‘Fork In The Road’ Documents Innovators Working To Repair America’s Dysfunctional Food System – Sonoma International Film Festival

“Watch what you eat” used to be a commonly heard expression, typically urged in the context of dieting. But the maxim applies in a different way in the documentary Fork in the Roadwhich made its world premiere Saturday at the Sonoma International Film Festival in California’s wine country.

The film directed by Vivian Sorenson and Jonathan Nastasi invites viewers to reevaluate the current American food system which has achieved massive scale, delivery of cheap calories to consumers and immense profits to mega corporations but at the expense of healthy food and sustainable practices.

“The antagonist of the film really is the industrial food system,” Nastasi observed at a Q&A following the world premiere. But this is not a film about the bad guys – it’s about the good guys who are reconnecting people to the land, innovating in farming methods, and working toward a sustainable future of quality food and dramatically reduced carbon footprint.

“We wanted to highlight people that… were working around that challenge, creating workarounds and solutions through the nonprofits that were supporting their work,” Nastasi continued. “That was a unifier amongst all of the subjects. Everyone in the film… is looking at how do we get food to people that is healthy and good, make a living, create jobs.”

Among the innovators in the film is Dune Lankard, an Eyak Athabaskan Native of the Eagle Clan who grew up in southcentral Alaska. Part of his work focuses on scaling up kelp harvesting off the Alaskan coast.

“Kelp is like the hemp of the sea,” Lankard explained at the Q&A. “It has all these amazing properties. If you take 3 percent red seaweed and add it to animal feed and feed it to cows and pigs, it reduces their emissions by 60 to 80 percent. They found that if you add it to fertilizer, things [grew] greener, faster, stronger, and required less water. So, we’re going to start a campaign from the homelands to the heartlands and work with all you farmers that want to grow things differently and think about how we can change these impacts from climate change.”

Lankard noted, “We are going to have to change the way we live, the way we act, the way we think, the way we grow our food. And so, when this opportunity came up to do this film with you all, I was like, ‘I’m in. Let’s figure out how to tell the story and think about how we can do things that are regenerative, that are going to be good for the ocean and good for the wildlife, good for the sea life, and good for the people.’”

Chef, restaurateur and Food Network star Marc Murphy, who appears in the documentary, shows people how to incorporate kelp into recipes after learning of its healthful properties and remarkable sustainability. He first met director Vivian Sorenson when they worked at the Food Network.

“When this kelp thing came around and [Vivian] told me about it, then I got together with Melissa [Clark, New York Times food columnist]an old friend of mine, and we just were like, ‘Wow, we can try to make this sh*t popular, man. Let’s do it.’ And we got together and we did this,” he said at the Q&A. “To me, it was like, if we could get it popular and we could get it into every grocery store and everybody could start eating it, it’s like back in the day when arugula — nobody knew what that was and all of a sudden now everybody eats arugula.”

Actor Nick Offerman, an Illinois native whose family background is in farming, participates in the documentary and serves as an executive producer.

“One of the worst ills to afflict our modern society is cheap food, because it’s empty in so many ways of nutrients,” he comments in Fork in the Road. “I am worried that our consumerist culture, if we don’t make some important changes, is going to be the death of the small American farmer.”

In the film, Offerman expresses admiration for the work of author and environmental activist Wendell Berry and travels to the writer’s home base in Henry County, Kentucky. The essayist, novelist and farmer, 91, is interviewed off camera in the film, his deep, rumbling voice grounding the documentary with words of wisdom. “The future of food is not distinguishable from the future of the land, which is indistinguishable, in turn, from the future of human care,” Berry says. “But care also involves love. It means a lifelong duty.”

The Berry Center, launched by Wendell’s daughter Mary Berry Smith in 2011, is one of the nonprofits featured in Fork in the Road. The organization’s website notes it is “dedicated to bringing focus, knowledge and cohesion to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agricultural system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities.”

Appropriately, there was an organic evolution to the documentary project, going back almost a decade.

“We started in Missouri with John and Holly Arbuckle,” Sorenson commented, referring to a couple that has pioneered regenerative farming at Singing Pastures. “We’re like, ‘…How do we get to the next part of the story?’ And then we started shooting in Kentucky and that’s when we met the Coombs [Curtis and Carilynn Coombs of Jericho Farmhouse] and we began to see that reciprocal relationship, and then we met Nick Offerman. Then of course we met Dune and Dune actually came to us from GreenWave [and executive director Brent Smith]and Lisa Holmes, who is our executive producer.”

Sorenson added, “It was incredibly important for us to first reach out to the nonprofits that support these farmers… because without the nonprofits, these farmers would cease to exist or be able to farm in the way that they want to farm… We wanted to make a movie about shining a light on the people who had ideas and were doing something about it.”

Fork in the Road is screening today at the Skyfire Environmental Film Festival in Phoenix, AZ. It will also be playing in April at the RiverRrun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, NC, the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in Dubuque, IA, and the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival in California. Additional festivals are also on the schedule.

“It is incredible accomplishment to finish a documentary film that comes from a little baby idea into a feature documentary,” Sorenson said at the world premiere. “It takes so much blood, sweat, tears, arguments, love, passion, giving up, starting again. And I can’t believe that we’re actually here today.”