Ruth Reichl: “The delicious revolution" was a distraction from America's food crisis

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Most people wouldn't recall the early days of the pandemic as "the moment I've been waiting for my whole life." But Ruth Reichl, whose new documentary "Food and Country" reveals America's food crisis from the perspective of the farmers, ranchers, restauranteurs and activists whose livelihoods were upended by it, isn't most people.

A seven-time James Beard Award winner (including one lifetime achievement award), bestselling memoirist and novelist, former restaurant critic and editor of the fondly remembered Gourmet magazine, Reichl is also, at her core, an activist. She began her career in the Bay Area in the 1970s, at a moment when the rise of convenience foods of the '50s and infatuation for French cuisine of the '60s was giving way to a new hunger for a different way of doing things. It just took a few decades for the rest of us to catch up.

As she told me during our recent "Salon Talks" conversation, "We really have the first generation of Americans who understand that food is much more than something to eat." As a producer and the guiding figure in director Laura Gabbert's documentary, Reichl is looking back on how American farming became a corporate enterprise and how the "derailed" activism of 50 years ago has become a new mission for the future. She talked with us about the challenges of making a movie at the height of quarantine, the resilience of the American farmer and why our fragile food system needs undocumented workers to survive.

"Food and Country" is in selected theaters and will be available to stream October 22.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Your new documentary “Food and Country” starts during the early days of Covid in 2020. Take me to the beginning of this film and the origins of this story.

My husband and I were in Los Angeles in March of 2020. We woke up one morning, we looked at each other and said, “We better go home, they're going to close the airports.” So on March 12th, we flew home. That was at the point you couldn't get masks. We were traveling with hydrogen peroxide to clean things off.

We get home and I say to my husband, “I'm going to do one giant shopping [trip]. I'm going to buy everything we need, and then we're going to go into quarantine.” I go to the store, and for the first time in my entire life, there is a sign on the supermarket door that says, “We have no bread. None.” And I open the door and the shelves are empty. There is nothing there. I thought I was going to buy all this food, and you literally just took whatever you could find off the shelves because there was no chicken, there was certainly no meat of any kind, there was no rice, there were no potatoes, there were no onions.

I came home and said to my husband, “This may be the moment I've been waiting for my whole life.” No American has ever gone into a store and seen an empty shelf. It just didn't happen. We take food for granted, and maybe this is the moment where people wake up and say, “Oh, maybe we aren't always going to have this abundance.” My husband said, “Or maybe the other thing will happen, and maybe what will happen is that all the farmers will go out of business, and it will be the triumph of industrial food.” I said, “No, people are going to be cooking. They're going to be home with their families.” In that moment, I thought, “I don't know what's going to happen, but I feel like this is a change point and I would like to have a record. So whatever happens, we can look back and say, this is how it happened.”

"The consequences of this cheap food policy have been enormous. We have destroyed the environment. We have addicted an entire population to food that's very bad for them."

I started calling farmers, fishermen, chefs, food policy people. Before I was done, I called 178 people and said, “What's happening for you?” I really was just thinking this was something that would go in with my papers and 25 years from now, 50 years from now, it would be useful to people. Then I heard that Laura Gabbert, who made “City of Gold,” about Jonathan Gold, was working on a film about what was happening to LA restaurants. I called her and said, “I think the story is much bigger. I think it's the whole food system.” She said, ”You're right. Do you want to collaborate on a film?” This is maybe March 20th, and I said, “But it's too late. We should have started a month ago.” Laura said, and this will stay with me forever, “In documentary, it's always too late.” I was saying “too late” because we thought it would last six weeks and then life would shift back to normal. We never in a million years thought that two years later, I would still be Zooming with these people.

The first people I called were farmers that I knew. Then someone would say, “You know, you should talk to so-and-so.” I'm talking to lots and lots of people who I've never met in person, but something happens with Zoom. You're in this very intense face-to-face conversation, it was Covid, people were locked up. They needed a stranger to just talk to, so we became friends. I'm talking to this wonderful farmer, Angela Knuth, out in Nebraska. We have never met, but we're sharing our problems with each other because over two years we got to be friends and it was a safe place to talk. Amazing things happened with this footage where, at one point, at least ten people said, “You're like my shrink.” It was just that I was a sympathetic ear [at] this truly devastating time for food producers.

