Tag Archives: food politics

Screening of "The Garden" to benefit DC's 7th Street Garden

Eva sent me the link to the website for, The Garden, which won best documentary at SilverDocs this year. If you missed the movie at SilverDocs this year, you can catch it November 19th when it will be screened in DC as part of a fundraiser for the 7th Street Garden Project.

About the film:

The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community.

But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.

The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers:

Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the LA City Council? Why has it never been made public?

And the powers-that-be have the same response: “The garden is wonderful, but there is nothing more we can do.”

If everyone told you nothing more could be done, would you give up?

About the fundraiser (from the 7th Street Garden website):

Screening at the Goethe Theater (812 7th Street, NW).
Doors 6pm.
Film Starts 6:30pm.
Seasonal foods and drinks will be served.

Tickets $20 each (though more is appreciated). Available at the door OR online at America the Beautiful Fund’s web site. **If buying online you must write in the Comment box that you are purchasing tickets for The Garden movie.**

Sounds like great event, I hope to be there.

recently read and highly recommended:

Ariel Gore’s Atlas of the Human Heart. Heartbreaking, depressing, funny as hell – in equal measures, sometimes all at the same time.

Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. I read a bunch of reviews that compared this one, unfavorably, to his earlier work Fast Food Nation. I found this to be a worthy follow-up and suspect that it’s the lack of humor in this book that left the critics wanting. It’s much easier to wax poetically wacky about a machine that shoots french fries than about migrant workers in California, outrageous prison terms for medical marijuana possession, or the absurdities of the Meese commissions pornography witchhunts. That doesn’t make the book any less compelling, in fact I sacrificed a lot of sleep while reading it. I don’t know which of his works I’d prounounce “the best”, I thought each stands on it’s own merits.

Schlosser is talking Wednesday night at Politics and Prose, by the way. Let me know if you’re going. (And Jonathan Schell will be there reading from Unconquered World on Tuesday night, incidentally).

Also last week was Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons, Lynn Peril’s dissection of the cult of femininity. (Here’s a tip girls: no matter what the manufacturer told you, never douche with Lysol. Eeeesh).