Laura Gabbert's "Food and Country," screening next week at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, began with a phone call.
It came from Laurie Ochoa, widow of restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, the subject of Gabbert's "City of Gold."
"It was the early days of the pandemic and I was thinking about doing a short piece about what was happening to restaurants in Los Angeles when I got a call from Laurie," recalled Gabbert. "She said, 'You need to call Ruth Reichl because you're both thinking about making something about this moment.'"
Gabbert had met Reichl, a former Los Angeles Times food critic, Gourmet magazine editor, host of "Top Chef Masters" and friend of Gold. So she made the call.
"It was March 2020 and we didn't know how long this was all going to last," said Gabbert. "But Ruth said, even back then, 'This is going to have a ripple effect and I think we need to do something about the big picture.' At the time, you couldn't travel, so we started doing interviews with Ruth on Zoom and, because of her incredible career of writing about food for 50 years, she could just pick up the phone and call Alice Waters [famed seasonal cooking restaurateur] and have a conversation."

The film includes many of those Zoom chats, which get intimate as some floundering chefs practically beg Reichl for advice. Other interviews were shot after the COVID-19 vaccine became available. Those interviews include a family of corn producers shifting to organic farming and a sustainable cattle rancher. The movie's message is that the food/restaurant system has been out of whack for 80 years because of an emphasis on low costs.
"Food and Country" — which screens Wednesday at 7 p.m. (with Gabbert in attendance) and Thursday at 1:15 p.m. — also feels like a time capsule. Many of Reichl's interviews illuminate a time when we knew even less about the COVID virus than we do now.
"The wonderful thing about Ruth is she brings her vast knowledge, as well as her reporting acumen, and she's so delightful," said Gabbert. "It's not in the film but there are so many subjects who would say at one point, 'Ruth, it's like you're my therapist.' She would talk to people every few weeks and they really opened up to her."