Could you forgo the convenience of the supermarket and spend a full year eating only locally raised food? From planting their own kitchen garden to visiting farmers across their home state, that’s exactly what filmmaker Andrew Beck Grace and his wife, Rashmi, set out to accomplish in the new documentary Eating Alabama. The film has been building a following since debuting at SXSW in March, and it will make its Alabama premiere this Saturday (August 25) at Birmingham’s Sidewalk Film Festival.
Like a lot of native Southerners, the Graces count more than a few farmers in their family histories, and it was an attempt to rediscover those agrarian roots that formed the initial motivation for the film. “Growing up on my granddaddy’s stories, I really thought, rather naively, that all these farmers were just out there but didn’t know how to get their product to us,” Andrew says. “My project would be about reconnecting those blocked pathways.” But after his first foray into the Alabama farmland in search of grain, Grace soon learned that the path to eating locally in today’s global market has a lot more twists and turns than it did in his grandfather’s day. Both funny and insightful, Eating Alabama delves into our often complex relationship to the food we eat and the people who grow it, and what food can teach us about community. “I hope people get a sense of how difficult farmers have it and how hard they work,” Grace says, “and that they will try to make choices—even small ones—that will lead to change.”
In the coming months, Eating Alabama will continue on the festival circuit, including a stop in New Orleans for the NOLA Film Festival (October 11–18). Click here to stay up-to-date as additional screenings are added to the lineup.
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