All these people who raised things for restaurants, there's no business anymore. Fishermen were in terrible trouble because Americans mostly eat fish in restaurants, and their business dried up. As we all know, restaurants, many, many, many of them died during Covid. What this turned out to be was quite a different film than we had anticipated.

We did film on location with each of the farmers, but when we went through all of this enormous footage of interviews that I had, we could have done a dozen films. We chose to mostly focus on farmers and ranchers and food producers because chefs have a big voice in the world, and these people don't. I was fascinated by the story of these farmers. What I learned making this [is] it is so hard to be a farmer in America and farmers are so resilient and strong. One of the things I love about this film is we're not telling their stories, they're telling their stories. But, all of them came out of Covid better than they went in. We really wanted to say, “Things are really broken in the food system, but we can fix it.”

When you talk about how fragile this food system is, that doesn't happen overnight. What happened and how did it become so industrialized?

At the end of World War II, America, the government, decided that the best way to fight communism was to have the cheapest, most abundant food in the world. They set about making that happen and one of the things they did was turn what had been ammunitions factories into fertilizer factories. Suddenly we have what they called the Green Revolution. Fertilizers are making the crops much more abundant, they remove animals from the equation. The farms all become factories and what had been animals are now machines. Then the farmers all have to go into debt because these machines are very expensive and you see a real shrink.

Going into World War II, 25% of Americans were engaged in farming. By 1961, only 8% were still engaged in farming. That's a huge change in a very short period of time. Meanwhile, this smaller number of people were producing massively more food. When Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, gave speeches to farmers he said, “Get big or get out.” He encouraged them all to take on massive debt and buy more and more machines that cost $½ million, $1 million. In the farm crisis of 1982, 200 farmers a week lost their farms because they couldn't pay.

"What I learned making this film is we don't vote with our dollars, we vote with our votes.""

The consequences of this cheap food policy have been enormous. We have destroyed the environment. The fertilizer runoff is creating dead [zones] in all the lakes and oceans. We have addicted an entire population to food that's very bad for them. Six out of ten Americans now have a food related disease, chronic disease. We've created this crisis of obesity and diabetes, and it's all because people used to eat good, healthy food, and now they eat processed foods, which are really increasingly bad for us. We have addicted a few generations to basically killing themselves with their food.

Meanwhile, in the meatpacking industry, we've allowed incredible concentration. There are four major meatpackers who control most of the meat in the United States. That's a whole other side of this: antitrust, monopoly.

Basically, our problem is that the government decided this was going to be the policy, that we were going to have cheap, abundant food. That has been what has led to this crisis.

When you talk about how few farmers there are, there are even fewer farmers in this country now who are Black.

In 1920, there were more Black farmers than white farmers in America. Now there are a handful. Karen Washington gives the numbers in the film. It's shocking.

You also talk in the film about how tipping evolved in this country, as a direct result of racism. Is there a way out of this mess in terms of paying our restaurant and service workers fairly?

It all ultimately goes back to the argument that those of us who advocate for good food are constantly fighting against, which is that this is an elitist issue – that it's great that you can afford to go to farmers markets but most people can't, and we like this cheap food.

The answer to that is the government supports the wrong kind of agriculture. We spend $50 billion a year in farmers subsidies and I would say probably 99.9% of them go to corporate farmers who are not worried about the environment or our health. The ultimate answer is yes, you can fix it, but the government is going to have to fix it. I used to go out and give these speeches where I’d say, “We vote with our dollars. Every time you buy good food, you're sending a message.” What I learned making this film is we don't vote with our dollars, we vote with our votes.

There are a lot of really wonderful things happening. One is that farmers are resilient. Will Harris in Georgia, who is like, preacher of the Earth, has found whole solutions and he is teaching people how to be regenerative farmers and why it's a good idea. There are a few incredible moments in the film with Will, where he is given a lemon and makes lemonade out of it. All of the farmers who tell us their stories are incredible.

The Joneses, who have The Chef's Garden in Huron, Ohio, their family lost everything in the farm crisis in 1982 and they have found a solution. They will never borrow another penny from the bank. [They’re] like, “That's what took our father down. We had to find a way to not need that operating capital up front and operate a year-round business.” They have figured out a few really innovative ways to do it. It's wonderful that we have activists like Karen Washington and activists like Bren Smith, the kelp farmer. But ultimately, the real answer is we have to insist that our governments start supporting good food and doing it in many, many ways.

