‘Survivor’ Kwon is high on ‘America’
YUL KWON admits that when he signed on to host PBS’ “America Revealed,” a series on how Big Things like transportation and food distribution work, he hadn’t completely thought it through.
Tracking how the ingredients for a pizza all get assembled at a Domino’s in midtown Manhattan wasn’t the issue. That he had under control.
What he hadn’t precalculated was that for several segments, he would have to physically get up into the air and look down.
So when we see Kwon gliding high above the earth in a light craft, that look in his eyes is the look of a man who just wants to get through this alive.
“I’m terrified of heights,” he says. “That was the scariest thing I ever did in my life.”
That’s not an insignificant confession from a man best known for winning season 13 of CBS’ “Survivor.”
His flight pays off, though, because those overhead visuals tell the story nicely in “America Revealed,” a four-part series that debuts Wednesday, 10 p.m., on PBS.
Kwon visits farmers in several states, including Kansas and California, who explain how the technologies of chemical fertilizer and water distribution have made farms look very different and produce far more food than they did 70 or 80 years ago.
That’s all in the opening episode on the food distribution system, which most of us know only from its final two stages: buying and eating.
“We’re explaining how none of that is an accident,” says Kwon. “It requires a highly complex system, and I hope the show will give viewers a new way of looking at things we take for granted.”
Along the way, he brushes against and acknowledges some troubling aspects of the system — though that’s not his focus.
Cattle are trained to eat corn, which isn’t their natural diet, so they can be fattened from 600 to 1,300 pounds in six months.
Kwon devotes considerable time to “food deserts,” where fresh food isn’t readily available and people turn to unhealthy convenience store snacks.
He visits community farmers’ markets in Detroit, a severe food desert where an estimated 44,000 abandoned housing lots are now being used to grow vegetables and other crops.
“Downtown Detroit once was farm- land,” Kwon notes. “So this just takes it back.”
He uses overhead graphics to illustrate the changes in Detroit and then switches to a different style for Manhattan, where beams of light track the routes of every pizza delivery on a random night.
It looks like a scene from the Fox drama “Touch,” and Kwon uses the same word “Touch” promos use: interconnectivity.
“We want to show how this is all a big grid and no part can work without the others. Without the whole food distribution system, you don’t get your hot pizza.”
Kwon admits he has always been fascinated with “how stuff works.” He has a B.A. in symbolic systems from Stanford.
But even though there’s other stuff he’d like to explore after this series, he wouldn’t mind if he does it on ground level.