Food Fight: A Story of Culinary Revolt

A terrific, if seriously California-centric culinary history lesson, Food Fight is about what happened to America’s farmers, shoppers and eaters before San Francisco-area cooks pushed the whole “eat healthier, eat fresh, eat local” thing on the rest of the country and indeed the world.

Christopher Taylor’s sober but engaging documentary looks at the Nixon-era policies that led to industrial farming and cheap, processed, bland food, and the epidemic of American obesity and diabetes that spun off that. Seriously, we weren’t always this chunky.

Using old TV commercials and interviews with chefs, experts and others, Taylor and Co. show how the current struggle over food policy is a last vestige of the counter-culture of the 1960s and traces it all to a push back against Big Oil and Big Chemicals by Chez Panisse, the Berkely restaurant from which Alice Waters launched the revolution.

It’s a lively, opinionated and very entertaining way of convincing people that changing our eating habits will save America.

Screening at: 3:15 p.m. Sunday, March 29, Regal.