Good Food, Good Intentions: Where

Pro-sustainability Arguments Get Stale

in US Food Documentaries

Ryanne Pilgeram & Russell Meeuf

Focusing on recent documentaries about sustainable agriculture in the USFood, Inc., The Garden, Fresh, and Farmageddonthis paper examines how pro-sustainable food arguments fail to merge environmentalism and environmental justice. By framing their approach to sustainable food production around the normative issue of "good food" for capitalist consumers, such documentaries ignore questions about community and cultural conceptions of farmers. In the process the films promote a problematic vision of the white family farm. As a consequence, these films limit a reimagining of alternative food systems, the roles for diverse actors within those systems, and possibilities for eaters beyond "voting with your fork." Several exceptions, most notably The Garden, are used to suggest how cinema might radically re-envision participation in alternative forms of agriculture.

For critics of the conventional, industrial food system in the USA, documentary films have become the go-to weapon in the campaign to change the way we eat. Inspired by the commercial success of 2008's Food, Inc. which grossed a surprising $4.5 million at the box officefood activists have produced a series of documentaries that raise public awareness about the US agriculture system. These documentaries address a range of issues, including health and obesity (Foodmatters, 2008; Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, 2010), genetically modified food (The Future of Food, 2004; Genetic Chili, 2010), veganism and vegetarianism (Vegucated, 2010; Forks over Knives, 2011), food insecurity (A Place at the Table, 2012), corporate agribusiness (King Corn, 2007), the environment (A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth, 2009), "foodie" culture and the local food movement (Food Fight, 2008), and the necessity of sustainable agricultural systems (Food, Inc., 2008; The Garden, 2008; Fresh, 2009; and Farm- ageddon, 2011).

This last category of films is particularly important since they describe how to fix what all the films agree is a fundamentally broken food system: through sustainable, local agriculture. These films address sustainable agriculture as the best alternative to conventional agriculture, providing a glimpse into what that alternative might look like and the challenges it faces.

Such documentaries also use the topic of food as a gateway into environment- alism. As Opel, Johnston, and Wilk (2010) note, the universal experience of eating makes food an effective rhetorical site to prompt questions about environment, policy, and identity: "The analytical process that begins with the question, 'where did my food come from?' is the starting placea line of questioningthat is fundamental for new kinds of active global citizenship" (p. 252). Food, after all, represents the ultimate intersection of the personal and political as the everyday act of eating links us into larger systems of food production. By encouraging people to think critically about food productionprocesses typically obscured by corporate intereststhe act of investigating one's food can become a gateway to a broader, global environmental consciousness, extending beyond food. The US food documentary can facilitate this environmental consciousness by exposing the environmental costs of corporate agribusiness in the USA and abroad.

But the ability of these popular discourses to use food as a gateway into social and environmental justice remains troubled. Sustainable agriculture has been critiqued for its associations with whiteness and perpetuation of class distinction. While an increasingly popular way of providing environmentally friendly and arguably healthier foods, the practice and consumption of sustainable agriculture remains linked with white, upper-middle class "foodie" culture while millions of disadvantaged people in the USA live in "food deserts" without access to healthful food (Guthman, 2007, 2008). And as sustainable farming becomes more popular among well-educated whites who can afford to purchase land, people of color are underrepresented as farm operators and overrepresented as manual laborers on farms (Hoppe, Korb, O'Donoghue, & Banker, 2007). Most of the food documentaries analyzed here do little to combat these trends, offering up images of food activism and sustainable farming dominated by white upper-middle class "foodies" and white family farmers.

This paper, then, explores failures in US sustainable food documentaries to effectively bridge their popular environmentalist vision and a concern with social justice. This failure, we argue, is rooted in an inability to think beyond neoliberal ideals of the individual consuming food. Across most of the pro-sustainable agriculture documentaries, the basic question of "where does my food come from?" becomes the generic question: "how do we grow 'good' food?" The emphasis shifts onto food and a normative evaluation of the processhow can we help consumers choose "good" (more environmentally friendly, healthier, tastier) food? But such questions see people as consumers rather than considering the relationship between communities and food production. The documentaries ignore basic but vital questions: Who should farm and what is their relationship to the community? What kinds of lands and spaces should host sustainable farming? How can we ensure access to "good" food across communities? And who gets to decide what food is "good?" Simply put, these documentaries focus on how consumers can buy themselves out of the problems of "bad" food.

Analyzing four documentaries that most explicitly describe and promote sustain- able agricultureFood, Inc., 2008; The Garden, 2008; Fresh, 2009; and Farmageddon, 2011this paper traces the inability of the sustainable food documentary to envision a critical and socially just model of sustainable agriculture, the environment, and human communities. In particular, we analyze the visual rhetoric of sustainability: the common images across the films used to promote and describe sustainable farming (as well as the images used to critique the conventional food system). Inspired by Dobrin and Morey's (2009) concept of "ecosee," which explores how visual media structure ideas about the environment and the social world, Monani (2011) notes that an image- based approach to environmental communication is vital to understanding issues of environmental justice. The construction of space, nature, and the social world through visual media often works to naturalize certain forms of social and environmental inequalities while also limiting the possibilities for environmental solutions (see also, Sturgeon, 2008 on the visual construction of environmentalism and nature). By analyzing the dominant images of sustainability (and its alternatives) deployed in the films, we explore how the definitions and boundaries of sustainable practices are envisionedliterally and ideologicallyfor popular consumption.

