Hi, I'm Lauren McDonald here with Reel TV Films.
I have none other than Chris Taylor, who's the director of Food Fight.
How are you tonight?
I'm great.
I'm really excited about the AFI Fest, an incredible film festival, and also excited
about the premiere of our film on November 8th.
It's beyond just telling people to eat organic.
Now it's about who's growing your food, are they part of your community, are they invested
in the health of the community, and how can we get communities to own their food system?
It's a way to help transform society.
My film is a documentary about the rise of California cuisine, and it's a way of eating
that is what we now call local, seasonal, sustainable.
And that way of eating came out of a political movement in Berkeley, came out of the free
speech movement.
And what happened was that a chef who was looking for taste actually found a political
revolution that was looking for change.
We're designed to eat healthy, good, flavorful, delicious food.
That's why we have taste buds.
If we were just supposed to eat paste, we wouldn't have taste buds, right?
Now what inspired you to do a film like this?
Well, I love food, and living in LA, we're surrounded by great food.
We have great restaurants, world-class restaurants, Spago, Luke, Campanile.
These are great restaurants, and I got a chance to eat in them all and kind of get to know
the chefs.
And what I found was that there was a consistent story that these chefs had.
They worked in the same restaurants, they came up, they all worked at Chez Panisse,
they all kind of adopted this way of finding the freshest local ingredients and cooking
them simply and making a really delicious meal out of these ingredients that were available
seasonally.
And that kind of cooking is what we call California cuisine, and I wanted to do a story about
that.
It turned out it had political ramifications, and that's when it got really interesting
for me.
This is an area in which social change is not only possible, but highly desirable, and
you get to eat it for dinner.
What's my favorite food?
I don't want to say goat, but you know.
The food is a key environmental issue, an issue of social welfare.
If we're not careful, we're going to wake up someday in this country and realize we
are completely dependent on our food supply to a few but very large agri-businesses.
Social activism does not need to be going out in the middle of the street and banging
on a drum.
Social activism can be making a good meal.
Well, so November 28th, now where can people see your, or November 8th, I'm sorry.
November 8th, December 8th, November 8th, 315 at the Man Chinese 6, just across the street.
And it's a free screening, and we'd love to have everybody come, bring a guest.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
We're also going to have Russ Parsons from the LA Times, and Mark Peel from Campanile
at a Q&A after the screening.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
Thank you so much for talking with us here at Real TV Films.
We will see you on November 8th.
