Eating Alabama

Eating Alabama was well-received in its World Premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. Director Andrew Grace takes his audience on a journey into the past as he and his wife try to spend a year eating Alabama- grown food as an effort to reconnect to the farming culture of their grandparents. The film is beautifully filmed and deeply personal. In so doing, they try to explore how difficult it has become to attempt to eat locally grown food today. The film is romantic attempt to try to understand how we used to live and how we've become completely disconnected from our food supply. It also succeeds in demonstrating just how difficult this is in a world of global markets. They show how difficult it is for farmers to make a living today and how agriculture has become increasingly mechanized and large-scale. The personal story that links to the filmmakers' family provides a wonderful lens to understand how our whole society has changed. At the same time, there is an element of romanticization for a past that might never have been as happy as we'd like to believe. While less advocacy-oriented than many such films, it is clearly supportive of efforts to promote community supported agriculture and encourage people to "eat local." There is a beautiful desire for a simpler way of life here, but it may ultimately represent a somewhat unrealistic nostalgia for a world gone- by. Usually, nostalgia for a better simpler life in a world gone-by is a product of right-wing political movements who seek to critique social and political change and progress. This film (and the movement that it speaks to) is an intriguing example of liberal progressive environmentalist nostalgia for a better simpler life that once existed attempting to critique the economic change and transformation. This film seems to suggest that while modernization (in Alabama and America as a whole) has seen great social progress in areas like race that it has taken us backwards in our relationship with the natural world. Eating Alabama offers a fascinating gastronomical journey through modern life. I hope that many people get a chance to see this small film and reflect on the important issues that it raises.