Food Beware by Jean-Paul Jaud

Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
Film by Jean-Paul Jaud

Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in the early 1970s. Increasingly, the experts are recognizing that the war is going nowhere. Even some mainstream oncologists are facing up to that fact. If we declared an end to the war right now, the conclusion would be clear: we lost.

Food Beware looks at a small village in France that has decided to obtain its food locally as much as possible. Experts in France are also coming to the conclusion that the conventional war on cancer is a failure and this village is taking wise steps away from the processed, chemical- laced food. A lot of film footage shows the children of the village being educated to know the difference between real food and what we’ve been conned into thinking is food. No real food has six syllables and sounds like it came from another planet—not even in French.

There are always questions about whether organic farming can feed the world but this DVD cites an FAO report from 2007 which says that farming all arable land according to organic precepts would produce enough to feed mankind. Another expert points out that conventional food would cost more than organic if it weren’t heavily subsidized.

A lot of farmers are ready to change their ways. In an interview with one farmer’s wife, she tells about how her husband gets a nosebleed every time he mixes chemicals to spray on the crops. He hasn’t seen a doctor and doesn’t like to talk about it much. She goes on to talk about a friend who treated his vines with chemicals and “couldn’t pee for a week after. That’s a bit of a worry.” Organic farmers explain how chemical pesticides, fungicides, etc. kill the soil, which creates unhealthy plants, which then need more chemicals to withstand the attacks of pests. The dead soil washes away more easily, leaving sand and pebbles and the plants get worse.

This film is in French with English subtitles. There is a speaker in the DVD who, at one point, talks about how we eat too much meat and how inefficient that is. That is venturing onto thin ice with me but the movie overall doesn’t clearly come out as anti-meat or anti-fat, and going local is a good message, so le pouce is UP.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2012.

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