![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yesterday, I took the day off and went to two of the Silverdocs showings.
First, I saw Cafeteria Man. The documentary follows Tony Geraci, who was hired to run the Baltimore school system's food program. Over the course of two years, he works with parents, teachers, students, politicians, local farmers, and chefs to eliminate the pre-plated, commodity food that was served in the school system's cafeterias with locally grown produce and introduce a more positive food culture into the entire school system, from pre-K to high school. This includes setting up a teaching farm inside Baltimore, reforming the food procurement system, setting up food service/hospitality programs in the schools, and trying to set up a central kitchen to cook food for the schools, because most schools in Baltimore do not have kitchens in which foods can actually be cooked and retrofitting them individually would be prohibitively expensive compared to a central kitchen with a hub-and-spoke distribution system.
It was a seriously fascinating look at food and bureaucracy in American public schools.
Second, I saw The Loving Story, about Loving vs Virginia. Told mostly through archival footage -- a news cinematographer/filmmaker had documented the case at the time, but had never been able to get funds to make a documentary of her own -- it was amazingly powerful, since Mildred and Richard Loving spoke for themselves, instead of having a talking head or 'voice of God' narrator explain things. There were several interviews from the time of the case that were cringe-worthy, mostly because America as a society has moved on, but it was really interesting to see how incredibly important breaking the miscegnation laws were -- for inheritance rights for the children, for survivor rights in the case of death of a spouse, for the right not to be arrested because of who you were married to -- and how we take many of these things for granted today.
First, I saw Cafeteria Man. The documentary follows Tony Geraci, who was hired to run the Baltimore school system's food program. Over the course of two years, he works with parents, teachers, students, politicians, local farmers, and chefs to eliminate the pre-plated, commodity food that was served in the school system's cafeterias with locally grown produce and introduce a more positive food culture into the entire school system, from pre-K to high school. This includes setting up a teaching farm inside Baltimore, reforming the food procurement system, setting up food service/hospitality programs in the schools, and trying to set up a central kitchen to cook food for the schools, because most schools in Baltimore do not have kitchens in which foods can actually be cooked and retrofitting them individually would be prohibitively expensive compared to a central kitchen with a hub-and-spoke distribution system.
It was a seriously fascinating look at food and bureaucracy in American public schools.
Second, I saw The Loving Story, about Loving vs Virginia. Told mostly through archival footage -- a news cinematographer/filmmaker had documented the case at the time, but had never been able to get funds to make a documentary of her own -- it was amazingly powerful, since Mildred and Richard Loving spoke for themselves, instead of having a talking head or 'voice of God' narrator explain things. There were several interviews from the time of the case that were cringe-worthy, mostly because America as a society has moved on, but it was really interesting to see how incredibly important breaking the miscegnation laws were -- for inheritance rights for the children, for survivor rights in the case of death of a spouse, for the right not to be arrested because of who you were married to -- and how we take many of these things for granted today.