, local/seasonal food guru and a Slow Food International officer, and afterward, "Botany of Desire" author and UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan will lead a panel discussion on the issues it raises. Both Pollan and Waters are just back from Terra Madre, Slow Food's annual gathering in Turin, Italy, a center of organizing against GMO foods.

Appearing on the panel along with Garcia will be two of the anti-GMO authorities who appear in her film: Andrew Kimbrell, head of the Center for Food Safety in Washington, D.C., and Ignacio Chapela, an assistant professor at Berkeley, whose work tracking the invasion of American GMO corn into Mexico stirred a furor.

It will be the film's highest-profile showing in the Bay Area. It's been hot on the film festival circuit. And activists have been showing it all over the country, especially as part of campaigns to ban GMO crops in Marin, Butte and San Luis Obispo counties on Tuesday's ballot. Marin voters passed the ban, following Mendocino County's lead in March, but it went down in the other counties.

"The Future of Food" is Garcia's first major film project since regrouping from a barrage of lawsuits over her husband's estate. Jerry loved film, she said, and would approve of her using some of his money -- less than $1 million -- to make it. When they lived together in the '70s, he supported her craft and would take her around to see all the films "he considered must-sees for me as a filmmaker -- 'Shadows of Our Forgotten Houses,' 'The Thin Man.' "

"He was a closet director himself, and did do some rock-'n'-roll film directing of the Dead," she says. "A fact that almost no one knows is Jerry could sing many musicals literally from beginning to end -- 'Showboat,' 'South Pacific.' "

Telling the story of how she got to where she is, it's hard to believe she began making films more than 30 years ago, at the University of North Carolina, before heading to the Bay Area for a master's in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She looks a good decade younger than a child of the '60s, lithe with glossy dark hair, on this day wearing a simple white jersey pullover and white calf-length skirt over knee-high lavender Uggs.

Making films "was really just fun," she says. "I didn't think of it as a career."

She made "All About Babies," a series on early childhood development narrated by Jane Alexander, a feature film called "Poco Loco," and instigated and helped make "Grateful Dawg," about the musical collaboration of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

"The Future of Food" evolved out of her longtime interest in food and desire to make a "really serious film and do something that wasn't about me."

Garcia became a vegetarian when she was in college (she does eat fish now), and "became one of those organic people who are evangelical and totally boring -- you know, telling people every pound of beef takes 8,000 pounds of water. I'm better now."

But she's still hyperaware of the "consequences that certain food choices have on society and on the land and on people's health."

First, she thought about doing a film on pesticides. But her research led her to the genetic revolution of agriculture. Biotech breakthroughs allowed the gene-splicing of plants from different species or even plants and animals to create crops that resist disease or can withstand pesticides, even the "terminator" gene that kills off crop seeds after one season.

"It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue ... And it was really clear that there hadn't been a really good film that told the whole story from the cellular, from the microscopic level, all the way up to the global, which was a huge challenge -- but I just thought that's what people need to know," Garcia says.

Her 90-minute documentary feels more educational than polemic -- though it expresses a strong point of view against letting new life forms loose on the land without long-term testing of the health effects and real government controls, especially labeling of foods.

It's an issue with special resonance in California, where the economy depends on agriculture and GMO crops are gaining a toehold. Test fields of grapes, cotton, rapeseed, alfalfa, wheat, onions, corn, rice and other fruits and vegetables have won permits for California. Nationally, 100 million acres of GMO crops -- mostly corn, soy, canola and cotton -- were under cultivation by 2003, according to the film.

The issues are complicated and technically daunting -- one reason people have a hard time grasping them. But Garcia threads a clear path through the history, science and politics of GMO foods to a clear call for action.

She sets her stage with nostalgic, black-and-white shots of traditional farming, before the "green revolution" of fertilizers, chemical pest-killers and mono-cropping grew out of World War II weapons research. Agriculture became industry, and then recombinant DNA technology upped the ante in the 1990s. Chemical companies like Monsanto created Roundup Ready canola, and Bt corn with a spliced-in gene that makes its own insecticide.

Garcia leads carefully from one point to the next -- showing how the chemical companies have succeeded in first patenting their own GMO seeds, and then slapping patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life forms for the first time without a vote of the people or Congress.

To make the point, Garcia goes to Saskatchewan grain farmer Percy Schmeiser to tell his story. He's one of hundreds of grain farmers sued by Monsanto after the company's Roundup Ready canola drifted into his field.

Monsanto accused Schmeiser of violating its Roundup Ready patent, even though Schmeiser never planted the GMO canola and didn't want it in his field. He fought the suit where many other farmers settled, but lost, and must pay Monsanto to plant his next crop from his own seed.

Garcia travels with UC Berkeley's Ignacio Chapela to Mexico, where hundreds of varieties of corn thrive in different climates and soils, to show how GMO crops threaten such biodiversity. It was here that Chapela found controversial evidence that genes of GMO corn had already jumped the border to contaminate native species.

The uncontrolled spread of genetically engineered plants -- recently proven again with tests of GMO grasses -- far beyond the fields where they were planted is one of the strongest arguments the film makes for introducing safeguards.

The film questions why the U.S. government hasn't required GMO foods to undergo the rigorous testing required of medicines created by recombinant DNA technology, and why it has resisted efforts to require GMO labeling on foods, as Europe does.

Suggesting an answer, the film ticks off all the government officials who have links to Monsanto, including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

It also briefly debunks claims that GMO foods are the answer to world starvation.

Ultimately, the film is a call to action -- for people to think more about the consequences of their food choices and to use their consumer power to push for labeling and regulation.

While some people are seeking to ban GMOs, Garcia thinks labeling would drive GMO foods off the market, as it has in Europe.

"I want people to watch the film and say we have to stop this," says Garcia.

Long gone are the days when Garcia believed "we could have our healthy foods over here, and they could have their food over there. You do your thing and I do mine."

With genetic engineering, she says, "You can't drop out anymore -- it'll come and get us."