Specifically, the visual rhetoric of the films maintains normative social ideals concerning farming, family, race, and masculinity. From the use of dystopic imagery and the racialized body to depict conventional agriculture to the over-representation of idyllic, rural spaces in the depiction of sustainable agriculture, the documentaries rely on a host of cultural assumptions concerning farming, farmers, and the white family farm. Images such as white, male farmers on tractors set against pastoral, rural backdrops, or African-American women processing food on an assembly line, function as visual stereotypes that communicate reductive meanings based on existing cultural ideologies (Kitch, 2001). Tapping into the cultural assumptions linking, on the one hand, rural, white masculinity with an idyllic and "wholesome" agrarian past and, on the other hand, non-white bodies with the danger and disease of modern industrial production, such images promote a vision of sustainable agriculture by deploying cultural stereotypes about gender, race, labor, and the "natural" (i.e. rural) spaces that should host sustainable agriculture. In the process, more diverse representations of sustainable farming are overwhelmed by stereotypes of white, rural farming. What is more, the imagery of sustainability used across the films imagines the future of sustainable agriculture through a highly nostalgic lens, linking sustainable farming to an idyllic, pre-corporate farming past. This nostalgic focus obscures the significant gender and racial inequalities that existed in the past and that will continue to exist without direct action.

By contrast, The Garden challenges this nostalgic vision of the white family farm. A documentary examining the South Central Farm in Los Angeles (at the time the largest urban, community garden in the world), The Garden illustrates the complex forms of urban agriculture and community development that might characterize alternatives to industrial agriculture if not for the cultural power of the white, rural family farm ideal.

Examining the most pervasive images used across these documentaries to represent sustainable farming and farmers, this paper demonstrates how the films have failed to bridge the divide between environmentalism and social justice because they deploy a slew of other interconnected dualisms: privileging images of white, family farms over the non-white laborers of industrial agriculture; privileging images of rural "natural beauty" over the spaces of urban food production; and privileging the male, yeoman farmer as the benevolent overseer of women, people of color, and the natural world. Analyzing the persistent presence of such images in the documentaries, we argue that the films, excepting The Garden, promote sustainable foods as a simple capitalist commodity, crafting images of sustainable farming that persuade consumers by deploying stereotypes and dualisms that the sustainable food movement should be contesting.

This argument does not downplay the importance of reimagining the US food system and the role of the environmental movement in this process. Promoting sustainable agriculture and challenging industrial food systems are critically import- ant, and popular media may play an important role in changing public opinion and consumption habits. But careful scrutiny is necessary as the alternative food movement faces questions about what "sustainability" is and the role of social justice in sustainable agriculture. The script for sustainable agriculture is still being written literally. As Pilgeram (2013) notes, "more than likely in the next 10 years ... [a] regulatory body will have defined what sustainable agriculture is, but today the actors in the movement can work to insert their interests and ideologies into that definition" (p. 132). In the midst of these negotiations, promoting a model of sustainability and environmentalism that privileges social equality alongside environmental sustain- ability is an important goal.

Environmentalism, Environmental Justice, and the Food Documentary

Lindenfeld (2010) argues there is a basic radical potential in the food documentary tradition because it reveals the commodity chain of food production that is often obscured by the fetishization of food. Commercial, narrative food films such as Like Water for Chocolate, 1991, or Chocolat, 2001, Lindenfeld notes, construct food and eating as "beautiful, sublime, and utopian" instead of exploring the social and economic factors that put food on the table (p. 379).

Especially in the USA, the narrative food tradition has "represent[ed] gender, race/ethnicity, and class in such a way that evades the actual politics of identity and food production through an idealized, utopian treatment" (p. 379; see also, Lindenfeld, 2007). And while food justice documentaries such as A Place at the Table explore issues of hunger and inequality to contrast the utopian vision of food in fiction films, they largely ignore issues of food production and community control over food. Documentaries that explore the process of food production, therefore, have the power to break the fetish of food, critically examining where food actually comes from.

But in the case of Food, Inc. (which remains the most well-known and influential food documentary), its challenge to the corporate food system avoids a substantive engagement with environmentalism as well as environmental justice. Despite offering a scathing critique of the industrial food system, Lindenfeld (2010) argues that Food, Inc. "adopts an anthropocentric perspective on food that relegates environmental issues into peripheral status," focusing instead on issues of health, morality, and the economy in its appeal to food consumers (p. 381). In doing so, Food, Inc. also largely avoids engaging with issues of food and social justice, especially when it comes to race, poverty, and food. As Page (2010) notes in her critique of Food, Inc., the film relies on "a neoliberal and racialized understanding of consumer citizenship that excludes those who cannot afford to belong" (p. 3). After all, Food, Inc.' s mantra of "You can vote to change this system three times a day" is an explicit endorsement of consumer citizenship, idealizing the individual choice of (arguably white and upper- middle class) consumers instead of critiquing the values of consumer capitalism.

