‘Farmageddon’ director talks benefits of homegrown natural food - Lowell Sun

GROTON – Kristin Canty is a jack of all trades: farmer, restaurateur, public speaker and documentary filmmaker. But her entire journey to becoming a crusader for ancestral health started back with a different long-time job: mom.

As she explained when visiting The Groton Center on Sunday, Feb. 23 during the center’s Speaker Series, the Concord resident said she came into looking for raw and fermented food in 1999 when her then four-year-old son continued to suffer from debilitating asthma and numerous environmental allergies with no sign of proper medical treatment available. After doing her own research, she discovered that others who also had natural allergies were cured after drinking unpasteurized milk. After doing more research and testing the milk herself, she integrated the milk believed to be richer in nutrients and enzymes into her son’s diet. Six weeks later, her son was healthier than ever before.

From there, Canty said she started further investigating buying raw and fermented foods, like grass-fed beef and organic produce. As she said after her speech, she’s not the only one.

“I feel like the movement is growing,” Canty said. “There’s more and more people who are getting sick and are turning to food as a healing mechanism. When they dedicate themselves to how they want to eat, there’s always a way to find organic foods and meet your farmer.”

She started off by joining buy-in clubs that ships natural organic food from out of state. These clubs are still available to others through Community Supported Agriculture farms including the Clark Farm in Carlisle and The Food Project in Lincoln.

Canty said more people started asking her about where to find organic resources after the release of her 2011 documentary “Farmageddon,” which details small-town farmers struggling to spread awareness of the benefits of ancestral health due to lack of awareness and even oppression from federal authorities. With that, those resources became more available.

Canty sure does practice what she preaches as seen at The Farm at Woods Hill in Bath, N.H., which she bought in 2013. The farm raises over 40 beef cows, nearly 100 pigs and pounds of fruit and vegetables on 265-acres of land for sustainable farming.

Of course Canty understands that not everyone has the resources of an actual farm to start having a sustainable diet.

“The hardest thing to transition out of is convenience,” she said. “We’re very privileged to have convenient food, but it’s not necessarily good for us. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on it, you need to be smart and you need to not waste. A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, I don’t have time.’ Time and money are the main factors to deterring people from eating food directly from farms.”

For those looking for a more casual transition, Canty provides it at her two restaurants: Woods Hill Table in Concord, which she opened in 2015, and Adelita also in Concord, which she opened in 2018. The menus at both restaurants adhere to Canty’s sustainable diet, ranging from Woods Hill Table’s dairy-free gluten-free pork chops to Adelita’s gluten-free enchiladas composed of pasture-raised chicken. Last November, Canty opened a third restaurant, Woods Hill Pier 4 at Seaport in Boston. These locations offer options for residents throughout northeastern Massachusetts, those which Canty said range in age.

“I’m very happy to have so many younger people who are interested in farming and growing their own food,” she explained. “The amount of younger people who are embracing it is refreshing and new. There’s older people who have been sick that aren’t finding help in medicine and remembering how their grandmother cooked for them and how much more nutritious it was. I don’t find a demographic for enjoying food and understanding how important it is.”