Missoula News

Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

The Fluff Tour: Sustainable Table’s Eat Well Guided Tour of America

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 8-21-07

This week, a group from Sustainable Table visited Missoula to partake in the bustling Missoula food scene. Sustainable Table, a nonprofit that aims to educate eaters about agro-food issues while offering viable solutions, rented a rock-star tour bus to travel from California to Randall’s Island, New York, where the Farm Aid Concert will be held on September 9. As they travel across the country, Sustainable Table hopes to eat from the, “nation’s most sustainable farms and restaurants,” blogging their escapades along the way in order to raise awareness of the options that are available to eaters.

As we drove to a potluck gathering this week (unfortunately we couldn’t take the bus due to the dirt-road), Diane Hatz, the founder and director of Sustainable Table, talked about the reason for their travels. “This is the fluff tour,” she said. “We are aiming to be the Entertainment Tonight of the food movement, not CNN.”

In the past, Diane Hatz has lived up to this mantra. Although based in New York, she and Sustainable Table use the tools of Hollywood to dial into the pop culture mind of eaters. As she says, “people want to be entertained.” And this is the best way to inform them.

So far, Sustainable Table has been most successful at the entertainment portion of the sustainable food movement with their creation of The Meatrix. Hatz served as the Executive Producer of the cartoon short, which is a parody of the movie The Matrix, in order to entertain folks with the story of factory farming.  In The Meatrix, Moopheus, an all-knowing cow, shows farm pig Leo the way the industrialized farm world truly works. Leo takes the red pill and sees the disgusting conditions he has been living in, “the lie,” as Moopheus says, “we tell ourselves about where our food comes from.”

When The Meatrix was first released, over 10,000 viewers watched it in a couple of hours and crashed Sustainable Table’s server. The server crashed again, even after it was expanded, as some ten million viewers tuned into the story of factory farming.

Sustainable Table later produced, The Meatrix II: Revolting and The Meatrix II ½.

When the folks from the real movie, The Matrix called, Hatz prepared herself for the worst. She knew her work was protected under parody laws, and she answered the phone prepared to make her case only to have representatives from Warner Brothers ask if they could include The Meatrixin a box set of The Matrix. (Unfortunately the company pulled the idea just before production.)

The cartoon shorts can still be seen online and at the end of each one, viewers can click on the red pill to learn more information about factory farming and how eaters can change behaviors and the system. A part of this information includes the Eat Well Guide, a comprehensive search engine that allows viewers to look for producers and grocers in their area.

To create buzz around the Eat Well Guide and local food, Sustainable Table has taken their show on the road with the The Eat Well Guided Tour of America.

While they were in Missoula this week they were treated to delicious meat, grilled by Chef Eric Stenberg, a member of the Chefs Collaborative, and were fed fresh potato and cucumber salads, and four kinds of pie, including delectable raspberry from Chef Martha Buser of The Catalyst in downtown Missoula. The next night Sustainable Table attended Garden City Harvest’s Summermoon Farm Party, an annual event that brings together some 600 people each year.

Unfortunately the beautiful bus didn’t make an appearance at the Garden City Harvest party. Even if it had, attendees at the potluck and Summermoon Farm Party were already well-versed in the attributes of local food. Many are active in localizing the food system or in protecting agricultural lands. So while these events provided some good exposure for Sustainable Table as an organization, it seems that they will have a bigger effect on the general eating public as they drive their massive, colorful, biodiesel tour bus around the country. The entertaining mobile billboard will certainly grab the attention of other drivers and passengers who will gawk as Sustainable Table heads east through Lincoln, Iowa City, Chicago and New York.

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