Exemplifying the food documentaries that followed, Food, Inc. approaches food as an individual object of consumption rather than a social practice that structures relationships between communities and land. Contemporary food documentaries represent a kind of popular environmentalism that fetishizes sustainability as a marker of product qualitywhy buy a conventional tomato when you can buy a tasty, local, organic one? Such environmental discourses reproduce an individualized framework for understanding food as a commodity instead of promoting a collective framework that sees food as a vital social practice linking communities, nature, and social relationships. In contrast to Western dichotomies of culture and nature, Milstein, Anguiano, Sandoval, Chen, and Dickinson (2011) describe a framework of "relations-in-place" that sees the environment as inseparable from culture and social interactions, as an "immersive space that provides the grounding, experiences and materials for social relations" (p. 487). Foodboth a biological necessity and highly meaningful cultural artifactillustrates this framework perfectly, providing not simply a product to be consumed (the framework proffered by conventional food systems) but a dynamic form of social practice that links communities, structures social interactions, and interpolates populations into a particular relationship with land.

Food as an environmental and simultaneously social phenomenon shapes complex social relationships and assumptions about the natural world. But by suggesting that food can be reduced to a consumer commodity, the conventional food system obscures the multifaceted role of food as a determinant of both environmental and social relations.

The food documentaries analyzed here, despite their radical potential to disrupt the fetishization of food, also participate in this process of obfuscation, revealing the visually horrific nature of the conventional food system but insisting on the inherent commodification of food as a product to be consumed. By denying the nature of food as a social and environmental practice, then, the films fail to bridge environmentalism and environmental justice. Despite their ostensibly similar goals, the relationship between environmentalism and the environmental justice movement in the USA, according to Sandler and Pezzullo (2007), has been marked by "division and even hostility" (p. 2).

Since the early 1990s, environmental justice scholars and activists have critiqued major organizations of the US environmental movement for their elitism, lack of diversity, and failure to prioritize the concerns of underprivileged populations over that of the conservation of nature. Charging that organizations like the Sierra Club privilege the interests of the white, middle- and upper-classes, the environmental justice movement in the USA has proceeded as a separate activist movement while the mainstream environmental movement has reacted with defiance or only some acquiescence to the concerns of social justice (Sandler & Pezzullo, 2007). Meanwhile, many in the environmental movement contend that the anthropocentric concerns of the environmental justice movement unfairly downplay the important benefits of protecting the natural world for its own sake, a philosophical position central to the environmental movement (DeLuca, 2007).

Given this schism, Sandler and Pezzullo question the benefits of merging the two movements. Rather, they suggest that each group might work more effectively if they "work apart" in order to respect their different histories, philosophical assumptions, and the practical necessities of compromise that go along with working together. Instead of putting the groups in a position to debate whose goals or assumptions are prioritized in collaborative work, activism on both sides could be more effective functioning as parallel rather than unified activist movements.

But as an environmental issue that is also foundational to social justice and equality, food is one area in which environmentalism and environmental justice clearly overlap and inform one another. From an environmental perspective, there is a real danger that sustainable foods become the purview of the privileged, vastly limiting the actual environmental benefits of sustainable foods. If sustainable, local food systems remain a way for those with the cultural and economic capital to demonstrate their distinction and good taste, the environmentally devastating system of conventional agriculture in the USA will never truly be challenged. The construction of sustainable foods as consumer fetish objects for those with "good taste" leads directly to the cooptation of the movement by large corporate agribusiness with no real commitment to environmental protection.

Extending access to and desire for sustainable foods to underprivileged populations, then, is vital to the environmental goals of sustainable agriculture as a movement. Likewise, the environmental goals of sustainable agriculture are often directly linked to issues of social justice, from the human and environmental health benefits of reducing pesticide use (for both consumers and laborers), to the disproportionate effects that climate change (accelerated by corporate agriculture) has on the poor and people of color in the world, to the lack of quality food available to the economically disadvantaged in the USA and abroad. As Alkon and Agyeman's (2011) examination of food justice shows, the creation of an environmentally sustainable alternative to the US food system is deeply intertwined with issues of racial, gendered, and economic injustice.

