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TechnoratiSAN FRANCISCO - Pick up your forks and knives, and let the revolution start now.
That's the rallying cry of the organizers of Slow Food Nation, an event designed to change the way people eat.
Fifty thousand people, including some of the world's leading food authorities, health care experts, farmers and policymakers, are expected to attend the four-day exhibition in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend - what's being called the largest celebration of American food in history.
Their message: Americans need to fix the food system or risk destroying their health and the planet.
"This impacts every single one us," said Mayor Gavin Newsom. "No matter where we live or how we've been raised, this is a profoundly important issue."
Workers will break ground Tuesday on a vegetable garden at San Francisco City Hall, where the public can take free tours and taste fresh produce. In addition, Slow Food Nation, held at both the Civic Center and Fort Mason, will include lectures, workshops, cooking demonstrations, tastings, films, concerts, hikes, a farmers' market and a "Slow on the Go" food court. Some of the programs are free; others require tickets that range in price from $5 to $65 (slowfoodnation.org) to help offset the $2 million cost.
One highlight will be the pavilions at Fort Mason, which will be divided by types of food - chocolate, cheese, bread, honey and the like - showcasing American varieties and artisan producers. At the Civic Center, speakers will include "Fast Food Nation" author Eric Schlosser; author, farmer and cultural critic Wendell Berry; and nutrition expert and "What to Eat" author Marion Nestle.
European influences
Slow Food Nation is the first such event to be held in the United States, although it's patterned after similar events in Europe.
Slow Food, a philosophy that food should be not only savored, but also produced with a social and environmental conscience, started as an Italian protest movement in 1986.
Furious that McDonald's had come to Rome, political activist Carlo Petrini organized a demonstration against the fast-food chain.
"Rather than take the French route - driving a tractor through the building - Petrini took a more Italian hedonistic tack," said Michael Pollan, a UC Berkeley professor and well-known food journalist and author who, like Petrini, is scheduled to speak on several panels. "Petrini set up trestle tables in front of the McDonald's, called upon Italy's grandmothers to make their favorite dishes and served them to passers-by."
Since then, Slow Food organizations have formed in 131 countries, working to preserve local cuisine and lobby for more sustainable and fair-wage farming practices.
Critics have denounced the movement, calling it elitist and accusing it of trying to stand in the way of farming and production methods that would make food cheaper. Proponents argue that eating local products grown and raised without chemicals, as opposed to nonorganic imported goods, will save the environment, lead to good health and save Americans money.
"Unless we squeeze the fossil fuel out of our dinner," Pollan said, we won't be able to maintain a viable food supply. "We no longer can catch salmon in Alaska, fillet it in China and serve it in New York."
Food as a language
Slow Food Nation founder Alice Waters, the Berkeley restaurateur who popularized the idea of serving food straight from local, organic farms to the table at her Chez Panisse restaurant, says the timing of the event, which kicks off on the eve of the presidential election, is no coincidence.
"We want people to vote with their forks," she said. "Food is our common language. The choices we make about what we eat not only affect our health, but affect our planet."
Pollan hopes the event will help galvanize the new administration to push for a better food agenda in this country.
"There's a real need for rethinking things," he said, adding that the world is in the midst of a food crisis, with people either starving or obese. There's something terribly wrong, says Pollan, when "it's cheaper to buy a double cheeseburger than a head of broccoli."
Countries like Haiti and the Philippines have become so reliant on imported rice that they've stopped growing their own, said Pollan, who blames globalization. Now their citizens are going hungry.
Back to basics
Newsom's worries are closer to home.
"In the Bayview, the only produce being sold is at a liquor store, and it's three days past its due date," he said. "Instead, I see a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Taco Bell. Our fast-food culture is the primary contributor to the health care costs in this country."
Waters complains that people don't even know how to cook anymore.
"We used to know how," she said. "We just got disconnected from it. The globalization of food took us by surprise. People told us, 'It's too hard to cook. Let us do it for you.' "
She hopes that Slow Food Nation will motivate people to get back to the basics - "learn how to fry an egg or stir polenta." She's also optimistic that participants will be spurred to reject industrialized farming, persuaded to eat locally and inspired to fight for changes in food policy.
None of this is far-fetched, said Waters, who has seen a significant shift in the public's attitude in the last five years - especially in the 18-to-22-age group.
"All of a sudden, it's happening," she said. "There are all these people who want to live off the grid. They want to farm. I see young people with their kids buying food at the farmers' market."
She acknowledges that the Bay Area may be a bit ahead of the curve.
"Next year," she said, "we'll take it to Washington, D.C., then New Orleans, then the Midwest."
© 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.
25 Comments so far
Show AllI live in Palo Alto , CA, a city that maintains several large organic gardens. Citizens of Palo Alto can rent a plot of land, at a small cost, from the city, on which to plant organic vegetables. I had a good sized plot for some 25 years. I grew most of my families vegetables and enough to give to friends and neighbors. I started seeds at home, grew plants under grow lights and planted them out in the garden. There is something quite wonderful about sitting down to a meal of healthy, organic food you planted in your garden from seeds you started and nurtured.
