**/****
directed by Laura Gabbert
Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
by Angelo Muredda “I’ve spent my whole life working on this project,” NEW YORK TIMES food critic and memoirist Ruth Reichl says late in Laura Gabbert’s Food and Country, a well-researched but muddled look at the changing nature of food in America that considers how an already precarious food system buckled under the additional weight of COVID in the early months of 2020. Reichl’s statement is one of many big promises not quite fulfilled by Gabbert’s tentative approach to her subject, which is also hazily defined: at various points, it’s either Reichl’s research or the author herself. The result is an amiably rambling but overcooked, arms-length essay–partly Reichl’s and partly Gabbert’s–about no less than three major topics: Reichl’s biography in food writing; the state of corporate agriculture and farming in America, which stiffs farmers and shoppers alike and benefits only four major packing conglomerates; and the myriad ways in which the early days of the pandemic caused irreparable damage to both restaurateurs and their providers.
The problem isn’t that Gabbert doesn’t choose a specific focal point, but that each of these topics is treated in a superficial manner, suggesting that Reichl might be better equipped to tackle the same material at greater length in one of the many books we see strategically placed around her (as though to attest to her bona fides). The film’s conception of COVID starts at the spring lockdowns of 2020 and ends around the arrival of the first vaccines in early 2021, leaving one to wonder if anything worth mentioning has happened in the following two full years. The biographical portrait of Reichl is similarly noncommittal and outdated. Reichl’s early voiceovers pitch the film to come as a CNN original programming-styled travelogue, hosted by Reichl, about how American values are entrenched in the nation’s relationship to its production and consumption of food. Partway through, however, we’re treated to an abbreviated history of Reichl’s storied rise through magazines and newspapers, which feels more anachronistic than the freezer-burned COVID lockdown discourse and talking-head interviews about pivoting to takeout. Either Reichl is the last food writer in America wildly deserving of multiple consecutive staff jobs, or Gabbert has little sense of how dire the media landscape looks today for writers at Reichl’s intersection of food and culture.
Food and Country fares better as a travel documentary than it does as an anthropological document about the pandemic or a profile of a cultural luminary. On the whole, though, the farmers make for more compelling and impassioned subjects than the restaurateurs, one of whom unconvincingly defends landlords who deny businesses like hers rent forgiveness in her early interviews–they’ve got loved ones to care for, too!–and then, by the spring of 2021, scolds the average American restaurant worker who won’t work front-of-house for little more than minimum wage post-COVID as supposedly lacking in financial literacy. Neither Reichl nor Gabbert has any comment on those anti-worker remarks, which strike a sour note at odds with the inspirational score, faintly literary NEW YORK TIMES feature-styled voiceover, and peaceful drone photography of the countryside. One wonders if a more earnest look at the subject would have made less time for the ruling class of food writers and more time for service workers.
