Hi! For my inaugural post, I'm just going to to tell a little bit about myself and my plans for this blog.
First of all, I grew up in Fresno, California. Fresno is located in the San Joaquin Valley, which is one of the United States' most productive agricultural regions, known particularly for it's fruit, vegetable, nut, and milk production. Although I didn't grow up on a farm myself, both my mom and my dad come from families who worked in plant and animal agriculture, and several of my aunts and uncles still own and operate walnut orchards. This connection to agriculture has always been an important part of my sense of family history, and I think that growing up in a region in which the economy and the well-being of the community is heavily based on agriculture has influenced the way I think about a lot of social and political issues.
Now, as far as what I have planned for this blog: I'm going to be analyzing media representations of food activism, food-related social, political and economic issues, and related topics. Specifically, I'll be focusing on a different documentary on one of these topics each week. So far, I have this partial and tentative list of documentaries in mind:
Food Matters (2008)
Forks Over Knives (2011)
Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (2012)
Vegucated (2010)
Food Fight (2008)
One Nation Overweight (2010)
Farmageddon (2011)
Food, Inc. (2009)
Ingredients: The Local Food Movement Takes Root (2011)
Fish Meat (2012)
The Apple Pushers (2012)
Bananas!* (2011)
Fresh (2009)
If anyone has any other documentaries they'd recommend, let me know! I'm trying to focus on more recent ones, but it might be interesting to look at some older ones too. Also, there may be a few weeks in which I write about other (non-documentary) types of media portrayals of new food activism, such as articles online, in magazines, or in newspapers.