A bridge between the movements, however, is still under construction. Despite some progress, the sustainable agriculture movement must better address issues of social justice in a more comprehensive way. For example, farmers' markets and sustainable farms often use practices that privilege white, middle-class consumers and white farmers (Pilgeram, 2012; Slocum, 2007). In particular, scholars often note a classed dynamic to sustainable agriculture, arguing that the consumption of sustainable foods seems to be related to a high education and income level (DeLind, 2000; Guthman, 2007, 2008; Hinrichs & Kremer, 2002; Slocum, 2007). Additionally, debates and discussions concerning labor or food justice issues such as "food deserts" are often not included in the philosophies and practices of sustainable food movements. This position ignores material differences in access that often keep certain groups from participating in sustainable food movements.

Too often these social justice concerns are eliminated or marginalized from popular environmental discourses, which rely instead on the image of the white family farm tending to rural lands to persuade individual consumers of the "wholesome" nature (environmentally and culturally) of sustainable agriculture. This idealized vision of sustainable farming reproduces a host of dualisms (environmentalism/social justice, rural/urban, individuals/community, nature/cul- ture) in its vision of environmental and social change, but food should bridge these dualisms. Food is personal and political. Equitable food production should rejuvenate the natural world and human communities. When documentaries construct food as an object of individual consumption, however, it becomes a commodity whose exchange reinforces the environmental and social injustices of the capitalist market.

By deploying the visual stereotypes of the white family farm in the marketing of sustainable foods, the documentaries rely on a highly reductive framework that limits food to its role as a consumable commodity. But more complex images that challenge these stereotypes could yield a vision of food as a social practice that empowers communities and spans the dualisms separating environmentalism and environ- mental justice.

Conventional Agriculture and the Raced, Laboring Body

In their critique of the conventional food system, the food documentaries analyzed here represent visually the horrors of industrial food production and the government policies that keep them afloat. All the films, however, use a logic similar to Food, Inc's "lifting the veil." If only consumers were educated about real conditions, real power relations, and real consequences of the industrial food system, then they would choose to purchase more sustainably produced foods. But this approaches sustainable agriculture from a problematic starting point: it assumes the primacy of the individual consumer in the food system and assumes that education is the only barrier to accessing sustainable foods (rather than material barriers, such as poverty). Then in their pursuit to persuade consumers by "lifting the veil," the documentaries fail to recognize that they create their own veils, obscuring crucial questions and concerns about the sustainable food system in an effort to promote "good" food.

For example, the opening scenes of Fresh build a visual association between people of color and the horrific consequences of conventional agriculture. Fresh examines new and innovative approaches to sustainable agriculture. With no overarching narration, the film weaves together interviews with practitioners and experts in sustainable farming. But the opening scenes provide some editorializing on the part of the filmmakers, as they use staged images of an anonymous African- American grocery clerk to signify the unhealthy excesses of the US food system. After a brief prelude showing white sustainable farmer Joel Salatin herding his pigs under a canopy of oaks, the film cuts to a conventional grocery store lit by fluorescent lights. The film then cuts to an endless pile of processed, unhealthy foods careening down a checkout conveyor belt before showing the checker: a slightly overweight, African- American woman shot from the neck down. The use of the headless and voiceless black grocery clerk (especially in juxtaposition to Joel Salatin) ties black femininity to the endless consumption of junk foods, inviting the comparison between the processed excesses of industrial food (exemplified by people of color) and the "natural" goodness of sustainable agriculture (exemplified by a white, male farmer).

This construction of whiteness as wholesome sustainability and darkness as unhealthy consumption finds an even more explicit manifestation in Food, Inc.'s depiction of corporate agriculture. Co-produced by Eric Schlosserauthor of Fast Food Nationand Michael Pollanauthor of The Omnivore's Dilemmathe film offers a cinematic mash up of the two books, exploring the history of the industrial agriculture system in the USA, the massive political power backing this system, the horrific conditions of industrial agriculture, and the alternatives posed by sustainable agriculture.

The film focuses on the fetishism of corporate food marketing as images of green pastures, bright red barns, and happy cows obscure the dirty, mechanical reality of industrial food production. Opening with several long, sweeping shots of fairly idyllic and stereotypical images of US agriculturefields at daybreak, farmers haying against blue skies, that ubiquitous red barnit pulls back to reveal these images as fabricated constructions of food marketers. Cutting to an overhead, helicopter shot of a massive cattle feedlota vast expanse of manure and dirty cowsthe film makes a visual argument that the industrial agriculture system is broken because it hides the grimy (and thus "unnatural") realities of food production behind the glossy stereotypes of the family farm. Much of the film, then, seeks to "lift the veil" and literally expose the unhealthy, inhumane, environmentally detrimental, and ultimately dystopian prac- tices of industrial agriculture through "behind the scenes" footage not meant for the public to see.

