Photo Credit: https://www.commontablecreative.com/

June 16, 2025

I recently attended a talk from filmmakers and brothers Oliver and Simon English. Their production company Common Table Creative's most well-known work is the documentary "Feeding Tomorrow" that was released in 2024 on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. It has won multiple awards including Best Feature Documentary at the 2023 Ceres Food Film Festival and Best Environmental Documentary at DOC LA. Common Table Creative has done other short films featuring the American Farmland Trust, the Lundberg Family Farms, and dinner talks, all with the goal of promoting regenerative farming and sharing the stories of farmers that are trying to do good in the world. 

Regenerative agriculture is not just growing crops in a non-toxic way; it also involves improving the land, working with the land's natural ecosystem to revitalize it. It is growing crops as if humans were not involved. To quote Simon and Oliver, "we don't have to plant the forest, the forest grows on its own." The land is covered in living plants to sequester carbon. Animals act as natural fertilizer and repel pests. There is biodiversity with all the different types of plants working together, building healthy soil giving nutrition. Also the soil gives the products flavor, so regenerative foods are not only more nutritious, but more flavorful too.

Please enjoy Simon and Oliver's insights into the important work they are doing through filmmaking. 

Simon and Oliver English's parents are chefs, so they grew up in the restaurant business. Oliver was designing, developing, and opening restaurants around the world. He started to see how broken the food system was --- how much food we ship around the world and how much food is wasted.

He started to meet with farmers to get better protein for the restaurants and found them to be truly inspiring. For example, there was a guy in The Bahamas that was transforming a little piece of land next to the airport into a regenerative farm. They are feeding their community with this farm, and also on the front lines of dealing with climate change. The climate had changed so much from when he was growing up and now he was not sure of what to plant. There used to be 12,000 farms in The Bahamas and now there are 1,200. He had a remarkable passion about food and farming sustainability.

Simon at the time was in the New York Film Academy. Oliver called Simon to tell him how amazing this guy was and Simon suggested they go film an interview with him. That was the start of their work on "Feeding Tomorrow".

Their documentary strives to highlight the roles food systems, farmers, and we can play in solving various issues like population growth, inequality, health epidemics, and climate change. They tell stories of where food comes from --- how it is grown and how it impacts the world around us. As individuals, our food choices can lead to a more sustainable future. 

For the first two years of working together, they also began creating short form videos for food companies and nonprofits, accidentally starting a production company called Common Table Creative. 

They think that chefs dominate so much in the media realm right now because they have more camera personalities, making it even more important to show the incredible work of down-to-earth farmers. They want to show these farmers' daily lives (going in there without a script) in a beautiful, inspiring way to elicit emotion, empathy, and understanding.

Another thing they center their short films around is powerful stories told at the dinner table. They love bringing people together to talk about ingredients, people's origins, their potentials for positive impact, and the potential of regenerative farming has for positive impact. For the dinners they set up and film, they team up with their sister, the culinary and test kitchen director at Williams Sonoma in San Francisco.

They believe that the thousands of little videos you see daily can make up the reality of your mind and how you view the world. So, they want to shift people's perceptions and give us a more positive outlook because there are farmers positively farming every day. It is important to call attention to the solutions, the regeneration, and sustainable practices. 

They commented that for so long, a lot of the sustainability conversation happening has been about how to do less bad. How to use less lights, consume less, not drive a certain car. But their filmmaking is about how to do more good. How we can still have the food we love but instead with a net positive impact on the environment. We can all act as positive actors by supporting farmers taking care of the soil and the Earth. 

It can be something as little as choosing one bag of rice that was grown without chemicals and in a way that creates a healthy farm landscape instead of buying another bag of rice that uses chemicals and degrades soil. Common Table Creative's short videos help convince us to make these simple changes and know more about where the food we are buying comes from and how it impacts our planet.

Other ways individuals can change their habits for the better is to buy ingredients that are certified regenerative. There are a couple labels to look out for like the ROA --- Regenerative Organic Alliance. You can buy all sorts of regenerative products like eggs, olive oil, meat, flour, and more. Lundberg Family Farms Rice is an example of a certified regenerative product. A final thing individuals can do is go to the farmer's market to buy from local farmers and change their relationships with food. Furthermore, there are certain food products that usually are not regenerative and are best to avoid like corn. 

By supporting food products that are regenerative, you can help move grocery stores to sell more regenerative products since they sell more of what people are buying. The grocery stores will also demand more regenerative from their suppliers and the suppliers will have to change their systems. Maybe in a year a grocery store will go from selling five regenerative products to dozens and dozens. 

For example, Simon and Oliver shared a story of Walmart never having organic milk and so many moms writing letters to Walmart that they started selling organic milk and now are the biggest distributor of organic produce in the United States by volume. The ripple effects work.

A final project Simon and Oliver have done that I believe is worth mentioning in this article is their work on the biggest regenerative farm at a public middle school in Santa Monica, California. Simon and Olive transformed an old dog park into a quarter acre regenerative school farm. School gardens and farms are extremely important and impactful because we have to connect kids to food and change their relationship with food at an early age. Kids start to eat kale and healthy greens and spend time in the garden understanding and learning how foods are grown and the importance of foods being grown naturally. The kids also learn about composting and bring it back home to their families. 

This realignment of our values and priorities is greatly beneficial, and Simon and Oliver English are at the head of this movement. Their films are opening people's minds, helping us see the good farmers are doing and how necessary it is for us to support them. I love Simon and Oliver's philosophy, positive attitudes, and the work they have done. I can't wait to see what they accomplish in the future.