As the old saying, goes, via Henry Ford."the day will come when food will be our medicine..." paying a little more, for health, seems small to me, as fat assed "suburben car ass" people pay twice as much and eat half as less and you will be healthy wealthy and wise,,,,reminds me of Ben Franklin,.."if you want to eat a lot, eat a little and you will live long enough to eat a lot..."
There you go again. Turning everybody into farmers. Thats how everything got screwed up in the first place. It produced to many people. Me, I am a hunter gatherer. That was and is still the really healthy diet.
people should spend more money on food...and less on everything else, like gas...start walking or biking and eating good food...you'll feel better and be happier...
he with the most joys when he dies, wins
IMO the slow food movement can incorporate meat eaters, so long as sustainability is central to the methodology. First and foremost, pastured livestock is the key. That removes much of the negative from agribusiness: corn or other commodities raised for livestock feed (and many of those GMOs, fattening Big Ag); no hormones, antibiotics, etc. Pastured is simply more healthful, and I have taken the time to visit local farms that employ sustainable methodologies to see whether their treatment of animals is humane.
These non-CAFO farms, which is to say, family farms, are usually happy to show visitors around and explain their methods. My beef rancher took me and my wife on a 4-hour tour, explaining the varieties of grasses used, the basics of managed intensive grazing (MIG), and letting me walk out among the rather relaxed cattle. These animals were not caged, they were healthy, and there was actually no manure smell at all.
Here in PA, there is a resurgence in interest in raw milk and raw milk cheese, both of which have far superior flavor. Pastured eggs, as Mother Earth has shown, have better nutritional properties, and have nice firm ornage yolks, as opposed to store-bought, with pale, runny yolks.
While I respect vegan and vegetarian dietary choices, a return to what I call "the old new" of traditional family farms practicing sustainable methods is NOT bad for the environment, or for the feeding of those in developing countries. I believe all these viewpoints have a place at the table of the Slow Food movement.
Come on kelmer, don't be so negative, jeez
purvis ames: By calling this a bourgeois movement, you indicate that you don't get it, do you? It's not about being bourgeois, it's about sustainability and health.
Fast food is cheap and quick, sure, but it's not good for you, and it's not good for the earth. Fast food is like a drug -- it feels good for the moment (tastes good, is cheap), but it leads you and everyone else on a downward spiral.
You make a valid point, that people have to survive in the short-term and maybe can't afford good food. But what a miserable situation our society has gotten itself into, that people can't afford good food!
This issue goes way beyond just choosing between fast food and good (slow) food -- it is a commentary on a deep sickness in our society. We desperately need to consider long-term sustainability in everything we do, and fast food is not a sustainable way to nourish ourselves or to take care of the earth.
The inexpensiveness of fast food is an illusion -- there are many costs to the earth not included in the price. Unless we get smarter and start behaving more responsibly, the bubble is going to burst. We need to realize that industrialized agriculture (which is what supports the artificially cheap food sold in fast food places and the supermarket) is unsustainable and begin changing the way food is produced. We may have to pay more for it, but that is just facing up to the true cost of food. We have been lured into the false illusion that food is cheap by the practices of agribusiness. Now we need to get back to reality and start seeing the big picture, which means we have to base our eating and all consumer behavior on an ethic of sustainability.
Recycle1 - Oh, it's only twice as much at your local farmer's market. The cleaning lady trying to support a couple of kids will be glad to hear it. Now if she just had enough space (and time) for her own garden.
purvis ames-I don't know about paying 3 times for local produce. I've found at my farmer's market, the most it's been is twice the amount (which goes to the farmer directly) and it's nearly free when it comes from my garden. Frankly, if more americans were actually BUYINg produce, I'd be more interested in the price differential. Instead, as a people, we're getting fatter on $4 bags of 15 ounce potato chips, then crabbing about the farmer's potato costing too much. Or spending $6 on a meal at McDonalds when that same $6 could buy you some fruit and you could MAKE your own bagette.
As a completely haut bourgeois movement backed by people who eat at Alice Water's restaurants, scarfing down local produce which costs three times as much as what you get at the grocery store, the whole Slow Food thing sounds great. Back in reality, and I'm writing from Paris, where arguably the food is better than anywhere else in the world, a simple, decent meal at a corner cafe will run you thirty dollars (twenty Euros). There is a McDonalds or Pizza Hut on every other block where working people can actually get something to eat. Until such time as the Slow Food movement can address this problem, they will continue to sound like a bunch of Marie Antoinettes braying: "Let them eat organic, vegan cake!"
Earl Simmins
Try a meat eater, they behave like real vegetables.
l ate vegetarian once, they taste like veal.
I know when I'm in Turkey, breakfast is bread, olives, feta cheese, rechel, melon. Lunch almost identical, Dinner usually a bean, small white beans in olive oil and garlic, eat late and take our time. They use things called meze, a whole bunch of dishes that are humuus, bean salads, fish caught outside our window, we buy all of our produce from the villages. They come in the morning with their donkeys, weights to balance a scale tossed across the donkeys back, 2 kilos of tomatos, domates, like .50 cents. Damn though gas is $5 per liter, they're paying $10 a gallon. Car is there only for a long haul, everyone walks, no suburban car ass.
