Eating Alaska
New Day Films
•
56m
Directed by Ellen Frankenstein • Documentary • 2009 • 57 minutes
What happens to a vegetarian who moves to the Alaskan Frontier?
Eating Alaska is a film about connecting to where you live and eating locally. Made by a former city dweller now living on an island in Alaska and married to fisherman, deer hunter and environmental activist, it is a journey into food politics, regional food traditions, our connection to the wilderness and to what we put into our mouths.
In this quest for the "right thing" to eat, the filmmaker stops by a farmer's market in the lower 48 stocked with fresh local fruits and vegetables and then heads back to Alaska, climbing mountains with women hunters, fishing for wild salmon and communing with vegans. She visits a grocery store with kids to study labels and heads to the Arctic to talk with Inupiat teens in a home economics class, making pretzels while they describe their favorite traditional foods from moose meat to whale blubber.
The postcard like scenery in Alaska may be a contrast to what most urban residents see everyday and the filmmaker may have gone into the wild, but she also finds farmed salmon, toxics getting into wild foods and the colonization of the indigenous diet.
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