In Food, Inc., a persistent strategy in this unveiling is the use of grainy footage showing people of color working on assembly lines somewhere in the industrial food system. From African-American women in a chicken processing plant to Latino men sorting lettuce on an assembly line, the films deploy the images of people of color flanked by the machines of industrial food production to demonstrate how unnatural and mechanized the US food system has become. Such images are often shot in low resolutions to suggest an authentic, "hidden camera" aestheticthese images were not meant for the public. Moreover, the framing of these images mirrors the framing of animals in the industrial food system. Night vision cameras of Latino laborers gathering chickens for slaughter are juxtaposed with night vision shots of chickens forced into small cages. Long lines of meat-processing workers on an assembly line of cow carcasses are juxtaposed with long lines of cattle waiting for slaughter. And African-American women at a chicken processing plant along with the plucked, hanging chickens on conveyer belts are simply two different cogs in the same industrial landscape. This kind of visual argument is certainly well-intentioned: one of the horrors of the industrial food system is its exploitation of the bodies of the poor and people of color, an exploitation that mirrors the treatment of animals in that system.

But the images of people of color in Fresh and Food, Inc. establish the dystopian opposite of the implied utopian solution: raced, industrial labor as the opposite of the idealized, white, sustainable farm. Consistently, such images of anonymous people of color function in opposition to the white, agrarian ideal. These images, then, perpetuate several problematic assumptions about sustainable agriculture. First is the idea that sustainable agriculture does not also exploit the labor of the poor and people of color. But the ways that sustainable agriculture is marketed, discussed, or policed rarely examines the experiences of farm laborersoften people of colorin sustainable farming practices. Sustainable farmers speak at length about what they do to promote soil fertility but often simply ignore the discussion of farm labor. Perhaps the clearest example of how this can lead to exploitation is work by organic and small-farm farmers to maintain a gap in California law that allow the use of the short-handled hoe by laborers on their farms (Getz, Brown, & Shreck, 2008). To suggest that only conventional agriculture relies on the demanding physical labor of often-non-white farm workers is misleading.

But perhaps more troubling, this opposition between raced labor and the white family farm implies that one solution to fix the industrial food system is the elimination of people of color from that system. The visual juxtaposition of anonymous, non-white bodies with idealized white farmers like Joel Salatin suggests that "wholesome" foods come from culturally "wholesome" models of agriculture: the white, heterosexual, family farm (Pilgeram, 2011). This visual juxtaposition suggests that the industrial food system would be purified not only just by the elimination of exploitive labor practices but also by the elimination of people of color from the food system. In the promotion of sustainability, then, the non-white body functions as a visual stereotype for the degradation and danger of industrial food, leaving little room for those same bodies in sustainable food systems.

The White Family Farm and Joel Salatin

The US food documentary is meant to expose the falsity of the idyllic, rural images promoting industrially produced foods. However, most of the films use those same images of farming and ranching to represent the benefits and "natural" quality of sustainable agriculture. Shots of sunsets, rolling fields, and dewy wildflowers are omnipresent in the films when sustainable farmers are introduced, relying on the same semiotic tradition as industrial food marketers as they attempt to associate sustainable agriculture with a traditional notion of "nature" and "natural beauty" (along with the cultural stereotypes of the idealized rural farmer). Joel Salatin makes this explicit in Farmageddon, arguing that the quality and health of the food is directly linked to the aesthetic beauty of the farm. As Dickinson and Maugh (2004) argue in their analysis of the visual rhetoric of Wild Oats Marketan international chain of organic grocery storesthe promotion of organic foods draws upon the imagery of locality and nature in order to manage the disrupted sense of place and identity in contemporary, postmodern capitalism. The images linking sustainability and natural beauty in the films function in a similar way: providing a mediated construct of the "natural world" which suggests a sense of local, intimate connection in contrast to the abstract and anonymous system of corporate food.

But the images used to signify locality and environmental health carry with them a host of ideological assumptions about farming and farmers as they promote a vision of sustainability to consumers. Perhaps most troubling, this visual rhetoric reveals the associations made in the films between natural beauty and a heteronormative vision of the white family farm. Such associations literally naturalize an exclusionary model of agriculture, suggesting the links between an idealized vision of "nature," the perceived wholesomeness of the white nuclear family, and the quality of sustainable foods.

Joel Salatin represents the most prominent example of this trend through his appearances in Food, Inc., Fresh, and Farmageddon. Not only can all three films use the imagery of "natural beauty" to construct Salatin's farm, but his representation in each relies on a particular vision of nostalgic, agrarian, white masculinity to affirm the wholesomeness of his work as a farmer. Offering copious scenes of Salatin atop vintage tractors or guiding his cows down gravel roadsall with Salatin in his customary suspenders and straw hatthe aesthetic used to construct Salatin references nostalgic US visions of agrarian masculinity. Fresh makes this nostalgia explicit, using old black and white photos of the Salatin family to tie Salatin's current sustainable endeavors to a "simpler" agrarian past preindustrial food production.

