America is the Land of the Opportunity where anyone can succeed with the right amount of determination. It is full of self-made men and home to the idea that greatness can come from anywhere. Take our current president, Barack Obama. He was raised without a father and his mother was able to feed him only with the help of the government. This sort of assistance does not seem to fit with our beliefs, but with a tremendous effort on his part he entered and graduated from Harvard, became a senator in Illinois and finally is now the most powerful man on the planet. He is a true testament of the American spirit and I applaud his intelligence and skill. But there have only been a few dozen presidents in the history of my nation. What about everyone else? America is built on the idea of ingenuity and hard work, but sometimes even that is not enough to make all ends meet.
"Finding North" is an infuriating documentary about a topic that Americans are too embarrassed to talk about: hunger. One in six US citizens suffers from what is known as "food insecurity," meaning that they do not know where their next meal is going to come from. This goes beyond living paycheck to paycheck and becomes something far more serious in which people live off of the government and the goodwill of others in order to feed their families. One in six means that there are about 50 million Americans now in this situation, about triple what the figure was before the introduction of Reaganomics.
Filmmakers Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush take us on a humiliating journey across the United States and examine the effects of food insecurity and the measures taken to combat it, both locally and nationally. When talking about hunger it is important to know that it does not mean starvation in the sense that we use the word to describe Africans. Hunger is used more to describe malnutrition. This can mean undernourishment, but it can also mean people eating the wrong sorts of food because fresh and healthy food is too expensive. The movie looks at Collbran, CO, Philadelphia (I think), and various points in Mississippi.
In each of these cities we look at families struggling to put bread on the table and all of the lengths they go to in order to make sure that they have enough. Poverty is a serious issue and this documentary does a fantastic job of giving faces, names and voices to the statistics. We meet a pastor and his wife whose food bank has grown by hundreds of percent in order to take care of the families in need in his town. There is a single mother of two trying to earn her degree and find full time work even though doing so means she is no longer eligible for food stamps which she desperately needs. A second grade teacher in Mississippi introduces her class to honeydew melon for the first time so they know what one looks like if they are ever at a store with their parents.
Mississippi is the most fascinating case of them all. This is a major spoiler, but I give it anyway because it is a topic that needs addressing through as many methods as possible. Paradoxically, Mississippi is the state with the highest number of people who are food insecure, but it also has the highest obesity rate in the country. This is due to the fact that foods that are high in starches, fats, etc. are subsidized at much higher rates than products like fruits and vegetables. This is because the USDA grants money to farms that produce wheat, rice, soy and corn--and which do it on a massive scale--at rates that local farmers, who grow most of the fruits and veggies, could not possibly even dream of. That leads to overproduction and lower costs of products heavy in grains. The end result is that a bag of chips costs a fraction of what a bag of fresh fruit might cost. Consumers in Mississippi who have very limited budgets try to buy the most calories for the cheapest price and this means that they end up buying unhealthy food.
This might not be the enormous problem that it is were it not so difficult for people to receive help from the government. Hunger was almost erased during the Nixon years, but Reagan changed the nature of Republican politics by stressing a do-it-yourself attitude and the mentality that those that don't have enough deserve it. Since then there has been a huge regression and major cuts to the funds that USDA has to spend on food programs. This in turn has lead to an increase in charity work going to help alleviate the problem in the short term.
I really loved this film for its controversial topic and the tactful way that it followed its characters. This is an incredibly difficult topic for many of them, but it was examined delicately and portrayed them more as victims than they might have been presented by other people. I did not like this film completely, however, as it was a very large amount of negative information without much of a silver lining. The long-term followups turned out to be depressing and clear, decisive measures for change were not given. The call to action was played loudly, but the steps to be taken were only hinted at. I left the theatre without much hope and that is never a good way to feel after watching a documentary like this. Exposing the wrongs is only half of the battle. That stated, this is a solid, a very thought-provoking film which I think, if its name is spread and can be shown to the right people, it could have a very significant political impact.
3.5/4
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