The 90-minute film, The Future of Food, is about genetically engineered (GE) crops. It investigates the health and environmental issues surrounding GE foods, as well as the government policies and globalization behind agribusiness.

Since its release last July, The Future of Food has slowly gained momentum and is now somewhat of a cult hit. It has been shown in film festivals from Cleveland to L.A. to Maui. Activists and food aficionados have been screening the film in venues as varied as people’s homes to the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. Whole Foods is carrying the DVD in its 200 stores. Garcia is also negotiating to get a limited theater run in select cities sometime this summer.

So far, the response couldn’t be better for this self-financed, independent documentary.

“The timing was somehow perfect,” says Garcia. “If it had come out three years ago, it probably wouldn’t have gotten this much attention. But right now it’s something of a hot-button issue.”

While curiosity about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is heating up, thanks in part to several measures throughout California to ban GE crops, there isn’t a lot of information about this technology out there.

“What GE crops are doing to our agriculture and our farmers is one of the great underreported stories of the last few years,” says Michael Pollan, UC Berkeley journalism professor and author of several books, including The Botany of Desire. “This is the first full-length film I’ve seen on this subject, and it’s starting important conversations.”

• • • •

LILY FILMS IS run out of Garcia’s Mill Valley home, a light-filled, airy house perched near the top of Mt. Tamalpais. Inside, a cook tosses together an inviting meal in the open kitchen for Garcia’s lunch. Books by Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault are piled along a windowsill overlooking a magnificent mountain view. Giant fake poppies color one corner and art hangs on the walls. Garcia’s three Dalmatians, Happy, Honeybee and Valentino, loll on squares of shag carpet and carry stuffed animals in their mouths.

Garcia, a petite woman with dark brown hair, exudes a buzzing, self-confident energy that borders on chipper as she walks me through the house to the large downstairs room where Lily Films operates. She introduces her three employees, who make up the majority of people who worked on the documentary—all women. They are sitting at computers between tables covered with books, videos and stacks of papers, a testament to how much research went into The Future of Food.

“What we’re doing now is getting the film out there to festivals and distributors and people who want to order it,” says Garcia before leading me to a lounge filled with cushy cream-colored furniture. She lists film festival after film festival where the documentary has been featured, bursting with obvious pride over its reception.

It has been 30 years since Garcia began making movies. She first became interested as a student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and went on to earn an MFA in film from the San Francisco Art Institute. Over the years, she made a full-length feature, Poco Loco, which she also wrote the screenplay for, and a series of five half-hour films titled All About Babies, about the first two years of life.

An earlier incarnation of her production company was called Signs of Life Films. When she started thinking about The Future of Food, she renamed it Lily Films because she wanted something that was easy to remember, yet somewhat anonymous.

“A lily is kind of a big showy flower, and that’s the kind of filmmaker I am,” she says from behind one of her Dalmatians, which has climbed into her lap. “I don’t make lots of films, but the ones I make are like big showy flowers.”

Up until now, of course, Garcia has been best known for her marriage to her famous husband. In the late 1990s, she was embroiled in a bitter court battle over Jerry’s estate with his two ex-wives, including Carolyn Adams Garcia, or Mountain Girl, who was with Jerry through most of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and ’70s.

Though Deborah was only married to Jerry for one year, their relationship endured over decades in one form or another.

“It was an unusual relationship,” she says. “We were together for four years, then apart for 15 years, and then together again.”

She met Jerry in the 1970s when he was performing a gig on the East Coast. Since she wasn’t a Grateful Dead fan, the meeting was almost an accident, but they hit it off. At the time, she was about to leave for Europe, and Jerry, who had not yet been to Europe, asked her to write him letters about her experiences.

She did, and they corresponded for about a year. When she returned to New York, he came to visit her, and the relationship blossomed. In fact, she originally moved to Marin County to be with him.

“We were very compatible,” she says.

She and Jerry bought the house shortly before his death, but Jerry never got to live in it. Lily Films is now in what would have been his art studio. After working on his estate for seven years, she decided to use the money to help finance the film.

The Future of Food took three years to make. Catherine Lynn Butler, who worked on science documentaries for The Discovery Channel, co-produced the film. Garcia did the writing, directing and most of the research herself.

