The Garden Club of the Back Bay

Bascom Lodge, on Mt. Greylock, Massachusetts (below), will hold a Talk and Dine Series Event on Wednesday, July 21, beginning at 6 pm.  Producer/Director Sharon Wyrrick will speak about Community Supported Agriculture, its beginnings in the United States and in the Berkshires, and its importance and promise for revitalizing local food systems and economies.  She will show footage from her documentary movie Food Matters: From the Ground Up, focusing on some of the rock stars of the North Berkshire food system – the farmers.  For more information, log on to http://bascomlodge.net/Events.html.  The talk is free, and there is a dinner to follow for which reservations (413-743-1591) are required.

From the Mass Turnpike, take Exit 2 in Lee, and follow Rt. 20 to Rt. 7 North.  Continue North to Lanesboro, watch for Mt. Greylock Reservation and Visitor Center signs on the right.  Turn right onto  North Main Street and follow Mt. Greylock and Bascom Lodge signs 9 miles to the summit.

Come to Boston University’s Sargent College, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 101, on Wednesday, June 16, beginning at 6:30 pm, for a provoking panel discussion in the Farm to Fork series. How do we get the food we eat? At the grocery store? From the deli? Out of a backyard? This panel of specialists is excited about local food, but beyond passion, they are ready to share with you how they farm, how they buy, and how they serve with intention. You’ll walk away inspired by what’s possible! Meet the panelists: John Lee of Allandale Farms, chef JJ Gonson, Jeff Morin, Manager of City Feed and Willow Blish, volunteer co-leader of the Boston chapter of Slow Food. The evening will be moderated by Drew Love, FRESH’s Event Coordinator for Boston and Intern for the Real Food Challenge. Tickets: $10.   At this event, you will receive a free voucher to see FRESH at the Brattle Theatre June 18-23. More information: http://action.freshthemovie.com/p/d/freshthemovie/event/display-theater-event.sjs?event_KEY=21814#freshweek3

Whole Foods again will sponsor a movie screening as part of its Let’s Retake Our Plates film series, this time on Thursday, April 29, at 6:00 pm at the Showcase Cinema de Lux Legacy Place, 950 Providence Highway in Dedham.  The film, What’s On Your Plate?, sees our food supply through the eyes of two 11-year-old city kids on a mission to discover where their meals really come from.  The budding food activists explore New York City, from farmers’ markets to school lunchrooms, and provide a fresh look at how a younger generation can influence what and  how we eat.  $10.  For more information, log on to www.letsretakeourplates.com.

Whole Foods sponsors “Let’s Retake Our Plates” film series at the Boston Public Library, Tuesday, April 27, from 7 – 9 pm. When bulldozers threaten a 14 acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles, concerned citizens unite and fight for the country’s largest urban farm.  This 2008 film takes an unflinching look at the struggle between urban farmers and the city, and powerful developers.

The Garden centers around a community’s struggle to hold onto a fourteen-acre garden in South Central Los Angeles. The community’s struggle received widespread attention in 2004-2006, when the farmers were fighting the city of Los Angeles and developer Ralph Horowitz to maintain control of the garden, ultimately working to raise funds to buy the land. The community garden was established on government property following the 1992 riots and was the largest of its kind in the U.S.

The details of the story provide great footage: a wealthy developer engages in a shady real-estate deal with the city of Los Angeles to acquire the property, a city council member helps push through the secret deal, tensions between the Black and Latino communities complicate matters, while the impoverished Latino farmers at the heart of the story struggle not just for land but their livelihoods.

The fourteen-acre garden was originally owned by developer Horowitz but the city acquired it under eminent domain, paying him $5 million. He sued the city unsuccessfully but ultimately struck a back-room deal to buy it back for $5 million, despite property values having skyrocketed in the intervening years. When the farmers are forced to consider buying the garden, Horowitz raises the price tag to $16.2 million.

