Distributed by Good DocsProduced by Laura Gabbert, Paula Manzanedo, Ruth Reichl, Caroline Libresco, and Lisa RemingtonDirected by Laura Gabbert2024, Streaming, 100 mins Food and Country is a documentary about the food ecosystem in the United States and the effects of the pandemic on its sustainability. Ruth Reichl, who has worked as a food critic for the New York Times and served as the Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet magazine, starts her journey by talking to restaurateurs she knows during the pandemic in 2020. They refer her to farmers they know, and from there she speaks to other farmers, ranchers, and agricultural advocates. Reichl also manages to pull in a summary of the effect of government policy on agriculture since World War II and the resulting industrialization of agriculture. She includes her own past as an advocate and protestor in Berkeley in the 1970s and the introduction of the farm-to-table movement. In this way, she packs in a tremendous amount of information while continuously weaving the storyline between the expectations of diners and food industry workers in the urban environment and rural agricultural communities that struggle and experiment to survive. She includes a variety of restaurant types from both California and New York, and all sorts of agriculturalists from boutique farms, kelp farming, large-scale operations from the heartland, to urban and regenerative farms. There are moments when the scale feels too large, but ultimately Reichl proves that we are all connected. She manages to bring warmth and intimacy to all these interviews of people who are vastly different yet clearly united in the same struggle. The decision to base the conversation around the fallout caused by the pandemic can seem to be limiting the scope of this documentary, but I think Reichl is successful in turning this into an updated documentary about a problem that has plagued the United States since the 1950s: big agriculture and mass food production isn’t serving us well, but we seem to be trapped in it. In this documentary, she also covers the expectations of the public not just in the grocery store, but also in the restaurant labor market. The lengths the chefs go to protect their staff are heartwarming and heartbreaking. The wages, or complete lack thereof, paid to restaurant workers have not been sustainable, and in Food and Country, we see the real changes, devastation, and hope brought about by chefs and farmers who are willing to risk doing what is best for their employees and communities. This is a welcome update to a topic that affects all Americans, regardless of political affiliations and place of residence. This documentary would fit well into K-12, academic, and public library collections.