A moment in the film that really stuck with me was when one of the farmers said, “We have so much food here that is rotting, miles away from people who are going hungry.” The idea that there isn't enough and this idea of scarcity feels like a smokescreen.

Covid was proof of that. We had farmers dumping everything and huge lines at food pantries that were running out of food. It's insanity. We have plenty of food. We overproduce calories per capita in this country. It's a matter of distribution.

"A lot of us who have been really focused on food for the last 50 years feel a real responsibility and sorrow for the fact that this happened under our noses"

I'll tell you the other moment that got me. One of my favorite characters in the film is rancher Steve Stratford. I went looking for not one of the hip new organic meat producers, but a rancher, a traditional rancher to talk to because I wanted to know what was going on. We were all very conscious of what was happening in the meat industry. There were huge backups at the beginning of Covid, you couldn't get meat. Farmers didn't have any place to slaughter their animals, the animals were getting too big.

I went looking for a rancher, and I found this wonderfully brilliant, articulate rancher in Pratt, Kansas. After a couple of years, when I got comfortable enough with him, I said, “Do you want your kids to do what you're doing?” He looked at me and said, “Let me put it this way: at the beginning of every year I go to the bank, I borrow $8 million. I work three jobs, I work 100 hours a week, and in a good year I take home $50,000. Do I want my kid to do this? No, any sane person will tell you that's stupid. But we love what we do, we believe in what we do.” He looks at the camera [and says], “You all are depending on the fact that we as food producers love what we do. But one day, it's just going to be too hard.”

The film makes the point that we’re also depending on undocumented people.

Oh my God. We certainly could have done a whole film just on that. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Bob Jones kneels down in his fields in Ohio and says, I'm paraphrasing this, “You know, you have a choice. You can round up all the undocumented workers, you can send them all somewhere else, but Americans won't do this work. When you do that, it means that we will not be able to compete with the underpaid people who are farming elsewhere. American farms will go out of business, and what you will have is not nutritious food [that’s] picked by people who are exploited. That's your choice.”

For all of the farmers, it's very clear, they really depend on the guest worker. I have heartbreaking footage of migrant workers during Covid. They were so exploited, they were living in these cramped little places, but they were considered essential workers. We did not get into undocumented workers in kitchens, but the entire American food system comes crashing down without undocumented workers. Every restaurant, every farm, they make our lives possible.

There's a moment in the movie where you say, “I feel like my whole life has been building up to this, and I feel like a terrible failure.” What does that mean to you to say that? To feel that?

I don't think I'm the only one who feels that. I think a lot of us who have been really focused on food for the last 50 years feel a real responsibility and sorrow for the fact that this happened under our noses and we let it happen. We thought we knew what was going on, and we willfully closed our eyes. It was such a shock to learn too late about the fact that we had overfished the oceans and fertilizer runoff was creating terrible problems. I was a food editor for a lot of this time. I ran a magazine and we thought we were doing a good enough job. We weren't. This happened.

I remember one of my favorite pieces we ran in Gourmet Magazine was by Robert Sietsema and his father. It was called “My Father the Formulator.” His father was a food scientist who really believed in the 50s that this was making life better for people. It's about his father's gradual disillusionment. He starts out really thinking this 50s American idea: “We’re going to make life better through science.” Then he doesn't like what's happening to the products that he's invented as they get increasingly worse for you.

I wish I had been more vigilant. I wish we all had been. We really, as a nation, depend on a vigilant press. The food movement as I know it pretty much starts in Berkeley and spreads out very slowly. It starts as a very political movement and after a while, we all got derailed by the delicious revolution, where suddenly we were suddenly very focused on food. It went from really thinking about the increasing industrialization of American food, but then we got so excited by food and recipes and restaurants and it all got derailed for a while. I just wish that hadn't happened.

How has this changed you? What are you doing now to reset yourself and your relationship with the food industry and your career?

It's a great question. I've had a long career. I've been writing about food for about 55 years. There's just a time when you think it's your time to pass it on and to be as helpful as you can to the people of the next generation. This is my activist moment with this film. I really believe in the press, I believe in the power of the press. I think information is the most important thing that we have, and especially in this moment when we're really understanding what misinformation can do.

My role at this point is just to try and encourage more people to be involved in this subject, more writers, and to be as available as I can and helpful as I can to the generation of writers who are coming up now. And I must say that this next generation gives me so much hope. We really have the first generation of Americans who understand that food is much more than something to eat.

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