Germ Wars

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Images

GERM WARS

Conventional dairy manure management system

Cows at Claravale Farms raw milk dairy

Mark McAfee: Dairy Owner

California Senate Hearing on Raw Milk Safty

Intraudder Antibiotics

Colette Cassidy: Dairy Owner

Conventional Dairy

David Gumpert: Writer, Business Week

Michele Jay Russell - UC Davis: Western Institute for Food Saftey & Security

Mother at a raw milk rally: Sacramento, California

Mark McAfee at raw milk sale

Organic Pastures Dairy

Conventional dairy manure management system

testing for deadly bacteria

Budget

Raised to date: $69,000.00
Estimate to complete: $361,000.00
Total Estimated Budget: $430,000.00
The budget numbers above are accurate as of 11/16/2009

Status

Production

Media Type

Video

Project End Use

Key Personnel

Jed Riffe
Director

Project director, film producer, director and co-writer Jed Riffe is an award-winning independent filmmaker and new media producer. He is best known as the producer and director of “Ishi, the Last Yahi.” The highly acclaimed dramatic documentary won “Best Documentary” awards at eight major national and international film festivals. “Ishi, the Last Yahi” was released theatrically and acquired for national broadcast by the acclaimed PBS series The American Experience.

Most recently, Riffe was one of three executive producers for “California and the American Dream,” a four-hour, nationally broadcast, prime time PBS Series that uses a lens of diversity to look at California from 1970 to the present. In addition to executive producing the Series, Riffe produced, directed and co-wrote the Series’ opening episode “California’s ‘Lost’ Tribes” with co-producer Jack Kohler (Yurok, Hupa, Karuk). Riffe also produced the fourth episode, “Ripe for Change” with Emiko Omori who directed. “California’s ‘Lost’ Tribes” and “Ripe for Change” have both been honored with a Cine Golden Eagle award and other awards.

Christine Chessen
Producer and Co-writer
Producer and co-writer Christine Chessen is a mother of three with an MBA from Columbia, a Bachelors degree in mathematics from UCLA and a certified nutrition educator. Ms. Chessen lives in San Francisco but is originally from Fresno, California, which has more dairies than any county in California, and one of only two licensed raw milk dairies in the state. In 2008, Ms. Chessen was instrumental in securing bi-partisan passage of SB 201, a bill to regulate raw milk in the California legislature. She produced a ten-minute video “SB 201” which was given to all of the legislators in California and is featured on YouTube.

Maureen Gosling
Editor
Editor Maureen Gosling has been a documentary filmmaker for more than thirty years and is best known for her twenty-year collaboration with acclaimed independent director, Les Blank. She was co-filmmaker, editor and/or sound recordist with Blank on over twenty 16mm films (e.g. Burden of Dreams, J’ai Eté au Bal: The Roots of Cajun and Zydeco). Gosling has also been sought after as an editor, working with directors Jed Riffe (Waiting to Inhale), Tom Weidlinger ( Boys Will Be Men), Amie Williams (Fallon, Deadly Oasis), Ashley James (Bomba, Dancing the Drum). Gosling’s 16mm feature documentary Blossoms Of Fire, on the legendary Zapotecs of southern Oaxaca, Mexico, won the Coral Award for Best Documentary by a Non-Latino Director at the Havana International Film Festival. The film was also broadcast on HBO Latino. Gosling’s current projects are Bamako Chic: The Women Cloth Dyers of Mali, co-produced with Maxine Downs; and No Mouse Music: The Story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records, co-produced with Chris Simon. Gosling’s films have been seen in countless film festivals around the world, on national public and cable television, on television in Europe, Australia and Asia, and have been distributed widely to educational institutions.

Outreach/Engagement Plan(s)

Public television offers a unique venue to filmmakers who want to reach a diverse yet highly educated audience of citizens from all spectrum's of the American Public. PBS audiences do not have to be titillated by sensationalism or nudity to enjoy seeing a documentary on important social issues. PBS, ITVS, the minority consortia and it’s two principal independent series, Independent Lens and POV, have taken the lead over all other broadcasters and cable casters in funding and presenting high quality programming to its large and increasingly diverse audience. Furthermore, PBS audiences from all walks of life are empowered by the in depth information they receive on public television to take actions to protect their families more than other viewers getting their daily dose of “news” from typical commercial news sources.

