cyrilplapied's Flickr photostream/Creative Commons

Documentaries about food have been sprouting up all over lately, and if you ask Jean-Paul Jaud director of the new film Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution, he’ll likely tell you that their abundance is due to fertile, chemical free soil.  Forced metaphors aside, the film celebrates a French town that has chosen to go organic, and explores the dangerous threat that fertilizers and pesticides pose to human health and the environment.

I’m looking forward to seeing the film, which opened in New York this week, as I’m always in favor of exploring positive alternatives to the problems of industrial agriculture, however, I have heard that the film tends to be a little heavy-handed when it comes to facts and figures about the harmful effects of chemicals.  That said, the New York Times found Jaud’s approach to be effective:

“Food Beware” takes a pragmatic, health-based approach, buttressed by frightening statistics about cancer rates among children, that’s a refreshing change from the moral and high-cultural preening that sometimes enter this debate in America.

Switching to an entirely locally-sourced, organic diet is surely easier in a small French town than implementing such an overhaul in, say, Los Angeles.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work towards a more sustainable food system, it may just look a bit different than French country life.

Check out the trailer for Food Beware, and use the action link to check out the great links that the film provides to learn more about building a sustainable food system.