Reel Talk Explores Complex ‘Food Chains’

Mark Sargent, Westmont provost, and Cynthia Toms, director of global education, will dissect the challenging issues of our food economy and the lives of farmworkers after a screening of the film “Food Chains” on Thursday, Oct. 15, at 7 p.m. in Westmont’s Adams Center for the Visual Arts, room 216. This Reel Talk film screening and discussion, sponsored by the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts, is free and open to the public.

“We’re living through a food renaissance,” says Aaron Sizer, assistant director of the Gaede Institute. “There’s more interest in growing, cooking and eating good and interesting food than at any other time in memory. Yet few of us give much thought to the people whose labor supports these life-giving activities.”

“Food Chains” tells the story of a group of farmworkers struggling to make a life on the margins of this booming food economy. The film challenges us to enter their experience — in migrant camps, on transport trucks, and most of all in the fields — along the way providing powerful encouragement to rethink our relationships and responsibilities to one another in a complex economy.

Reel Talk brings together Westmont faculty, staff, students and members of the Westmont community to discuss important films and contemporary issues. Movie screenings precede discussions facilitated by college faculty and staff.