Brian Kimmel is not meatless. This worried him during our interview. “As a vegan,” he asked, “What did you think of the movie?” The movie he means is the food documentary Ingredients. Kimmel is producer and cinematographer.

“You know that scene on the farm with all those cute lambs?” I said. “I wanted to set them free.”

Why, then, would I feature Ingredients and Kimmel, in a Meatless Monday post?  Because we each believe in bringing conscious food choices to the table, we just have different ways of doing it.

Ingredients, now out on DVD, has been making the rounds at film festivals and for a food documentary, is happier than you’d expect. “We’ve all seen and read stories about everything that’s wrong with food. People like the fact that it’s celebrating what’s right with food.”  That has much to do with Kimmel himself, who believes positive change is possible — starting with himself.  This is a guy who grew up eating “food from Safeway. I was the classic kid who wouldn’t explore food.” Kimmel laughs.

He came to explore food for a living, revealing its beauty and vitality through his camera lens. Kimmel became the darling of chefs during the ‘80s, that time of wretched excess, when the more expensive and elitist an ingredient was, the further away it came from, the better. “I worked for high profile chefs and was really impressed and awestruck with what these people were doing, but something was missing,” says Kimmel. “I didn’t have the whole story. I was looking at where their food came from. That got me looking at this particular story.”

Ingredients is eloquent, edible argument for sustainability and seasonality — concepts Kimmel had to learn. “I grew up in California, so I wasn’t in touch with seasonality.”  The fact is, when it comes to what we eat, most of us aren’t.  Blame our Twitter-happy lives, blame the industrial food system, but we’ve lost out on the gustatory pleasures each season brings. Ingredients brings that all back with interviews with sustainability advocates like Gary Nabhan and Alice Waters and with those in the field — literally — farmers like Anthony and Carol Boutard who raise their produce with care and consciousness.  They remind you how precious food is.

Ingredients is framed within a calendar year, telling its story seasonally, starting in the spring. It is easy to sell fresh produce when you’re talking about the first bright berries of spring, but fall and winter have their own edible rewards — dark rich greens like Swiss chard and kale and broccoli rabe, sweet root vegetables, mushrooms that taste of the forest.  And it brings rewards that go beyond the table.

“Seasonality teaches me awareness,” says Kimmel, now based in Portland, Oregon. “I look at things differently.  Getting in touch with that cycle has been something new and wonderful.”

Granted, it’s not so new. “Our grandparents or great grandparents had some connection to the farm, it’s only in the last couple generations we’ve created this nightmare foodwise.”

What Kimmel and Ingredients call for is no less than a return to that connection, to valuing — even growing—sustainable, seasonal, locally grown food. Sounds big, but “it’s a simple thing and really pleasurable,” says Kimmel.  Join a CSA (community shared agriculture program), go to your local farmers market, cook, grow your own food.  Kimmel is.  He’s planting kale and looking ahead to winter crops like onions, parsnips and turnips.  Not bad for a guy who “had no connection whatsoever with what food came from. This is been slow-going revolution for me in terms of awareness,” he says with something akin to awe.

A green, sustainable world and enough fresh food to feed us all requires change at every level, from government policy to education, from eating less meat to eating more seasonal produce. Ingredients focuses on the personal and the possible.

“You start to take a look at what’s happening politically, economically — it’s out of your control.  Food is not,” says Kimmel.  “If people understand the impact of their purchases, it can create great change. The hopeful side of me is looking at this point in our history as one of beginning — we’ll look at the mistakes we made, correct them and go back to something that’s worked for a long time.”

As Kimmel says, “There’s no way to get around it— food is the biggest part of our lives. This is something we have to respect and nurture. All the other things — policy, debates, efficiency versus small family farms — become sort of irrelevant.”

And we both agree it all begins with feeding people “a really good meal.”

• Here’s Ellen Kanner’s recipe for Tamale Pie with Winter Greens. ^[1]
• See more of Ellen’s Meatless Monday Musings ^[2] on VegKitchen.

Ellen Kanner is the Huffington Post’s Meatless Monday  ^[3]blogger, the syndicated columnist the Edgy Veggie ^[4] and contributor  to publications including Culinate, ^[5] Bon Appetit and Every Day With Rachael Ray as well as her own blog Edgy Veggie ^[6].