“Germ Wars” is the first film to examine food safety by looking at bacteria, good and bad, and the complicated roles they play in maintaining human health. Families across America are trying to cope with an epidemic of chronic childhood diseases that last well into adulthood. It will be of particular interest to working and middle class families who live in both large cities or in rural areas, and to people of color whose communities are plagued by chronic diseases effecting their immune systems. However, no matter where one lives in America, or what strata of society you may come from, it is likely that your friends or families are coping with illnesses of depressed immune systems. This film will provide these audiences with new information on how to better understand how nutrition can effect one’s quality of life, and provide them with a new way of looking at and understanding food-borne diseases. While there are many wonderful and informative programs on food on PBS and in commercial theaters this is the first film to go “beyond organic” and present the latest scientific studies on what it takes to maintain healthy immune systems through diet and nutrition.

Beyond public television is an even larger and a more significantly diverse audience of regular citizens from all walks of life. Project director Jed Riffe has been hosting screening and discussions of his humanities funded films for 34 years. Riffe is a community organizer with deep experience using films to create dialogues and foster social change. Riffe spent the last 36 months, presenting two CCH funded films, “Waiting to Inhale” and “Ripe for Change,” and leading discussions on “health” and “choice” issues the two films raise to over 200 different live audiences across the United States, Canada, Europe, the middle East and South America. He has built a significant following for his films on food and cutting edge medicine in small and large cities across America with special tours like the Southern Circuit Film Tour (NEA funded), the 2007 Illinois Fall Tour (funded by the Illinois Humanities Council), and in Europe with the WatchDocs Film Festival and it’s Traveling Film Festival (Open Society Institute funded). “Germ Wars” will be of particular interest to audiences who have seen both “Waiting to Inhale” and “Ripe for Change” thus allowing the film to build on their success. The film will also be of interest to the millions of Americans concerned about their health and the role government and big business play in deciding who eats what in our society. Producer and co-writer Christine Chessen has been working closely with California State Senator Dean Florez (Fresno), head of the state legislature’s committee on Health and Agriculture. She has built a following through a series of hearings on SB201, a bill to regulate unpasteurized milk and her video “SB201.”

Riffe's last seven films, all funded by grants from the California Council for the Humanities, have been nationally broadcast on PBS. The Council should have in its files a letter from Berkeley Media, LLC. Berkeley Media is the educational distributor of eleven of Riffe's films. Additionally, films produced by the project director Jed Riffe are represented for international broadcast by Charles Schuerhoff, Director of Acquisitions & Sales, at PBS International in Boston.

The television broadcast, community screenings and discussions are only one part of our outreach strategy. For Riffe's last two films he created a series of video modules 6-9 minutes in length which addressed topics of concern to specific individuals and are used by organizations to educate, inform and motivate their members and the general public. Examples of these new media modules for "Ripe for Change" include modules on: 1) an immigrant farmworker who has become a successful organic farmer, 2) Richard Heinberg, a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and author of "The End of Oil" on agriculture and petroleum, 3) Professor Tyrone Hayes on the most widely used herbicide in North America and it's effect on human hormones and health. Because of the success of the "Waiting to Inhale" outreach campaign, the project was just awarded the first Audience Engagement grant from the Sundance Documentary Fund. This campaign features: 1) the creation and distribution of four new media video modules on DVD, the web and cell phone; 2) a series of targeted screening and discussion forums; and 3) production of a “How To Use The Film” video guide, and is a collaboration with the project's five national outreach partners.

Funders

Name	Amount	Date
Berkeley FILM Foundation	$10,000.00	07/15/2010
Fleishhacker Foundation	$4,000.00	11/07/2009
Jed Riffe Films + Electronic Media	$15,000.00	06/14/2009
Nature’s Table	$50,000.00	04/01/2009

Location

2600 10th Street Suite 438
Berkeley, CA, 94710

See Google Maps

Short Synopsis

"Germ Wars,” a 60-minute documentary, examines the epidemic in food borne diseases, and consumers fighting for the most fundamental of liberties-the right to choose our food.

Description/Treatment

GERM WARS is a 60-minute, high-definition documentary for national PBS broadcast. Contemporary issues of human health and personal freedom are explored through the controversial lens of our “first food,” “nature’s most perfect food,” milk.