Suggesting a return to agricultural practices that predate the rise of corporate agribusiness in the films, however, also seems to suggest a return to social and cultural norms of that era as part of the film's nostalgic project. As Murray and Heumann (2012) note, the food documentary tradition often relies on a "nostalgic vision of the pre-industrial farming period" that is "not only unobtainable, but also cast in an unrealistic innocence" (pp. 46-47). Constructing Salatin as a benevolent patriarch and steward of the land, the films featuring his farm unquestioningly affirm this social and agricultural structure as inherently "natural." Fresh, again, proves fairly explicit in this affirmation, including highly gendered scenes of Salatin's family dinner, with Salatin's sons tending to the barbecue while his wife and daughters set the table to get ready for an outdoor supper. By idealizing images of the white family tending to the land, films such as Fresh promote a perspective of the family farm that obscures the long history of oppression and discrimination that has excluded women and people of color from farm ownership and agricultural entrepreneurship in the USA (Allen & Sachs, 1993, p. 148).

This gendered portrayal of Salatin on film is not to suggest that his vision of farm masculinity simply translates conventional farm manhood into more environmental practices. In his writings and public speeches, Salatin makes it clear that sustainable farming involves a dramatic break from the hegemonic masculinities of conventional agriculture, which emphasize the domination of nature through technology (Salatin, 2006). And other research suggests that a turn to sustainable farming practices shifts constructions of masculinity as male farmers reconsider the elements of farming masculinitybig equipment, large scale farmingthat are tied to conventional farm masculinity (Barlett & Conger, 2004; Coldwell, 2007). But in order to accommodate this reorientation of masculinity, the image of Salatin asserts other forms of dominance.

For example, Salatin's image indicates how hegemonic masculinites are being drafted into popular definitions of sustainability and environmentalism. As Rogers (2008) explains, the rising cultural power of environmental discourses is often constructed as a threat to traditional masculinities, which are organized around strength and dominance over the natural world. In Rogers' examples, primitive, meat- consuming masculinities are promoted in advertising to shore up the feminized threats of vegetarianism and environmentalism. Such attempts to disavow the "sissy" threat of environmentalism to contemporary manhood showcase the intersectional nature of power and dominance. Using an ecofeminist perspective, Rogers argues that the "dualisms at the heart of the master identity and the logic of domination (nature/ culture, primitive/civilized, body/mind, feminine/masculine) are not only intercon- nected and mutually supportive, but can be reversed" when such reversals are necessary to maintain cultural dominance (p. 285).

In other words, when a dualism such as nature/culturewhich insists on masculinized, individual control over the natural worldis reoriented culturally thanks to the increasing power of environmental and sustainable discourses, the system of interconnected dualisms can compensate in other areas to reaffirm the hegemony of privileged positions such as white, heterosexual men. So while Salatin offers a radical departure in the gendered vision of nature and culture, insisting on a "new" masculinity based around stewardship of the natural world, this alteration can be accommodated only through reassertions of dominance in other areas of masculinity, heteronormativity, and race. The images of Salatin at the head of his family's dinner table or sitting atop a rusty tractor reinscribe his environmental masculinity into other existing and "natural" forms of patriarchal authority.

Farmageddon takes this logic a bit further, idealizing Salatin's farm masculinity and then suggesting that the government's pro-corporate policies are an attack not only just on sustainable producers but also on the white family farm itself. Farmageddeon unveils the invasive influence of federal and state governments whose policies favor corporate agribusinesson small, sustainable food producers. Examining a range of legal cases in which the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in cooperation with law enforcement agencies have harassed and intimidated small-scale sustainable food producers under the guise of food safety concerns, the film offers a scathing critique of government food policy that has gone so far as to use the threat of violence to privilege the existing norms of industrial agriculture. The film's director, Kristin Canty, narrates the film and inserts her own story as a mother seeking relief for her son's debilitating food allergies. Canty finds her solution in raw milk, which supporters say has medicinal benefits but the FDA says is potentially dangerous and thus illegal to distribute commercially in some states. Canty then intersperses interviews with sustainable food producers and government officials with several distressing stories of small, sustainable farmers who are harassed by the USDA and FDA.

Farmageddon demonstrates the emotional importance of the white family farm to its vision of sustainable agriculture. While the major argument of the film concerns unfair government policies targeting small scale, sustainable farming, the emotional argument of the film centers on the protection of children and families. Much of the film is devoted to harrowing tales of armed, government raids on small, white family farms, narratives that emphasize the psychological terror inflicted on the innocent children of the farmers as guns are drawn on them and their parents are persecuted. The opening of the film, in fact, is a shot of small children happily playing on the porch of their farm that turns to slow-motion as dark music creeps in. We then hear their mother's description of the raid on their farm, as an unidentified, shadowy figure draws his gun on the mother. The intellectual argument of the film concerns the right to buck government-supported, corporate agribusiness, but the filmmakers support this argument through an emotional appeal to the safety and well-being of the rural, white family.

Underlying the entire documentary is the unbelieving anger that "wholesome," white families could be treated as common criminals.

This is not to deny the injustice faced by these families and the need for better and more responsible government policy, but the film's emphasis on white family farms contributes to the valorizing of this social and agricultural structure as the most "natural" and in need of protection. Moreover, the insistent emphasis on the wholesome family farm across the films also erases the conditions of poverty that many rural, white communities face in the wake of corporate agriculture's decimation of family farming (for example, the spread of methamphetamines in poor, rural areas (Reding, 2010).