I cannot believe we got that place for $25K 20 years ago, out the back balcony you are gazing at the Agean, other side mountains. It is the climate and water that adds to a slower pace. Nice..
I live in the tiny village of Independence in the desert of eastern California. We have plenty of irrigation water from the streams flowing down out of the High Sierra above town.
I have 22 fruit trees in my back yard in a hedgerow planting like you would find in the hills above Genoa, Italy. I planted them 7 years ago in a space about 100 feet by 25 feet (30 x 8 meteres). I keep them pruned to 8 feet (3 meters) in height.I had sweet cherries for about 3 weeks, and am now enjoying a bumper crop of apricots with plenty to share with my friends and neighbors.
There is nothing more delicious than tree ripened fruit, and it is not possible for the supermarkets to offer it.
Kelmer,
I know a lot of vegans, personally, who are into the slow food movement. I think some of them have formed their own Slow Food vegan groups. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area vegans live among the meat eaters, and for the most part they all seem to get along just fine. I've noticed that most of my friends who do eat meat, but try to eat locally, organically and sustainably (for a meat eater) tend not to eat that much meat at all, compared to the average American. If anything I think the Slow Food movement has helped people realize how destructive and unhealthy a heavy meat diet is. The slow food movement should be viewed as a positive thing. Not something to be susicious of. It sounds to me like you have a lot of passion for the vegan diet (which is good), but are trying to find fault in the Slow Food movement. I really don't think you need to be suspicious. I don't think they are trying to purposefully decieve anyone. I think they only have good intentions in mind. Let's look at the Slow Food movement as a great way to expose people to the benefits of vegetarianism and veganism.
There is more to slow food than just a long lunch, homegrown organiuc food and a long siesta, e.g. slow food communities in Italy reserve prime locations for family food enterprises and push supermarkets out to the community borders.
VERY important message-- thank you Stacy Finz!
Want this message on video? Try the new movie on DVD at
www.foodmatters.tv
Best wishes,
Nerissa
wilmoor-I couldn't agree more-start kids gardening when they are young and they'll eat veggies and fruit. Every year I plant more peas and every year we have nary a pea to cook-my kids and their friends are too busy eating them like they are nature's candy. I've resorted to picking the undeveloped pods to use in stir fry so we can get SOME of the bounty. A price I'm willing to pay. These same kids won't touch veggies at home but for some reason, love to eat salads they've harvested here.
The slow food people seem suspiciously disinterested in promoting smart food--as in a vegan diet.
You cant be wasting water, grain, pasture land, and slaughtering wildlife(pests) and claim to be promoting a slow diet.
Its just slower destruction.
My small container garden is growing great in the bark and black plastic side of my yard. My zuchinni, in a large plastic flower pot sitting in my wheelbarrow, has already given me four very nice meals; two acorn squash plants in a whiskey barrel with a huge tomato plant are heading to the side of the barrel where I'm sure they'll produce well down in the bark, and in a long plastic window box-type container, my beans are growing well up two square trellises tied together at the top and positioned over the beans in an inverted V.
I also rescued a small decaying flower pot with straggly strawberry plants my neighbor had ignored except to water when she thought of it. From one good plant and several others fighting to survive among weeds crowding them up against the side of the pot, I now have six very healthy plants covered with blossoms. From the runners of these plants, I'll be able to have a pretty decent patch of berries before too long.
I'm lovin' it!
In our first house in the city, we had no place for a garden. We did have a small strip of bare ground along our front walk for flowers. One day my three year old son took some beans that had fallen to the floor while I was preparing to cook them, and he planted them in that strip. Then he watched them grow. I could never get him to eat green beans, but when I cooked those growing on "his" vines, he didn't hesitate to eat them.
I saw such a good lesson there. Kids really do like to plant things and watch them grow. And like my son, I'm sure kids would eat everything they had a hand in growing. Start them growing things before they get hooked up to the many electronics mind-numbing contraptions and "into" packaged junk food.
In many Latin American and European countries, long lunches and short siestas have been the norm for a long time. Unfortunately, as corporate "progress" has visited these nations, food-on-the-go is supplanting the more sane and humane ways of old.
What's cool about Slow Food is that it is such a personal and revolutionary act. Not only do we make and enjoy food, but we are involved in the growing of it. Growing your own food is one of the most revolutionary acts one can take. By the sweat of our brow, we are able to slowly disconnect from the corporate feed trough. Not all at once, and not completely, but one seed, one garden, one act at a time.
Raise your trowels in support and defiance!
"The Europeans have it down. Lunch and a nap! And its also not to late to start your winter garden!"
In Mexico, it was always a long lunch and a short siesta, which not only helps digestion, but is honoring the midday sun's heat and the natural rhythm of the day, resuming work until sundown. Think of the energy we'd save if everything slowed down in the sunbelt states.
We are what we eat, has never been truer then today. Whats the hurry. Enjoy your meal from start to finish. And longer lunch breaks would be a start. The Europeans have it down. Lunch and a nap! And its also not to late to start your winter garden!