First We Eat: Doc about a family's challenge to 'eat local' in the Yukon is a fun take on a global reality

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

With a little tweaking, First We Eat, Suzanne Crocker’s documentary about making her Yukon-based family “eat locally” for a year, could work as a sitcom.

There’s a determined mom with a vision, one not strongly shared by her husband Gerard or three children (two of them recalcitrant teenagers). But they grudgingly accept the challenge. Store-bought food is replaced by, variously, moose nose, berries, birch water, sugar beets, smoked Chinook salmon and salt retrieved from animal blood.

Suzanne Crocker and family feed themselves locally in a Yukon winter in First We Eat

In place of grace, most meals are preceded by murmured complaints and occasional expressions of disgust. Pull the camera back on the light-hearted doc, and First We Eat was quite the event in Dawson City as it was being filmed, with ample coverage in the local media. It is likely that kids Kate, Tess and son Sam got unwanted attention in school for their new diet, and felt left out when classmates chowed down at the local pizza joint. We get a hint of it, but in the right hands, it could be a whole extra subplot.

It’s no surprise that, with its amiable, feel-good approach, First We Eat was a top-five audience favourite at this year’s Hot Docs Festival. But there was gravity in its inspiration.  A recent landslide had cut off the main highway into Dawson, and left store shelves empty within 48 hours. With that in mind, you could think of the doc as a sugar coating (something else the kids couldn’t have) on a potential existential food crisis.

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The fact is that the entire world, to a large extent, now eats a Western diet, with ingredients that may be shipped thousands of kilometres to where you are. Made before the pandemic, First We Eat’s underlying message has since come home to roost with disruptions in the complex global food shipping chain. The sight of empty shelves is now no longer confined to towns near the Arctic Circle.

And you probably couldn’t find a better litmus test for our ability to survive food disruption than Dawson. It turns out, it’s as far North as you can go to carry on any sort of recognizable farming. There are apple orchards, bred for the cold, that are still a coin-toss for surviving the minus-40-degree winter. Same with honeybee hives. Dawson, we’re told, is also home to the Northernmost dairy farm in the Western hemisphere.

But the “meat” of First We Eat is Crocker’s turn to Indigenous people for help (in this case, the local Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in), something desperate Arctic explorers did for centuries. People who’ve been living off the sparse land for millennia are obviously amused at the flailing attempts of sandwich-eaters to find sustenance. But a lot of what they serve up, including the smoked Chinook, looks delicious, worthy of the Food Network.

I’m not sure cities with millions of inhabitants could ever embrace First We Eat’s challenge in quite the same way. There’s not a lot of foraging to be had, and urban sprawl has a tendency to engulf the local farms that could otherwise feed us in a crisis. 

First We Eat is a fun watch, but if you think about it, its message is dire.

First We Eat. Written and directed by Suzanne Crocker. Starring Suzanne, Gerard, Kate, Tess and Sam Crocker. Now playing in theatres, where open, across Canada. Streams in virtual theatres across Canada, debuting Thursday, November 19 at the virtual Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema.