Where have you been all month?

I’ve just came from Iowa, from the last stops on the King Corn in the Corn Belt tour. The idea came out of, in part because of the unanticipated reception that the film has had in cities — it still really boggles my mind that people went to movie theaters to go see a movie about corn, considering how difficult it was to raise money and interest in the beginning. We had to make a decision in August whether or not to fill out the paperwork to qualify for the Academy Awards, which was something that seemed preposterously impossible. I don’t know if the film would qualify on its own merits, but one of the criteria for getting in was the film had to play in 14 cities in 10 states by the end of November – in movie theaters. I thought the chances of that happening were practically nil, so as a results we didn’t bother filling out the paperwork. As it turned out the film playled in something like 30 cities by then, and now has played in like 40 cities. We all started feeling like, it was great to bring that discussion on the coasts, and university audiences. But it was starting to feel funny that the film wasn’t playing in the kinds of places that we made the film. Because we were fortunate enough to make 35mm prints of the film, we applied for a grant to take the film back to those Iowa towns, including the town, Greene, where we made the film.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned about food making this film?

The most surprising thing to me – this film has been such a series of surprises, and all of them are about corn, on some level. I was surprised to hear that all that corn that we grow, those 90 million acres of corn that we grow, isn’t sweet corn. Isn’t the corn we eat on 4th of July picnics. Even before that, I was surprised that there was a connection between corn, this most beloved American crop, and this incredible irony that the richest nation on earth eats so poorly.

Another surprise is that I came to love agriculture and see, not only the future of our country, but my future as being really connected to food. We are sitting here in the grocery store that I opened largely as a result of the kinds of things I learned about our food system in King Corn.

When you are in kindergarten and they go around the room and say, what do you want to be when you grow up, there are lots of astronauts and firemen and ballerinas and maybe the president, but no one says grocer. And now I think that’s one of the sexiest, most awesome things you can do.

Your website for King Corn urges visitors to write their congress person and demand a farm bill that better reflects their values. How do you feel about how the bill turned out?

Just weeks ago, Congress passed a farm bill that is, essentially, if not a carbon copy of the previous one, at least one that will continue to pay heavy subsidies for commodity agriculture, whether or not the market demands it. I think we did lose this round, but there are victories to measure, and I don’t think those victories are in the incrementally more money that was allocated in the recent farm bill for things like organic agriculture and farmers markets. It’s great that they have given a little bit more money to those things, but it’s clear that the bill has used that as a placating strategy – if we give a little bit more to this, then we can keep the main substance of the bill intact, which is exactly what happened.

The hope that I see is not in those tiny little gains, but in the 11th hour groundswell that emerged just before the final debate on the farm bill. We had senators like Boxer and Feinstein from California, who for the first time were questioning the main substance of the bill. For a long time, there has been an agreement between so-called specially crop growers in the Central Valley in California, who grow stuff like tomatoes and asparagus, with commodity growers that if the specialty crop growers accept that the commodity farm growers will get all this largess from the federal government in the form of subsidies, then the commodity growers will agree not to grow things like tomatoes and asparagus in that wonderfully rich ground of Iowa. That is a really damaging agreement, I think. Because it means not only are we paying lots of money to cultivate and overproduce the core ingredients for some of our least healthy foods, but it means that our more healthy foods are going to be grown much farther away and are going to have to be transported across the country, burning more fossil fuel. And that changes, not only the way that we imagine the agriculture, but it changes the food itself. Look at what we’ve done to produce in industrial agriculture for the last 40 or 50 years. Whenever we have a chance to select for qualities that we want in, say, a tomato, we’ve selected shelf life, and then appearance, and then flavor and then nutrition. It’s almost like the whole formula is backwards, but if you are transporting a fruit or vegetable 1500 miles – which is the average amount that a piece of food travels from farm to plate right now – you’re going to select for things that tolerate the ride, not for things that taste good or going to be good for you.

So we have this agreement between commodity corn growers and specialty growers that really locks our food system into this program that favors massive scale over smaller scale, that favors massive transportation over local transportation, and in the end favors poor quality over yummy and delicious.

But just in the days before the bill was passed, we had on the Senate floor two really interesting proposals. One from Senator [Richard] Lugar from Indiana, together with [Frank] Lautenberg from New Jersey. And another from [Chuck] Grassely in Iowa, together with [Byron] Dorgen from North Dakota. Which were really interesting, because they both were proposed by a Corn Belt Republican. The Grassley-Dorgen amendment, which didn’t pass, simply proposed to cap subsidy payments at $250,000, which is a lot of money. But now you have single farmers collecting millions of dollars, many of them absentee landowners. This would have kept the scale really on a family farm scale. It still was paying a lot of subsidies, but it was saying people are milking the system, which is really true. And it was going to put those savings, something like $8 billion, into conservation programs. Because Glassley, despite the fact that he is a Republican Corn Belt stater, is really the only family farmer in the Senate. And I think he knows the value of stewardship, and the value of small-scale farming. and the incentive to preserve that soil, which is one of our greatest national assets.

The other amendment was the FRESH Act, proposed by Lugar and Lautenberg. That proposed to get rid of all commodity payments and replace them with a guaranteed safety net insurance program, for all growers. If you are growing organic asparagus, or if you are growing mesclun mix, or if you are growing commodity corn, you get a guaranteed insurance program from the government. That would have been paid for from the savings from the commodity payments. That got 37 votes. That’s really good.

I’ve always been politically engaged, but with this film, there’s such a clear tie between policy and people. As Michael Pollan has pointed out, we get the food system that we asked for. I think we ask for it by not paying attention.

People ask me about the film – why didn’t you go after ADM? Why didn’t you go after Cargill? Partly, that’s not my character, but partly, as much as those big companies have a lot of influence in Congress, I don’t think it’s fair to blame them before we take into account that so little of the urban public has taken interest in this legislation. Maybe if it were called the food bill instead of the farm bill, more people would have paid attention to it. There was nothing to dilute the influence of those big companies on farm legislation, because urban Americans didn’t think that this bill had to do with them. And often, by not contacting their congresspeople, those congresspeople were emboldened to trade their vote away on the farm bill to some Midwestern legislator, in exchange for some other kind of pet project.

What’s nice about now is, OK, this farm bill is not what we wanted, but we’ve got a clean slate. We’ve got five years to work on this. There are revisions done to the farm bill annually. And if some of that groundswell that emerged at the last minute toward the end of the last farm bill could be continued on to the next, I think we would be in a really good position to have the farm bill that we want.

Is Urban Rustic a business or activism or both?

I’ve never been really good at either one of those things, activism or business. Restaurants or food stores are about the dumbest thing besides documentary to put your money into, as it turns out. I hope it succeeds on a business level. I don’t think it’s quite an activist act if it is a business, because activism seems to be an altruistic thing, inherently. But I think it’s some parts all of those things. And in some parts, kind of a personal dream as well.

I looked so much into the food system, and kept hearing people’s ideas about how farming and agriculture might be. And the term sustainability kept coming up. And I think on some level, I realized that my own career in documentary is about the most unsustainable thing that you can do. It’s so hard to make a consistent plan in your life when each film takes you to a different place. You never know if there is going to be any income. I’ve been lucky enough to have made a few films that have broken even and some that have even made money, but that’s really atypical in documentary.

I wanted to have a project that was more of a long-term project, personally. On another level, I was really outraged personally at the way our food system seeks to obscure the sources of our sustenance. I thought both from a philosophical and a business standpoint, a store that sells food and tells you where that food comes from might gain a foothold among thinking people.

You are also part owner of Lodge in Williamsburg. Is there something specific to this neighborhood that makes selling locally grown food a potentially profitable endeavor? Would it work on the Upper East Side?

I really like Williamsburg. My father’s from Brooklyn, and the neighborhoodiness — I think to put a business in Brooklyn, you have to be invested in the community in a way that maybe is less true in Manhattan. Seems like there is a lot more anonymity in those tall buildings in the Upper West Side than there is here. That means that you are not really let off the hook, because you want to be a neighbor as much as a businessperson. I have a kind of a sentimental connection to Brooklyn that I don’t have for the Upper East Side. It seems like a great place because there are so many thinking people around here, there are so many young people around here. The reason why King Corn was so oriented towards young people is that, this is not the kind of thing that’s going to change overnight. Our food system is very entrenched. I think it’s going to take a lot of dedication from a lot of quarters for a long period of time. To be in a place where you have people who are more disposed towards that than the Upper East Side is probably, is a good place. But it wasn’t so much a business decision. It’s just a nice place to be.