Garcia had been thinking about a movie on agriculture for some time. She has spent a lot of time on organic farms—her film Poco Loco was even about a farmer—but her interest in plants goes back even further. In high school, she won first place in the Science Fair when she mutated plants with chemicals and radiation. The experience left its mark on Garcia.

“As I looked at those plants, it became clear to me I would eat the normal plants, but the mutated plants, which looked sort of grotesque, I would not eat,” she says, slowly. “And I thought at the time that genetics were going to become stranger and stranger, and that I should keep up with them.”

In college, she became a vegetarian. When she moved to Marin, she discovered organic grocery stores and “became one of those health food people.” These days, however, she’s not quite as strict about her diet.

“About 15 years ago, I went out to dinner and realized everyone was having these great meals but me!” she says, laughing. “So now I eat fish too.”

• • • •

ORIGINALLY GARCIA LEARNED about GE foods when a friend told her about Bt corn, a type of corn that is resistant to Bt pesticides. If sprayed with certain chemicals, the corn does not die.

“I said, Oh my god that sounds so weird,” she says. “I also thought, Well that doesn’t sound like an improvement because you’re actually spraying them more and more and more. That’s the opposite of what should be happening.”

While she made sure to keep her facts straight, Garcia is the first to admit that the documentary portrays her particular point of view. For her, making The Future of Food was a kind of activism. Still, she fit the agribusiness side of the argument into the movie. She contacted Monsanto for an interview and when she was denied, she asked them for information on GMOs.

“They sent us a CD with their best corporate propaganda spin on it,” she says. “I used that in the film over and over again, so we actually do have their point of view. But in addition to their point of view, we also have other information critiquing it.”

While biases are frowned upon in journalism, with documentaries they are more acceptable. In fact, Vivien Hillgrove, film editor for The Future of Food, believes that if there were more documentaries showing specific viewpoints, people might open up to other ways of thinking.

“The key is a wider base of documentaries,” she says. “I’d even like to see right-wing documentaries—I don’t know how the hell those people think. A real festival would have all kinds of films bouncing off one another.”

The critical response to the movie has been mixed. Wired called the movie “a comprehensive and chilling example of anti-GMO rhetoric.” Alternet.org said it was an “engaging and lucid presentation” of the technology. Though many industry publications disliked the movie, industry magazine Nature Biotech gave it a good review.

Despite the bias, The Future of Food seems to be crossing some political and cultural barriers.

“It has been phenomenal,” says Hillgrove. “And the concern has been across the board. It’s appealing to mother’s groups, non-mother’s groups, Christian, non-Christians, farmers, non-farmers. Everybody has to eat.”

Garcia repeatedly hears how people are surprised by the content of the film—even from those who should know better. At one screening in San Diego, a scientist who works in biotech stood up and said that he had no idea GE foods were not tested for health problems before being released to the public.

“I could see he was kind of freaked out about that,” says Garcia. “He had seen some application of ag-biotech in the film that he hadn’t really been aware of, although he’d probably been working in the industry since the beginning.”

The Future of Food has been widely used in the movement to ban GE crops throughout California. So far, Marin and Mendocino counties have banned the planting of GE crops, while Humboldt, Butte and San Luis Obispo counties have rejected the legislation. Sonoma County will have a special election on the issue November 8.

Activists in Mendocino County, where the anti-GMO movement started, credit the film as a major factor in the passage of their local ban. GE-Free Sonoma is also using the film. The group hosted a showing of the film at the Rialto Theater in Santa Rosa in May, followed by a Q&A with Garcia, UC scientist Ignacio Chapela and head of GE-Free Sonoma, Dave Henson.

Unlike other legislation, the Sonoma County measure is a moratorium that expires after 10 years and can be overthrown with a unanimous vote by the Board of Supervisors at any time. The bill would also allow for scientific research using GMOs as long as it was conducted in a contained environment.

“I like the idea of a moratorium,” says Garcia. “The idea of a ban kind of scares people. But if you say it’s just a moratorium until we have more information, a lot of people will admit, ‘Well yeah, we do need more information.’ ”

One of the things the film does well is explain the political climate surrounding GMOs. It shows, for example, how seed patents evolved to the point where companies can literally own and control the propagation of a living species.