FDA agents, state regulators and some members of the medical profession are convinced that any food that comes from nature (fresh vegetables, fruits, dairy and meats) must have all of its live bacteria, good and bad, killed through pasteurization or irradiation. These regulators believe that health conscious consumers must be protected from themselves. Government and large dairy processors argue that they know what’s best for the individual consumer who believes eating fresh, locally grown foods and dairy products are good for them. This film explores fundamental civil right issues from all sides, including the farmers targeted by government investigations, those conducting these investigations, and consumers of “raw” dairy and agricultural products and the health impacts on their lives. The film’s outreach campaign will spark dialogue, provide insight and offer hope to consumers who want to decide what healthy foods to feed their families rather than big government and big dairy.

News and propaganda from print, radio, and television are interwoven with traditional interviews, verite-style footage, and archival footage to explore how the evolution of human civilization promoted the complex interrelationships among food safety, nutrition, and disease that today’s scientists are just beginning to appreciate in their quest for laboratory cures to human ills.

The historical and cultural context is being developed through interviews with historians, anthropologists, ethicists, and journalists against a backdrop of archival footage and visuals. We will hear the story of how processed, pasteurized, milk was lauded at the dawn of the 20th century when infant mortality rates were over 50% due to dirty milk in filthy industrial cities. A few decades later, California’s Stueve family, who continued to sell unprocessed raw milk to thousands of consumers from the 1960s – 1980s, was harassed out of business by corrupt health departments and smear campaigns backed by Big Dairy interests. Government hearings and interviews with lawmakers will highlight the chasm that has ensued between public officials and the constituents they are purported to serve.

We share the story of Kimeli, a Masai warrior from Africa who was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease after two years as a student at Stanford University in California eating the standard American diet. While scheduled for surgery to remove part of his intestines, he discovered a local source of raw milk, which was an integral part of his traditional Kenyan diet and culture that revered cows. After one year drinking several bottles of raw milk daily, the Crohn’s disease was gone and so was Kimeli’s need for surgery.

We follow a UC Davis veterinary scientist into the fields as she scoops up cow paddies in her hunt for deadly bacteria such as E Coli. We will join a Stanford nutrition researcher in the lab as he examines Lactobacillus bacteria in raw milk that might eliminate digestive and allergic problems in milk-drinkers. Cutting-edge microbiologists studying bacteria as part of the NIH’s $180 million Human Microbiome Project will present what they are learning about the trillions of microscopic organisms that live in our bodies and how they affect our immune systems. We will talk to doctors who, in 2003, used human fecal matter to cure 15 out of 16 patients of chronic intestinal bacteria infection.

Most conventional California dairies are struggling while the state's two regulated raw milk dairymen are thriving. Contrasting them will expose the economic impacts of our food production systems on consumers and on the industry. We take the viewer through one dairy family’s nightmare of suicide and loss and contrast this with the joyful birth of a new generation in a thriving family dairy business that is embracing the future with a new and profitable paradigm of food and health.

On the opposite coast in Bowie, MD, we will follow resident Liz Reitzig as she drives four hours round-trip every week to pick up seven gallons of raw milk for her family of six from a dairy farmer in Pennsylvania. She makes this trek because the sale of raw milk is illegal in Maryland and her children are allergic to pasteurized milk. While California is one of only three states in the country that allow raw milk to be sold commercially on store shelves, some states do permit on-farm sales directly from a farmer. Still other states allow consumers to form "cow-share" ownership programs, in which members pay a farmer to milk and maintain cows that the group "owns". In states where no supply of raw milk is allowed beyond milking one's own cow on one's own land, buying clubs have formed that will cross state lines to pick up raw milk for their members and then leave it at a designated drop-off location, often at night to avoid detection by authorities. Ironically, it has been reported that the Capitol building in Washington, DC has at times served as a raw milk drop-off point. Why does such disparity exist among state laws governing raw milk distribution? If distribution is being forced underground by state regulators unwilling to cooperate with local raw dairies, what new risks are being assumed by those consumers who have no other choice?

Most important, the story will be told by consumers struggling with these issues everyday: mothers who are exasperated from their kids being sick, desperate individuals who cross state lines in the middle of the night to get their hands on milk that is illegal where they live, and grateful consumers who have recovered from chronic health problems by bringing raw dairy into their diets. Finally, we are reminded that no health choice is risk-free when a mother describes how her son nearly lost his life after drinking raw milk that was contaminated with E Coli.

Featured as cover story on SF360.org. <http://www.sf360.org/features/riffe-aims-to-spread-raw-milk-germ>

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