The film is moving and expertly captures the intricacies of the farmers’ struggle. Where another documentary filmmaker might have shied away from some of the nuance such as divisions between communities of color, filmmaker Scott Hamilton Kennedy delves into the tough subjects, highlighting complex racial and political dynamics. Free admission.

You are invited to a free screening and panel discussion on Thursday, April 15, beginning at 7 pm at the Watertown Free Public Library, 123 Main Street in Watertown.  Contaminated Without Consent is a 16 minute video to help inform your community about the hidden risks from chemical contaminates found in our homes, workplaces, the products we buy and even our bodies.  The Bhopal Chemical Disaster: Twenty Years Without Justice reviews the history of the world’s worst chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, and the fight for justice by the citizens of Bhopal.  Produced for the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal and screened widely by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, this evening’s program is presented by The Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow, a not for profit group which has spoken to The Garden Club of the Back Bay in the past about cleaning products and contaminated cosmetics.  The program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.  For more information about Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow, call 617-338-8131, or email nschelling@cleanwater.org.

Artist-naturalist Mary Jo McConnell has traveled to a remote region of Papua New Guinea every year since 1992 to paint a group of bowers constructed by Vogelkop bowerbirds (Amblyornis inornata).  Watch a brief PBS Frontline documentary about McConnell’s remarkable odyssey to her field site, view examples of her striking bower paintings and listen as McConnell shares her observations of individual bower-makers that convinced her these birds are true artists.  The event takes place in the Phillips Library Auditorium of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on Friday, April 23, beginning at 7:45, and is free.  Co-sponsored by the Essex County Ornithological Club, the E.C.O.C. meeting will be held from 7:30 – 7:45.  For more information, and directions to the museum, log on to www.pem.org.

Be prepared to be inspired because The Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival, hosted by local non-profit “e” inc., the Environmental Science Learning and Action Center, is back! WSEFF will take place on March 20th from 6-10 PM at The Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, 41 Berkeley Street in Boston’s South End. The evening will showcase 9 films – shorts, animations, documentaries – about pressing environmental issues, opening with the award winning documentary ‘Tapped’ about the privatization of water and the effects of buying back what you already own. Tickets also include a light supper, dessert, and a silent auction. Supper begins at 6 and films at 7:15. Dessert/Intermission is from 8:30 to 9 followed by the 2nd set of films from 9 to 10. Admission for the entire event is just $25 if purchased before March 1 and $30 after that. All proceeds benefit “e” inc.’s mission of bringing science literacy and community action to urban children and teens.  For more imformation log on to
www.e-action.us, or call 617-227-1522.  You may also email drickystern@yahoo.com.

Slow Foods 3rd Annual Film Series continues with a screening of Pea Holmquist and Suzanne Khardalian’s documentary Bullshit, at the Tufts University Friedman School, 150 Harrison Avenue, on Sunday, March 14 beginning at 3:30 pm.

Time magazine calls Vandana Shiva a hero of our times, an icon for youngsters all over the world.  This film is about the Indian environmental activist and nuclear physicist, who was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1993.  It’s a film on globalization and patenting, on genetic engineering, bio-piracy, indigenous knowledge.  In it, the film makers follow Shiva over a two year period, from her organic farm at the foot of the Himalayas to institutions of power all over the world.  She does battle with one of her toughest opponents, Monsanto, a huge American biotech company, when they try to patent an ancient Indian strain of wheat.  Together with Dalits she tries to close down a Coca-Cola plant in Kerala, in a conflict involving groundwater pollution.  In this film Shiva also tackles the question of farmers’ suicide, a backlash of the globalization.  The film makers describe Monsanto from the inside and arrange what proves a shaking meeting between Shiva and Barun Mitra, liberal think-tank lobbyist and fierce critic of Vandana Shiva.  A speakers panel will follow immediately after the screening.  Cost is $5.  Log on to www.slowfoodboston.com to reserve your spaces.

Please be Northeastern University’s guest on February 22 for the screening of “A Chemical Reaction,” an inspiring documentary movie about one of the most powerful and effective community initiatives against chemical pesticides and herbicides in the history of North America.

