I don’t know if you have seen the great documentary film, Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock, but it is a perfect example of a genre of film and non-fiction where someone takes a simple concept to its extreme to examine the consequences. In the film, Spurlock decides to eat nothing but McDonald’s food for every meal for a month. He sets down a few ground rules (must eat everything on the menu at least once, must finish the meal, must say ‘yes’ if the cashier asks if he wants to supersize his order, etc.)
It’s all fun and games until Spurlock’s body starts freaking out and his doctors tell him that he is risking his life if he continues. The drama is heightened along the way with vignettes about the fast food industry, their marketing and the degree to which their “food” approximates food. Overall, it should be required watching for anyone that eats.
My movie is going to rely on this tried and true formula, with a few exceptions and a local twist.
My movie, with a working title “So Long and Thanks for the Fish” will be based on this chart. It is DNREC’s chart of recommended consumption limits for fish caught in Delaware waters. Go ahead and take a look at it. I’ll wait.
You see, Delaware’s history as a mecca for the chemical industry, over-fertilization and industrial farming have made our waters hazardous. The way that many of these chemicals actually concentrate in the fish has made huge swaths of them inedible. The chart is truly shocking to the uninitiated. Seriously, go look at it.
The plan is to make a film that features 3 meals a day prepared from fish caught in Delaware waters, every day, for a month. During the film, we can examine the source for each of the chemicals and how that company was actually allowed to dump a certain amount of the toxin into the waterway or how much they were fined, or how much they dumped on land and how it got into the streams. We could talk about how these companies have externalized the costs of doing business and how Delawareans are paying the price in increased healthcare bills and lost wages and quality of life.
And after each of these stories, we can feature another dish… Carp from Lum’s Pond one day, a striped bass from Bowers Beach the next. Each could be served with a little subtitle stating what the chemicals that they are concerned with are in that particular fish and what the limits should be “PCBs – No consumption for women of childbearing age and children. All others, eat no more than two meals per year”
This brings me to where I diverge with Super Size me and even The Year of Living Biblically, I won’t be the guy eating the fish. That would be too easy (and frankly, dangerous). Instead, I would recruit one of the dimwitted “Corporations First” contingent from Sussex County to prove to me that self-regulation and business at all costs is really the best policy.
I’m hoping to also highlight local chefs to prepare all of the fish (including the aptly nicknamed Free Radical). Presumably they could prepare the fish in a way that would minimize the taste of mercury and chlorinated pesticides so as to not scare off our intrepid designated eater.
If we throw in a few sections with the sucker visiting his doctor along the way and maybe some interviews with people that don’t realize the danger in feeding these fish to their kids for years.
Personally, I think I could win an Oscar.