The rugged individualist narrative of films such as Farmageddeon suggest that it is only government interference hindering hard-working, yeoman farmers such as Salatin from rejuvenating America's rural lands, obscuring the structural poverty plaguing many rural communities.

The Garden and Other Exceptions: Envisioning Food as a Communal Practice

A major exception to this trend of making the white family symbolic of sustainable agriculture is the inclusion of Will Allen in Fresh. Allen's Growing Power project in Milwaukee provides an inclusive model of urban agriculture, and his education programs (featured in Fresh) help get other urban farmers combating the lack of healthy foods available in many poor, urban centers and other "food deserts." Extended interviews with Allen, Growing Power codirector Karen Parker, and Allen's daughter/projects director, Erika Allen, provide a powerful alternative to the white family farm celebrated in films such as Food, Inc. and Farmageddon. And Allen's project displays the role that people of color currently play in the sustainable food movement, showing the agency of people of color in contrast to the anonymous, voiceless laborers of the conventional food system.

But the inclusion of Allen also provides the exception that proves the rule. In Fresh, Allen's brief profile in a film that devotes extended screen time to Joel Salatin's Polyface farms suggests not only tokenism but also a worldview that privileges the white, rural family farm as the center of the sustainable food movement while relegating urban agriculture to the periphery. This view of sustainability is made explicit in the final credit sequences, where the film finally showcases a diverse set of practitioners and consumers of sustainable foods, including an interesting interview with a young African-American man discussing the discrepancy people see between his "thug"-like appearance and his role as a farmer. So while the body of the film devotes its time and energy to mostly white, rural visions of sustainable food production, images that challenge cultural stereotypes about farming and farmers are literally relegated to an unorganized mash-up of interviews during the end credits, ghettoizing concerns of race and urban farming. But the interviews at the end of Fresh suggest a much more complex and intriguing set of questions about who gets to farm, where, and how those choices might impact the evolution of sustainable agriculture.

These questions are at the heart of The Garden, a documentary exploring local food as a social practice, not a fetishized consumer good. The film documents the failed struggles of mostly Latino urban farmers to save what was at the time the largest urban farm in the USA in the heart of South Central Los Angeles. The 14-acre plot of city-owned land was transformed into a community garden in the aftermath of the 1992 riots in order to promote community development. As documented in the film, the garden served as an important site to not only provide local, healthy food alternatives for poor families in the area but also as a source of pride for the farmers, who were able to continue many of the farming practices and varieties of plant life that connected them to their family traditions.

But when the city surreptitiously sold the land out from under the garden as part of a backroom deal with a property developer and a politically powerful community group, the farmers turned to political activism, legal battles, and fund-raising to try to keep the garden from becoming a warehouse. In the end, the political forces and power of urban property developers wins out, with the land's new owner refusing to sell the property to the farmers for three times what he paid for it.

Instead, he sends in the bulldozers to clear the lot. While the city and the landowner continue to consider development of the land against the wishes of the South Central Farmers, the original lot remains an unused dirt field while the farmers now tend to a site in Bakersfield far from the city center.

Focusing on the organizing efforts of urban farmers Rufina Juraez and Tezozomoc to fight the legal, political, and public relations battles in favor of locally grown foods that serve underserved populations, The Garden stands in stark contrast to the largely white and often masculinized vision of sustainable agriculture provided in films such as Food, Inc., Fresh, and Farmageddon. By depicting the women and men of color who are actively involved in a model of urban agriculture that struggles for survival, The Garden suggests a broader set of concerns and challenges facing a truly alternative form of agriculture that crosses class and racial borders. And its emphasis on the leadership of Juarez and others shows the role that women play in not only sustainable agriculture itself but also the kinds of community and political organizing that helps make local forms of agriculture possible.

The Garden as a documentary is able to envision this more complex and socially nuanced model of sustainable farming in part because it privileges the ideals of community and social justice over the abstract concept of "good food." In films like Food, Inc., Fresh, and Farmageddon, the documentaries start with the question of food quality: how can we grow and promote food that is healthier, tastes better, and is better for the environment? But in The Garden, issues of quality and justice within a community define the concept of "good food": how can we maintain a community that brings "good food" to those who need it most? How can communities create systems that encourage local food production? And, importantly, how might we rethink our ideas about farmlands and farming to better serve community members? By asking such questions, the film moves the discussion beyond "good food" to questions of social justice and even food sovereignty, the idea that people and communities rather than corporations and governments should control processes of food production (Holt-Gimenez,

2009G, p. 146).

As Mares and Pena (

o2010) argue, the South Central Farm as a community project challenged the "top down neo-liberal governmentality" of urban policy-makers, creating alternative spatial practices that promoted community self-reliance and autonomy (p. 241); The Garden as a film foregrounds these spatial practices, offering complex images of food production that explore the complex legal questions of land use and access to green spaces.

