Food for Thought: Facts and (Science) Fictions is a public platform for critical community engagement with topics related to agricultural practices—here on earth, and in our wider galaxy. Food for Thought will draw general audiences into considering its themes from an array of vantage points by way of exciting and popular narrative films, weird and delicious snacks and refreshments, and speakers who know how to employ everyday language while addressing complex issues. The platform is part of the Davis Humanities Institute’s “Cultivation: Food, Farming, and Heritage in the Sacramento Valley and Beyond”—a year-long initiative which explores the themes of farmers, farming, race, and ethnic heritage in the Sacramento Valley and beyond.

The free, outdoor events, which will mostly occur in March 2023 in Sacramento’s historically-Black neighborhood of Oak Park, will arise from the screenings of two popular American films. The first, Sounder (1972), depicts a Black family’s struggles to avert starvation by farming sugarcane on depleted soil in Depression-era Louisiana, while grappling with their eldest son's longings to attend school full-time. The Martian (2015) chronicles an astronaut-botanist’s attempts to stay alive on Mars—where he has accidentally been left behind by his crew mates—through cultivating potatoes inside his vessel’s artificial habitat.

A near half-century divides the release dates of these films; a century divides their stories. Yet despite sharply different time frames and plot lines, both films turn on the life-and-death consequences of growing food. Food for Thought will prompt conversations in response to these films with a focus on sustainable farming, interdependence, histories of Black farming, and more.