The Perennial Plate

There is a dreaded part of each day. We’ve filmed or driven or edited at a coffee shop all day, and its time to find a place to stay. When we were planning this trip we thought “oh, we’ll camp all the time!” Ha. We have only camped 3 times on this trip — as we didn’t account for the vast amount of work we would be doing each night and therefore didn’t realize how dependent we would be on a good internet connection and three pronged wall plugs. We do have the pleasure of staying with friends or with the subjects of our films from time to time. Mirra and I stayed separately in the “boys” and “girls” rooms at a Mennonite home in Ohio; we stayed in a cave in a canyon in Utah; we lived it on Martha’s Vineyard for a night; and we roughed it in a bed bug ridden South Dakota Reservation home. It has been a wonderfully mixed bag. But those situations are always the good ones; it’s when you have to find a hotel that it becomes challenging.

10 years ago I moved to NYC a few days before the Sept 11. It seems strange to have a dinner on that day… but people have to eat and celebrate life and learn, even on the days with bad memories. Perhaps it is even more important to live life on those days.

The easy option for us would be to go to the famous folks, the Joel Salatins and Will Allens of different areas. These videos might even be more popular, they might make for a better, or at least more typical film down the road. But what we’ve found is the folks that have a persona (that have a business and a reputation to uphold) don’t make as good of subjects as the folks who are surprised by our visit — the people who are just doing what they do and haven’t gotten any attention for it. And those people can be farmers or foragers or fisherman — it doesn’t matter — they just need to have an original story and the capacity to let it come through to our camera. But how do you tell who they are in a sea of organic ideas? We just guess and hope for the best. Sometimes it works out.

Ya’ll don’t know that much about Mirra. I know, I know… she writes great blog entries, sooo much better than mine. It doesn’t matter that she guzzles coca cola and love chickens more than people, she’s good at blogging. But do you know why…?

We’ve found ourselves all the way to Syracuse NY – just a stop for the night. We had planned to be filming today at The Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen. But it fell through. A pretty disappointing experience, especially for Mirra. Here we’ve been killing pigs and fishing and visiting ranches, and the one thing Mirra wants to do is visit the cows, pigs and chickens that have been rescued from that fate. We had been planning it for months, and had finalized and confirmed the dates (even planned our trip around it), and all of a sudden they said no. We are looking for another place, but its a shame. We really try to represent lots of different ideas on the show, different ways of life etc and I thought it would be great to show the vegan perspective.

I don’t know of many places out there where you can buy a house for a grand and then farm an acre of open space right next door, or perhaps open a hipster business and have lines out the door, its an anomaly. I tried to get Mirra to think about moving here and though she appreciates how unique it is, she’s having none of it. I can imagine the winter’s being bleak like Siberia. Anyways, in one last ditch effort to convince Mirra (and because we are in Detroit and are super dorky), we are going to watch 8 Mile off of Netflix. Eminem isn’t the detroit I’m trying to sell, I’m more into the stuff we’ve been filming – urban farming, giant compost piles, awesome farmer’s markets, lots of ideas.