For example, The Garden insists on the communal nature of local food production rather than celebrating the individualized yeoman farmer. The images of the South Central Farm in the film provide a stark contrastecologically and sociallyto Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, with its benevolent patriarchal authority and traditional visions of agrarian life. Showcasing the verdant abundance and messiness of the community gardenwith new crops spilling out against long-established fruit trees and makeshift plot boundariesthe film depicts how food cultivation connects the farmers to past and present generations as well as to each other as they share traditional farming knowledge. Even though the farm is made up of individual plots, the South Central Farm is represented by images of community: farmers working together by sharing their water supply and tools, farmers discussing the farm in communal spaces, and community leaders organizing their community for political action. Additionally, the images of brown-skinned farmers (not farm laborers), along with the prevalence of Spanish as the primary language of the farm, suggest a more diverse vision of farmers and the spaces of farming.

In fact, some of the most compelling images in the film dramatically demonstrate the varied spaces that farmers must occupy in order to fight for their communities and for food sovereignty. Not only does the film offer powerful images of the lush garden against the smog stained Los Angeles cityscape (suggesting the necessity of urban green spaces and urban agriculture) but we see the farmers as active agents in a variety of spaceslawyers offices, courtrooms, city hall meetingsas they struggle to maintain control of the community garden. Seeing the farmers working beyond the space of the farm itselfespecially as they battle against an African-American community organization with a different view of the landillustrates the important scramble for resources and land access amongst the politically and economically disadvantaged.

The Garden offers a more emotionally compelling argument about food, contrasting the intellectual frustration and appeals to privileged consumers found in the other documentaries with the poignant human suffering of those whose vision of sustainable agriculture is met with hostility by the wealthy and politically powerful who have a vastly different vision of land-use in the city. One of the most poignant images in the film is the collection of farmers watching in horror from behind chain- link fences as bulldozers raze their garden. While Farmageddon attempts to depict white family farms as victims of nefarious government influence, this image of the helpless farmers in The Garden demonstrates the political and economic challenges that truly vulnerable sustainable farmers face.

Conclusion

Creating an engaged and thoughtful culture of critique around the state of US agriculture will be vital to actual cultural and structural change, and the rising popularity of critical food documentaries such as Food, Inc. signals an important shift in public discourses surrounding food production. But in order to promote a vision of sustainability that includes both social and environmental justice, these discourses need to break free from problematic cultural assumptions that limit the possibilities of new alternatives, leaving behind the prominent visual stereotypes of US agriculture to envision a more diverse and equitable model of sustainability.

The struggles of the South Central Farmers represented in The Garden reveal the kinds of political and cultural challenges created by this limited view of sustainability.

LeGreco and Leonard (2011) outline some of the practical strategies that activists can learn from the failures of the South Central Farmers, but the farmers' struggles also stem from a cultural context that devalues urban agriculture. As the owner of the land in the documentary insists, the "natural" purpose of that plot is for commercial, industrial development. In this example, the visual stereotype of rural farming has a direct impact on public policy concerning land use. Thus the South Central Farm found new life at a new site far from the city center that better suits the cultural and legal conceptions of farmland for Los Angeles policy-makers.

By documenting these struggles, the film asks questions about rights and privatization that go beyond the "right" to consume better food, instead asking "how can environmental advocates persuade power-brokers ... that rights is a limited, potentially unjust, criterion for deciding land use?" (Foust, 2011, p. 353). As The Garden suggests, redefining land use around concepts such as community, social justice, and environmental impact can sustain important projects like the South Central Farm and encourage varied forms of sustainable agriculture that involve people of color as both farmers and consumers. Research suggests that people of color are more likely to consume sustainable foods if they can buy them from a farmer of color and have increased access to farmers' markets (Webber & Dollahite, 2008). Addressing inequalities in food consumption, then, will come in the form of projects such as the South Central Farm that challenge the various forms of discrimination and public policy that have discouraged farm land use and ownership by people of color (Suarez-Balcazar, Martinez, Cox, & Jayraj, 2006).

Documentaries such as The Garden, then, indicate the need to envision many different alternatives to the conventional, industrial food system in the US popular imaginationnot just the white family farmwhile also suggesting that the challenges facing the US food system extend beyond the ruthless practices of corporate agribusinesses such as Monsanto. Convincing consumers to simply avoid foods made with genetically modified organisms will not rectify inequalities in land ownership nor ensure access to sustainable foods for underserved populations. Until documentaries like Food, Inc., Fresh, and Farmageddon can envision a more inclusive model of sustainable agriculture that privileges community and social justice, the possibilities for change in the US food system will be limited to those with the social and economic capital to "vote with their fork."

Questions:

• FOCUS on the visual analysis that the article performs to think critically about advertising images employed in food marketing and what they make 'transparent & traceable', how and to what effect.

1. What are to things you understood well from this article
2. One thing that you did not understand and what specifically or why
3. One thing that you really liked from any of the readings