MACSAC - Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition

This partnership between the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and MACSAC was coordinated and designed by Sarah Obernauer (B.S. student in Communication Arts and Environmental Studies) and Tia Nowack (B.A. student in Strategic Communications and Environmental Studies) as part of a unique new course Community Engagement through Film.

COMMUNITY PARTNER:
MACSAC's (the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition) mission is to provide sustainable, just, and local foods to the residents of Southern Wisconsin by helping link them to local farms and farmers. Farmers in return benefit through a steadier income and direct personal connections with their customers. One of MACSAC's aspirations is to increase access to local foods regardless of one’s income and location within the city. We are working with MACSAC to achieve these goals of diversifying their client demographic and raising awareness about their organization and programs.

PARTNERING FILMS:

What's On Your Plate? (Saturday, November 7, 10:00 am, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art)

The American public has received numerous warnings in the last 10 years about the changing global food system and its consequences for public health and the environment. But Catherine Gund raises the question of whether these messages are reaching our most vulnerable food consumers - America's children. In this rollicking film, Gund follows two New York City pre-teens, Sadie and Safiyah, as they take their own journey across the systems that provide them with food and take charge of their health against the onslaught of unhealthy food choices bombarding them.

Papapapá (Saturday, November 7, Noon, Fredric March Play Circle)

In yet another innovative work, Alex Rivera humorously explores immigration issues by comparing the assimilation of immigrant peoples and immigrant foods. In this case, Rivera parallels the migration of a form of potato from Incan Peru north to become part of diets throughout North America with an immensely personal journey following the journeys of his Peruvian father as he migrated from Lima to the United States.

Our Daily Bread (Saturday, November 7, 9:30 pm, UW Cinematheque)

Training an artistic lens on the global food system, Nikolaus Geyrhalter wordlessly captures extraordinary tableaus and landscapes of astonishing power. From the treatment of livestock to the application of pesticides and the working conditions of laborers, Our Daily Bread lays open for questioning each link of the complex processing chain that connects us to our landscapes via the food on our plates.

The Hunger Season (Sunday, November 8, 1:00 pm, First United Methodist Church)

Beadie Finzi's The Hunger Season shatters our illusions of distance, however, revealing the complex interconnections between global economic systems, the hunger for new biofuel sources of energy, global climate change, political unrest, and resulting devastation of drought and famine for millions of people around the world. Tracing the journey of food aid from the fields of Wisconsin farmers to USAID and finally to Swaziland, where Justice, a village leader, struggles to feed his neighbors, Finzi brings home our role in hunger crises and also our ability to help avert such problems.

Each of these films is food-related, focusing on topics such as food production, distribution, access, and the politics of food. Our Daily Bread explores the industrial and transportation aspects of the food trade as does What's on Your Plate? which also celebrates CSAs and farmers markets and how it all can be linked to school lunch and kids health whereas The Hunger Season and Papapapá focus more on access to food, food security and production. MACSAC address each of one of these issues on a daily basis right here in Madison as it tries to promote local and sustainably produced foods.

FILM-RELATED EVENTS:

Share the Shares

Share the Shares is an initiative by the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition (MACSAC) to raise funds to purchase six CSA shares that will be donated to the Centro Hispano and First United Methodist Church (FUMC) food pantries. Join us for a conversation with organizers from MACSAC, Centro Hispano and FUMC after the 1 pm screening of The Hunger Season, Sunday, November 8, at First United Methodist Church, 203 Wisconsin Avenue.

In addition, after The Hunger Season there will be a special meal that will help profile a new national engagement project being built around the film, called "Meal & A Movie in a Box," which was designed through Tales from Planet Earth's pilot screening of the film in October 2008.

WHAT ELSE YOU CAN DO:
We are in need of sponsors to fund "Share the Shares." The average winter storage CSA share costs $225, which is out of the budget for institutions that rely solely on food donations and families and individuals on fixed incomes who live check to check. The more you can contribute, the more we can share fresh, nutritious produce with those in need in the Madison area.

SOCIAL MEDIA @ WORK:
For regular updates about "Share the Shares," follow us on Twitter. Look for Sarah at RustTinBlues and Tia at TalesFromTia. For Tweets about Tales from Planet Earth film festival in general, look for the hashtag #tfpe09. On Facebook, you can become a friend of MACSAC and Tales from Planet Earth, and RSVP to our "Share the Shares" event.

CONTACTS:
For all events, contact Sarah Obernauer or Tia Nowack, obernauer@wisc.edu or nowack@wisc.edu,
412-849-6218 or 715-897-3357, respectively.