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It’s been a few years since Food, Inc. came out and author Michael Pollan last graced the big screen. On Wednesday December 30, Americans will again be privy to Pollan’s wisdom—this time about eating, more than farming—when PBS airs In Defense of Food, a documentary film based on Pollan’s book of the same name. This week Modern Farmer got a sneak preview of the film and spoke with the director, Michael Schwarz, about his process of adapting the book into a visual journey—and about some of the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. Modern Farmer: The tagline of Pollan’s book In Defense of Food is “An Eater’s Manifesto.” For those that haven’t read it, what’s the basic premise? Michael Schwarz: People are very confused about what to eat to be healthy. A lot of that has to do with being bombarded by different messages constantly about what’s healthy and what’s not. Every day there’s a new headline, a new finding, and many of them are contradictory. People feel kind of lost. In Defense of Food offers a very simple antidote to that confusion, which is this idea that you don’t need to worry so much, that you can cut through all these conflicting messages. What Michael did in writing the book was to find a simple approach. He found a very simple answer to the question of, What should I eat to be healthy? It boils down to these seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. MF: You’ve known Pollan for many years—tell us how you first met and started working together. MS: Michael and I have known each other since we were fresh out of college. We spent some of our early years working together on various magazines in New York City and have been friends ever since. I’ve collaborated with him in some way for longer and more often than probably anybody else I know. MF: One of your past projects together was a film based on Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire. What germinated the idea of doing this film together? MS: Food, Inc. had already come out which covered big chunks of Omnivore’s Dilemma—everything about corn was straight out of [that book], as was the Joel Salatin material. So it seemed like Omnivore had sort of been done, although not by name. It was clear that he had written In Defense of Food because people, after reading Omnivore, said: “I see how it gets to the table but what I want to know is what should I eat?” So we began talking about the possibilities of doing a documentary that explored the relationship between food and health. There is this paradox that the more obsessed we seem to be about health, [the less] healthy we are becoming as a country. MF: You have produced films on all sorts of subjects, many of which have nothing to do with food or farming. What drew you to this? Is there a through line with your larger body of work? MS: We like to make films that make a difference. It just seemed like this one had clear potential to do that. There is this paradox that the more obsessed we seem to be about health, [the less] healthy we are becoming as a country. MF: And there is more to it than just a film, right? Tell us about the broader mission of this collaboration. MS: The film is the centerpiece of an ambitious education effort [that] will include a curriculum designed by the teachers college at Columbia University. It consists of 10 lesson plans for middle school students, and each lesson plan is tied to a five- or six-minute clip from the film. These are kids that are just beginning to make eating decisions on their own and so to the extent that they can begin to understand the difference between real food and what Michael calls “edible food-like substances”—or what the lesson plans referred to as p-h-u-ds—that could really be significant. MF: The film begins and ends with a sequence involving a family and their pre-adolescent child, Anthony, who is overweight. How did you find these people? Seems like it must have been very vulnerable for a boy that age to go on camera and talk about his weight. MS: We went to David Ludwig [a pediatrician at the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Boston Children’s Hospital] to find people who would be willing to be filmed—which is tough when you’re talking about children with weight issues and potential health issues. It took months of research and meeting with families to figure out who would be the best one and who would be the most willing. I think Anthony and his mom were two of the most delightful people in the film. MF: On the other end of the age spectrum you interview a group of elderly vegetarians who seem to have incredible vitality. They happen to be Seventh Day Adventists—what was the connection there? MS: There are some really powerful studies looking at the impact on longevity of eating a plant-based diet. Not all Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarians, but more than half are. They also don’t smoke or drink, so they eliminate a lot of risk factors there, but when you compare the vegetarians with the non-vegetarians, you see dramatic differences. MF: You filmed that segment at a Seventh Day Adventist nursing home, or an assisted living facility of some sort, where we see a centenarian lifting weights and an elderly women who is practically running up and down the halls. Was everyone there that robust, or did you seek out the hardiest among them? MS: There were people with walkers and wheelchairs, but the majority of people who we met were in extremely good health and had a lot of energy. The average age is about 93. I only hope I’m in half as good shape as they are mentally and physically if and when I get to that age. That was a memorable sequence. I think that made an impression on everybody was there.
