One, two, three. Okay, I think that's going to work.
I'm testing the distance, camera to subject distance with my new microphone.
My name is Laura Colby, and I'm making a film.
I'm letting you know in advance that there will be audio and video imperfections.
In today's world, many filmmakers have their artistic visions as the main creative force in the product.
And why wouldn't they? That's what's being taught.
We stop at nothing to get the desired look, the perfect take,
spending millions of dollars and using precious resources to do so.
But I'd like to challenge that institution.
What if we decided perfection was secondary and ethics should come first?
That we needed great ideas, not massive funding.
My most firm belief is that the earth is in crisis,
and as such, I must deliver the message while contributing as minimally as is possible to her demise.
What if we all let our morals shape our artistic vision?
It might look something like this.
You don't need to go down to Tennessee to take a walk around your neighborhood.
Go home and eat some of mama's food.
Bloomington, Indiana, USA.
A mid-sized Midwest town and home to Indiana University's primary campus.
This is where I live and attend school, the place that fostered my personal interest in environmental affairs.
I like to define sustainability as learning to thrive within our means.
The word thrive, I think, is important because too often people get the idea that sustainability is about
sacrifice and doing without and having a lesser quality of life where I would argue that the things that we need to do
to become more sustainable are things like enjoying a farmer's market, riding our bike instead of being in our car.
These things get us closer to an authentic life, closer to nature, closer to each other, closer to our food.
Before the 1940s, farmers in general, they were not using chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
They were using organic things, they were using manure, they were using crop rotation.
And they were in general more smaller scale, farm based, so they could use a lot of diversity and rotation to control.
Well, after the war, yes, there was this push then to industrialize agriculture and use these industrial chemicals,
fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides in agriculture.
So that contributed to the so-called Green Revolution.
The agribusiness is meant to say that it's not just producing food, but it's producing all these other products associated with food
and all this other industry like grocery stores and all this value added food, all this processed food,
not just fresh food from the farm, but things that you get in cans and boxes and so on that have all kinds of antitips.
And agribusiness then, the rise of multinational corporate food companies.
The industries built up during the war, when the war ended, they naturally wanted to keep going.
They naturally wanted to seek civilian markets.
And so there was large advertising campaigns and push to get these synthetic organic chemicals into our everyday use in the economy.
And they pushed out the plant-based products.
They have a billion-dollar advertising industry directing people to commercially produced corporate food sources.
And to combat that, just in whatever way we can, in a very tangible, real way,
we've brought together food interest groups from around the community and university, local food producers,
and then the restaurants that support them have shown some past, present, future commitment to buying from these people directly.
And so it's sort of like a mini snapshot of the ecosystem that is our local food community.
They might not have a lot of money to go out and buy these things, and so there might be a little bit of fear.
They might actually go towards something they've already tasted, the Kraft macaroni and cheese and so on and so forth,
you know, the Cudobo burritos.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But if Laughing Planet is there, why not introduce them to that as well, so it's on their radar.
Sometimes it's pricey.
That's my only big thing, just because I'm a broke college student, you know?
On food every week, it depends probably close to like a hundred dollars or more.
So I was doing a big shopping trip, and we probably, or we spent a hundred and one dollars,
and that's for a house of five.
Usually we spend anywhere from forty to sixty dollars every week on groceries.
For five people.
For five people.
And that's shopping at Blooming Foods.
Shopping at Blooming Foods, yeah.
My name is Stephanie Solomon, and I'm the garden and nutrition coordinator with Mother Hubbard's Cupboards.
We are a large local food pantry, but we also focus on garden and nutrition education.
We believe in a community where everybody has access to healthy food.
We as a food pantry have more of a focus on education, so that folks who are struggling to get by
know that it's possible to grow their own food, and also how to prepare those fresh foods that come straight from the garden
and local foods and whole foods that a lot of people in our culture aren't sure how to deal with.
We've worked with local folks, farmers and whatnot, trying to work out agreements and ways to increase the quantity of what we can buy.
The challenge is for a farmer to be able to produce enough that can feed twelve thousand residents,
plus the remaining twenty-eight thousand students that may or may not use the service day in and day out.
We have roughly twenty-two thousand transactions a day, or customers coming through our points of sale,
so that's a lot of people for a farmer to try and supply for.
Future goals, one, to have a larger garden so that we can find more produce in the campus community.
Two, we'd like to use that produce in a more formal way, in dining halls or a cafe on campus, that sort of thing.
And then we also want to make sure that we include academic initiatives in this expanded garden.
Well, as with most everything in our business, our decisions are driven by customer action.
Customer feedback and commentary is a major part of what we do in our research and development of the department
and what we're going to offer from full-scale food venues to the items that are carried by those venues.
I would like to think of the university as opening many possibilities for people to think about ways to improve the world.
You know, to have the possibility of changing the world.
You know, actually, we're going to change the world no matter what.
Is it going to be intentional? Is it going to be conscious?
Are we going to make choices to go toward where we want to get to?
Can we even come to any kind of consensus or agreement at all about where we want to go or how we might get there?
Maybe not, but somehow or another, we're still changing this world all the time.
And I think our challenge is to figure out who can we work with, who can we live with, who can we be with
that actually might make a difference for building a community that together,
and a used community very loosely, can make a difference by some of its choices.