“Whoever controls the seed, controls the food,” says one of the scientists in the film, which goes on to add that industry-giant Monsanto owns 11,000 seed patents.

Garcia interviewed small farmers who have been sued by Monsanto—because patented seeds drifted onto their land and crossbred with their crops—to highlight the destruction of family-owned farms as well as current patent trends. The film also touches upon terminator technology, which causes seeds to self-destruct after one planting so farmers have to keep returning to the supplier for new seed.

During the recession of the early 1990s, the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration together released biotech products into the agriculture industry to help stimulate the economy. In their haste, some say they skipped important steps like health testing. Many members of the current Bush administration, including some higher-ups in the EPA and agriculture department, have ties with Monsanto. And though much of Europe has banned GE crops, agribusiness is expanding globally. Developing countries are planting GE crops by the thousands.

The Future of Food leaves viewers with a disturbing picture of private interests gaining increasing control over the food supply.

“I think Deborah was very smart to put the heaviest emphasis in the film on the intellectual property issues,” says Pollan. “You hear that these crops are better than the ones before, that they cause health problems, that they harm the environment—that’s all arguable. What’s not arguable is that biotech crops are giving a handful of companies unprecedented power over the food supply. With these technologies, companies will be able to put bar codes on every plant in a farmer’s field.”

The film also brings up potential environmental and health problems GMOs may cause. For example, GMOs may breed with native species and take over the ecosystem. A study by Purdue University showed that GE salmon have such a breeding advantage over wild salmon that if 60 GE salmon are released into a population of 60,000 fish, the native population die out in just 40 generations.

GE foods are part of the larger problem of monoculture, a trend in agriculture to only cultivate a few species of plant, such as one kind of soybean or corn. Monocultures are extremely vulnerable to pests. In 1845, a fungus destroyed Ireland’s few varieties of potatoes, wiping out the country’s major food supply and killing over a million people in what is today called the Irish Potato Famine.

“We have developed a lot of defenses against monocultures, but pesticides have been the defense of choice, the Band-Aid we put over it,” says Pollan. “Now it’s becoming GMOs.”

Not that Garcia sees the technology as all bad. In fact, she thinks the medical research with GMOs is promising, especially if it is in a contained environment.

“I can understand if someone were a scientist, how fascinating it would be,” she says. “I can see how they would be brought along with this is what’s happening, this is the future, without really questioning it.”

• • • •

THIS IS A great time to make documentaries. Not only is filmmaker Michael Moore bringing unprecedented attention to the genre, but the advancement of technology has rapidly brought down the cost of equipment, making it suddenly accessible to small filmmakers.

The genre is so interesting right now that Hillgrove, who has been a film editor for 37 years and has worked on movies like Blue Velvet and Amadeus, has moved from feature films almost exclusively to documentaries.

“Documentaries used to be pretty damn boring, even though every once in a while one would rise up out of the heap,” she says. “Now there are a broad range of entertaining documentaries because of the technology changes. It’s where the action is.”

The narrative trend in documentaries is to put the filmmaker in the film, à la Moore or Morgan Spurlock, who made Super Size Me about what would happen if he ate McDonald’s fast food for 30 days. Garcia, who favors classic films from the 1930s and 1940s, took a more anonymous route with her movie by staying in the background. She doesn’t even narrate the film.

“Enough with the personal stories, right?” she says, laughing. “But one thing with Michael Moore—these days, in order to get attention you kind of have to be right out there and be controversial.”

Even though more people are making documentaries, it is difficult to get attention in film festivals unless they know of you or your work. In this case, having a name that people recognize helps, admits Garcia.

As the film continues to gain momentum, Garcia has started to see more interest from abroad. The film was translated into Bulgarian, Turkish and Greek. Places in Brazil and India have ordered hundreds of copies.

And she was just about to leave for a festival in England.

“I sent a copy of the film to Prince Charles too,” she says. “I don’t know if he’s seen it yet, but that’s kind of exciting.”

As for what’s next on the list, her love for the Earth is not waning. Garcia says she may look into making a few short films about seeds and soil. While that may sound less than riveting, given her success with Food, audiences may find the end result fascinating.

PHOTO OF DEBORAH KOONS GARCIA BY ROBERT VENTE

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