A Food Lover's Journey into GMOs
If Aube Giroux is right, we've allowed our food gaze to get sidetracked. Giroux is the Nova Scotia filmmaker whose award-winning documentary Modified tackles how Canada, like the U.S., has rejected the labelling of food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
"We're living in an era where we celebrate food. There are a lot of cooking shows and food is very trendy," she says in an interview. "But sometimes we don't ask enough questions about how our food is produced."
Giroux's largely self-financed film — a trenchant blend of investigation, gorgeous images of food, personal reflection and a deep love of family — certainly celebrates food while abjuring the chirpy slickness of so many cooking shows. But, in the process, it also asks those questions about genetically engineered food that she believes are being overlooked, to our detriment.
Shot over nine years and narrated by Giroux, Modified tackles everything from the disquieting relationship between governments and the biotech industry (an industry that Giroux says has spent $200 million in the U.S. alone fighting the labelling of GMO foods) to Health Canada's refusal, despite numerous, patient phone calls from Giroux, to even cough up a spokesperson to address the topic of GMOs (a sequence in the documentary that would be hilarious were it not so dispiriting).
She's careful to leave the question as to whether GMOs in food are harmful in themselves; but she makes no bones about the fact that genetically engineering crops means they can be sprayed with chemicals that kill everything except the genetically engineered crops.
"People always want to know if GMOs are dangerous and I steer away from that question because I don't think there's conclusive evidence," says Giroux, who's also the award-winning producer behind the PBS video blog Kitchen Vignettes, director of two NFB films and a past contributor to edible Toronto.
In the film, Andrew Kimbrell, attorney and executive of the U.S.- based Center for Food Safety, makes no qualms about the motives behind genetically engineered foods. "80 per cent of all genetically engineered crops are designed to withstand herbicides. [That's] very good for Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow. They're selling more of their chemicals because they are... chemical companies," he says. "So 150 million more pounds of herbicides each year in the U.S. are sprayed because of GMOs."
However, she will say that GMOs are intimately linked to an increased use of herbicides in the past 20 years and that worries her because of possible links with cancer. Now, she says, weeds are becoming resistant to some chemicals and that's meant new generations of pesticides and GMOs. "It's created a kind of [chemical] treadmill where when one no longer works as well, we bring in new ones. And the whole narrative created around GMOs by industry was that they would reduce [chemical] use."
The film also addresses the disturbing fact that while 88 per cent of Canadians want all genetically engineered food labelled, as is done in 64 other countries, the Canadian federal government has thus far refused. "When I started this project," Giroux says at one point in Modified, "it was meant to be a film about food, but more and more it was becoming a film about democracy and about who gets to make our food policy. Is it the people we elect to represent us or is it corporations and their heavily financed lobbyists?"
Such elements alone would make an enticing documentary about our right to know how our food is produced. But by anchoring the film in the love of food passed on to her by her late mother, Jali Giroux, the filmmaker gives her creation a particular intensity and relatability. Like a nourishing home-cooked meal, it's a generous, welcoming piece of work.
Jali Giroux is key to the film. We watch her harvesting food from her beloved garden, her fingernails blackened with soil rather than sealed off by gloves from what they're touching and then preparing and cooking that produce. "I've never met anyone who loved food as much as she did," says her daughter during our interview. "Our conversations almost always revolved around food. I'd visit her and we'd always be talking about food, the next thing we were going to eat. Her garden was her universe."
"She had a real gusto for life, for the pleasures of living and the table. She was also very politically attuned... a real political junkie, a believer in justice and in holding elected representatives accountable to their constituents."
Jali was also the one who got her daughter interested in the subject of GMO labelling. Her mother sent her news clippings on the subject and wound up being a kind of de facto researcher for the film.
In 2009, Jali was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died just five months later. Giroux had clips of her mother from before and after the diagnosis, but after her mother died she largely put that part of the film on hiatus. "I didn't even look at that footage for about a year and a half after she'd passed away... because it was like going through a grieving process a second time."
But the film's co-producer Camelia Frieberg and a couple of others, including editor Avril Jacobson, convinced Giroux to pull out the footage. "They really pushed me to make the film more personal. They said, ‘The heart of the film is really your relationship with your mom and your mom's spirit and her attitude towards food.'"
They were right. Those personal relationships give us an emotional entry point into the film. The shots of her mother preparing food are so evocative we feel as though we've been invited to sit at her table.
Jali was also an inveterate seed saver (just try doing that with Monsanto seeds). Planting those seeds after her death "is a continuation of something she loved and valued," Giroux says.
Giroux weaves a great deal more into Modified.
She talks with scientists, professors, farmers, politicians and others. Gord Surgeonor, past-president of Ontario Agri-Food Technologies, ridicules GMO labelling and small-scale European farming practices. Jane Goodall poohs-poohs the assumption that there's scientific consensus that GMOs are safe and declares, "We're making decisions not based on how this decision will affect generations ahead... but rather how will this benefit me, now, at the next shareholders' meeting."
We see the loss of biodiversity and the hollowing out of rural communities as big agriculture bulldozes onward, sowing corn as far as the eye can see, those fields of monoculture ominously beautiful.
We also listen as Jali describes what it's like to work in a garden of mixed flowers and vegetables, where the colours are varied and vivid and birds and butterflies abound. "It's just magical," she says.
Giroux, taking the lessons on diversity to heart, creates a harmonious whole out of these and sundry other ingredients, using formal interviews and casual conversation, humour, stop-motion animation, footage of GMO protesters in France clashing with the police, clear explanations of complex science and delicious recipes to keep the film's overall pace spirited and its trajectory focused.
In the end, you're left with only one possible conclusion: of course genetically engineered food should be labelled so that, as consumers, we can decide whether or not to buy it, just as we have the opportunity to make informed decisions about anything else we do.
As for Giroux's position on the larger question of whether we'll right the wrongs we've done to the production of food and, by extension, the planet that produces that food, she says she alternates between optimism and pessimism. "Overall, I'm optimistic. Even if we're in a precarious time facing major challenges, climate change being the biggest, I feel we have a duty to fight to the end and make the world a better place. At the same time, we have to never lose sight of celebrating life and the beauty around us. That's something my mom taught me: You can never give up, but that doesn't mean you should lose sight of pleasure and celebration and all the reasons we are fighting to change things."
Check modifiedthefilm.com for updates on the film's digital release, to host a screening or for scheduled screenings. A shortened version of the film is also available at cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/episodes/modified.
