Devour Food & Film Festival

Location: Al Whittle Theatre
450 Main St
Wolfville, Nova Scotia

Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2020
Time: 10:00 am – 11:30 am (In-person screening)
             9:00 am – 4:00 pm (Online)
Price: $10.00

For other upcoming screenings, please visit the Fish & Men website.

Not everyone knows where their seafood comes from, and the difference between commercial fisheries versus smaller local operations is in where they get their catch– and sustainability. Fish & Men is an important documentary to watch because it presents a struggle to survive in a cutthroat marketplace where the consumer’s dollar is top prize.

Not many smaller operations, usually a fisherman and his mid-sized boat, can keep up with what the market wants. Sadly, these days it’s more about quantity than quality. I support a local fish operation, Finest at Sea, in Victoria, BC. They have a ship or two under their employ to fetch a variety of fish up and down the British Columbia Coast, and the difference is in how they keep things fresh until it hits the dinner table. In this feature length exploration, Gloucester, MA, America’s oldest fishing port, is shown struggling to survive.

Chefs and fishermen know there’s a difference in taste between something straight from the ocean versus sitting frozen for an hour or longer. This documentary excels at getting their perspective on what makes a fish taste good versus one retrieved from a farm or out of season. But there’s more to this feature than in how seafood tastes. The subtext here is that there will be a day when there’ll be nothing left in the ocean for us to eat. It’s more to do with all the imports being done to feed a country, the United States in this instance, and we’re forgetting how to forage for food ourselves. Industry thinks getting product cheap and from other shores is key.

This briefing suggests the food stuff from China is not necessarily always good. They’re the cheapest to obtain for a reason. The politics is light in this work by Darby Duffin and Adam Jones. I find their message to give power back to the regular fisherman is more important. Because without them and other agriculturalists, that portion of the populace who can’t fend for themselves will end up starving.

To cheaply feed a world is not the most ideal of situations. In small areas of the world where corporate agendas are hardly an influence, farmers and fishermen are hugely depended on, and it’s terrific to know this documentary makes them look like champions!

5 Blokes out of 5