Nathan Lee Johnson - Digging In

Nathan Lee Johnson
Director

Digging In took a shape that I couldn’t anticipate.

It’s taken almost three years for the initial phone call with the Vatheuer Family Foundation in the summer of 2020 to grow into the film we have today. At so many points along the way, when this project mostly existed in mind and in conversation, it looked very different from what you see now. 

I take great delight in the surprise of what we created.

Our early conversations about this film, and especially during the first few months of 2022 when pre-production began in earnest, are what I treasure most. During those rambling chats, over a cafe de olla in Oaxaca or a beer in Kansas City, I and my colleague Jay tossed food-related ideas back and forth like curious little trinkets to be turned over, examined, held in different light, and then discarded or saved. Jay’s wo/andering played a huge role here. Why are Red Delicious apples not delicious - like, at all? Why are cherry tomatoes that particular size? What if we made a Broadway musical instead? (Bad ideas and dumb questions, apparently, are no less crucial.)

Along the way, we formulated a guiding principle that I now regularly apply to my work: if we’re going to take on a project whose end isn’t immediately in sight, then we have to enjoy the process of getting there, not just the end product. To put it more succinctly: it must be fun. 

It was fun. 

If results are “points”, then the process is a “path”. We discovered that committing to a path that we enjoyed kept us curious, engaged, motivated, and - crucially - willing to watch as the film became something we hadn’t imagined previously. 

We had fun, and we stayed surprised. When we casted Masika as a narrator, she also became a co-writer and co-producer. When we finished our originally planned mini-series, we scrapped it and created a feature instead. We ate the best Korean food of our lives in rural Kansas. We stayed surprised. 

All of this simply wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have a client (SAFSF, and Renee Catacalos in particular) and a funder (VFF, and Stefan Vatheuer in particular) who trusted us to create something worthwhile, despite our very evident goofing off. I owe them both a huge debt of gratitude for giving us this space to eventually get somewhere. 

Well, we got somewhere. Who knows what we’ll make next? Not me. But I can’t wait to see it.

Masika Henson - Digging In

Masika Henson
Host & Co-Producer

When Renee first asked me if I wanted to narrate a documentary, I thought to myself, “Sure, why not?!”

I was terrified and excited. I had no idea what this project would entail, but I was curious and ready for adventure. 

Shortly after, I met Jay and Nathan and learned that plans had changed. Not only would I be narrating, I’d also be onscreen. I’d be interviewing folks. I’d get to travel and be on the land with folks. I love to travel. I love talking to people. I wasn’t comfortable on camera, but it’s important to step out of your comfort zone!

For the next three months, I got to know Jay and Nathan remotely as we prepared to hit the road. Boarding my first flight, I wondered what it was going to be like to meet them in person. What was it going to be like spending hours and days traveling with complete strangers? Would I make it back home? All these thoughts raced through my brain, especially when I realized I’d have nowhere to go if I decided this wasn’t for me.

Once on the road, I started to learn. I learned that I should never wear clothes for the first time on camera and that I barely knew how to interview someone for a documentary. I learned several cities, counties and towns in Missouri have the same name as other cities, towns and countries and that Wakeeney, Kansas is the Christmas City of the High Plains. I learned how terrifying flying from Denver to Chadron, Nebraska on the smallest plane known to humans could be. I’d never seen so many corn, wheat and soybean fields in my life.

From Missouri to Kansas, South Dakota and California, we were welcomed with warmth. We were welcomed as family. Realizing the person I was renting a car from was the same person who waved my plane into the gate and the only employee at the whole airport is something that I will remember for the rest of my life. When they learned I was headed to the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, they gave me their cell phone number and told me to call if I needed anything. They were from the reservation, their family lived on the reservation and they wanted to make sure I was taken care of. That touched my heart!

What may have been most special about the project was how everything came full circle during our last shoot in Watsonville, CA. I was born and raised on the Central Coast of California, and this was a bit of  a homecoming for me. No more corn, wheat and soybeans! We ate what was  growing from the ground. I was home. 

I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work on Digging In. My life will be forever changed. If given the chance, I’d do it all over again.

Jay W. Austin - Digging In

Jay W. Austin
Co-Producer

Every project I get to work on advocates for change, but not every project changes me.

The process of making Digging In fundamentally changed me in two ways:

  1. It made me vigilant about where food comes from, especially in how Madre Tierra was treated in order to bring these foods to life.

  2. It made me much more empathetic to the producers in rural America — people who I’ve admittedly seen as “others”.

Farming and producing isn’t only affected by a changing climate — these things are the environmental change that either contributes to or mitigates the effects of a changing climate.

I’ve noticed that full adoption of regenerative, sustainably, kind production methods for these foods, fibers, and energy sources are often held hostage by outdated policies and capitalistic market forces that encourage a race-to-the-bottom. The bottom: that’s exactly where our food-fiber-energy system resides unless we see major overhauls of how things work.

I was incredibly happy to learn that solutions exist, and that there are people who have the ability to bring about those solutions in time. Some of those people live in places I never would’ve visited if not for this film. Sitting with these farmers not only educated me on how tied their hands might sometimes be, but also how food (production) can also close distances between people who live in an ideologically segregated country.

It’s not enough to say that “we are what we eat.”

Through this filmmaking journey, I’ve come to believe that “we are what it took to make what we eat.” If “what it took” was poisonous, too convenient, cheap, and extractive of La Madre Tierra, then we are those things too.

Gratefully, the opposite can also be true.