Started by one lone voice, dermatologist June Irwin noticed a connection between her patients’ health conditions and their exposure to chemical pesticides and herbicides. “A Chemical Reaction” follows her journey of relentless persistence from warning fellow citizens in her small town to an ultimate victory in the Canadian Supreme Court.

A reception at 5:30 will be followed by the screening at 7 pm. Immediately after the movie screening, at approximately 8:15, there will be a Q&A Session with Paul Tukey, who has followed this story closely over several years. After becoming seriously ill with acute pesticide sensitivity from applying chemical lawn products in his own lawn care business, he became an outspoken advocate for alternatives to chemical lawn care and one of the nation’s leading experts on organic lawn care.

The screening will be held at Northeastern’s West Village F20. For more information, and for a campus map, log on to www.cba.neu/Event.aspx?id=5708.

When we walk into a supermarket, we assume that we have the widest possible choice of healthy foods.  But, in fact, over the course of the 20th century, our food system has been co-opted by corporate forces whose interests do not lie in providing the public with fresh, healthy, and sustainably grown food.  Fortunately for America, an alternative emerged from the counter culture of California in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, where a group of political anti-corporate protesters – led by Alice Waters – voiced their dissent by creating a food chain outside of the conventional system.  The unintended result was the birth of a vital local-sustainable-organic food movement, which has brought back taste and variety to our tables.

Chris Taylor’s award winning film Food Fight is a fascinating look at how American agricultural policy and food culture developed in the 20th century, and how the California food movement has created a counter-revolution against agribusiness.  Join the Harvard University Dining Services Food Literacy Project for this screening at the Science Center Lecture Hall A, Cambridge campus, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Chris Taylor and Woody Tasch, the founder of Slow Money Alliance.  Slow Money Alliance is a new nonprofit that combines principles of philanthropy and investing to “bring money back down to earth” by encouraging investment in small food enterprises, local food systems, and local economies.  The event is free and open to the public.  For more information email theresa_mcculla@harvard.edu.

Slow Food Boston’s 3rd Annual Film Series continues with a screening of The End of the Line at the Tufts University Friedman School, 150 Harrison Avenue, on Sunday, February 7 at 3:30 pm.

Grilling beautiful tuna steaks. The ubiquitous shrimp cocktail. Polluted fish farms. Mercury. Omega 3 fatty acids. Fishing quotas. Ouch – purchasing & consuming seafood has never been so rife with conflict.   This somewhat unnerving documentary The End of the Line explores issues like those above in what the LA Times called a “…crisp, informative and convincing way…” The NY Times says, despite some flaws, that it “…subverts our ancient faith in the ocean as an inexhaustible resource, offering a persuasive case that the major species of edible fish are headed for extinction.”

Join Slow Food Boston for this in-depth look at current research and thoughts on our oceans, the fish that populate them and the people whose livelihoods depend on them. Oh, not to mention the effects all of it has on those of us on the other end of the chain: the consumers!  Cost is $5, payable at the door by cash or check.

Please invite friends, family, and colleagues to join you – it will be an evening to remember!  Groups welcome (religious, academic, social clubs, your sports team or book club…)  Youth are welcome, however, some of the footage is very graphic and may be upsetting to younger children: parental discretion advised.  The Q&A session only holds 100 people, so please reserve your seats today to be sure of being part of this very special event.

To purchase tickets for the film: online purchases via http://tickets.mfa.org or call the MFA box office at 617-369-3306. Tickets are $10 each; MFA members get a $2 per ticket discount. If you have a group of 15 or more you can obtain discounted group rates through the MFA box office.

• To reserve your exclusive seats for the Q&A (no charge): email crude@cs.org NOTE: you must purchase your film tickets through the MFA box office before reserving seats with us for the Q&A.
• For more information about the film, trailers, and info about showings in other cities: www.crudethemovie.com

If you have additional questions, please email us as crude@cs.org Please note: the 100 seats for the Q&A will go fast, so please be sure to book yours now!  We look forward to seeing you there.