Who do you want instructing the public about the life-and-death implications of food technology: Nobel Prize-winning scientists or an aging hippie who spent her life hanging out with psychedelic dancing bears? That will be the choice facing viewers of Deborah Koons Garcia’s anti-biotech attack film, “The Future of Food.” Garcia, the widow of former Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, will open the movie this week in San Francisco along with a “Ship of Fools” featuring leading Luddites and disgraced biotech naysayers.
“The Future of Food” isn’t Garcia’s first foray into telling others what they should eat. She tells the San Francisco Chronicle that she “became one of those organic people who are evangelical and totally boring — you know, telling people every pound of beef takes 8,000 pounds of water. I’m better now.”
Apparently, by “better now” Garcia means her focus has shifted to a shrill warning against a revolutionary food technology that has never caused so much as a case of the sniffles.
Garcia’s opening will be sandwiched between speeches from anti-technology advocates Alice Waters and Michael Pollan. Jamming an alarmist tone on a panel with Garcia will be Neo-Luddite Andrew Kimbrell from the misnamed Center for Food Safety and Berkeley professor Ignacio Chapela — whose study on genetically enhanced (GE) corn in Mexico became a case study on scientific hoaxes after it was retracted by the prestigious journal Nature.
