The Deconstructing Dinner Film Festival came to Rossland for the first time this year.
Last Wednesday, the festival screened an episode of Deconstructing Dinner: Reconstructing Our Food System and the film Bugs at the Rossland Miners’ Hall. The event was a collaboration between the Rossland Food Security Task Force, the Rossland Sustainability Commission and Deconstructing Dinner.
Jon Steinman, the host of Deconstructing Dinner and founder of the Deconstructing Dinner Film Festival, gave a little bit of background on the television show.
“So this emerged out of the radio show I was doing for five years. I ended up meeting a filmmaker who was in Nelson showcasing his film at a film festival — his name is Declan O’Driscoll and he had produced a film about raw milk… — and he and I met when he was in Nelson,” explained Steinman. “He pitched this idea of wanting to do some sort of television series on food.”
Steinman and O’Driscoll created the pilot episode of Deconstructing Dinner, which was about pork, and decided to film it in Nelson. But because the episode was only 24 minutes, they wanted to show something else as well.
“So I went out and started looking at other films that were out there. Short films, feature-length films that could compliment that one episode and that’s how the festival was born,” said Steinman.
The episode screened last Wednesday was about garlic.
“We were using garlic as a way to communicate the importance of local food to local economies,” explained Steinman. “And garlic is a really important crop to small-scale farmers. Per acre, it can yield a lot more in sales versus other crops.”
Bugs is a Danish film that follows a research team from the Nordic Food Lab led by Canadian researcher Josh Evans.
“And they travel the world trying to document and learn about insects as food,” said Steinman. “And of course what we learn in the film is that 2.5 billion people around the world eat insects.”
The evening also included insect snacks and garlic-infused truffles between the screenings of Deconstructing Dinner and Bugs.