Twitter
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Delicious
Digg
Newsvine
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiSlow Food Nation Gains Momentum
Slow Food Nation leader Alice Waters -- founder of Berkeley's famous Chez Panisse Restaurant and author of eight food books -- spoke at the small town (8000 people) Sebastopol Farmers' Market in Northern California August 3. She was interviewed about the August 29-31 SFN celebration to happen around San Francisco by KRCB public radio host Michelle Anna Jordan for her "Mouthful" program to run that evening.
"We want to lift a loud voice to change our food system," Waters responded when asked about SFN, where over 50,000 people are expected. "We need to change the ways we grow, distribute, and eat food, which needs to be good, clean, and fair. Things are at a crisis point with respect to health and the environment."
Waters described how the lawn in front of San Francisco's Civic Center, one of the sites for SFN, has been replaced with a victory garden. "We have been talking about a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. This would be a way to talk about stewardship and nourishment. Thomas Jefferson had such a garden."
"A big message of Slow Food Nation is that we all need to be planting gardens," Waters noted. Addressing global climate change issues, she commented, "We need to have more greenhouses in the future, whether it gets too hot or too cold."
"How we eat can change the world," Waters has said elsewhere. By combining fresh produce from local farms with European cuisine, Waters helped create a food revolution and transform eating habits. At the Sebastopol market she also signed copies of her newest book "The Art of Simple Food."
Waters helped kick-off the Gravenstein Apple Month, which has been declared by both the Sebastopol City Council and the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. This is the time of year in this semi-rural area where one gets invitations such as the following: "If you want to help grind up large quantities of Gravenstein apples to make fresh juice, drink lots of juice, join a pot luck BBQ lunch, and get covered in apple pulp, come on over!"
"Gravensteins are a tasty apple that got left behind," Waters explained. The delicious "Grav" apple is at risk of becoming an endangered species. "Save the Gravensteins!" bumper stickers made by Slow Food and Community Alliance with Family Famers (CAFF) are popping up around the country. Slow Food has accepted the Sebastopol Grav as one of the traditional foods to which it gives attention to protect it from extinction.
SFN's "Come to the Table" call has garnered significant media attention. The New York Times (July 23) and San Francisco Chronicle (June 30) have each published long articles about the gathering that has a budget of some $2 million dollars. Some of its public events have already sold out.
Its main events are a Food for Thought speaker series, taste pavilions, a marketplace showcasing 60 local farmers and artisans, and the victory garden. Live music will be performed across town at the Ft. Mason meadow, an appropriate place to make "swords into plowshares." Special events include dinners, art, journeys, and hikes. Some are free, whereas others require tickets.
Slow Food was started by the Italian Carlo Petrini in 1986 to protest McDonald's and its fast food culture. It advocates traditional agriculture and food preparation and consumption, which differ from how many in the U.S. deal with food. SFN is the first such large gathering in the U.S.; it is modeled after events in Europe that have drawn thousands to Terra Madre gatherings.
The speaker series includes some of the leading voices in the growing global sustainable agriculture and food movement, such as Petrini, physicist Vandana Shiva of India, Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, University of California at Berkeley professor and author Michael Pollan, author Raj Patel, Native American leader Winona LaDuke, "Fast Food Nation" author Eric Schlosser, and the Land Institute's Wes Jackson of Kansas.
Their topics include "The World Food Crisis," "Building a New Food System," "Re-Localizing Food," "Climate Change and Food," and "Edible Education." Award-winning short films and documentaries will also be shown.
The "New, Fair Food System," as an example, will feature "activists who campaign on behalf of farm workers and meatpacking workers." It will focus on "how do you create a system in which eating well and treating people well are inextricably linked?"
A Call to Participate went out for a Youth Food Movement "to empower networks of students and young farmers, cooks, artisans, activists and eaters." Among those attending will be members of Sonoma State University's Slow Food Club, including its president, Robin Temple, a psychology student. While pruning on a local farm one day in late July Temple described some of his group's plans, "We will speak in classes during the last week of August to inform students of the event. We will make a film of the youth program there that will be shown at the October Terra Madre gathering in Italy. We have been working to get Michael Pollan and some of the other key speakers to come to campus."
"Slow food is the opposite of fast food. It is food that comes from local, sustainable farms," Temple writes in the SSU campus newspaper. "We intend to raise awareness about the profound effects of our food choices on the environment, on our health and on issues of social justice," he adds.
Some have criticized Slow Food for being elitist and catering to an older crowd that can afford better food and attend its sometimes-expensive dinners and gatherings. Temple represents a younger generation in the Slow Food Movement raising various challenges. "The current industrial model will soon fail for its heavy dependency on homogeneity and petroleum. As such, slow food is about survival," asserts Temple.
The Youth Food Movement invitation contends that "good, clean and fair food is a universal right." The youth gathering starts with an overnight retreat August 27 at a teaching farm on the California coast north of San Francisco, includes meeting at an art gallery that seeks to "build community through food and art," and concludes with an Eat-In at Dolores Park "on a long, 200-person table for a meal curated by Outstanding in the Field."
By-invitation-only events include a Changemakers Day and a National Congress. Around 600 participants will attend the August 29 Changemakers Day "designed for our nation's food system leaders." It will include "26 dynamic presentations on topics ranging from the viability of rare breeds to the nuts and bolts of engaging our isolated urban and rural communities in the sustainable food movement." Its seeks "to inspire leaders to knit new and diverse networks" and "lay the groundwork for more concrete, inclusive and effective collaboration in the sustainable food and farming movement," according to its website www.slowfoodnation.org.
The organizers expect "the clash of ideas, critical thinking from incisive minds, and inspiring dialog." The Changemakers Day emerged from a February Town Hall meeting composed of people from SFN and Roots of Change, a San Francisco co-sponsor of SFN.
Panels include the following: "Rising Seas, Shrinking Catch;" "Triple-Bottom Line," referring to social, environmental, and financial return to investors; "Preserving the Land Base;" "Ensuring Diversity;" "Nutrition for All: Improving Community Health;" "Rich Diet, Poor Communities;" "Going Local;" "Help Wanted: 50 Million New Farmers;" and "Reframing the Slow Food Conversation" to work more for social justice.
"I'll be a panelist on Changemakers Day," explained Steve Schwartz, while selling mushrooms from his New Carpati Farm at the Sebastopol Farmers' Market. "More people are thinking about what they eat these days. Passing by McDonald's my four-year-old says, 'That's junk food. It's bad for you.'"
Watching Schwartz and other farmers at the market talk about their crops, one can see that they are creating food-based relationships. "I'm proud to be a small part of this movement with a vision for a better food system. It can help activate people to work to change food policies."
Food, after all, is much more than something you just eat. It has traditionally drawn families, friends, and communities together. Agri-culture is at the base of culture. The preparation and sharing of food and drink creates and sustains culture.
"I went to Slow Food Nation's parent, Terra Madre in Italy," explained the manager of the Sebastopol Farmers' Market, Paula Downing. "It was life-changing. I plan to go to Slow Food Nation because I do not want to miss another chance for a life-changing event."
"Terra Madre was a heart event. It was a thrill to see families still making the food they have made for centuries. You feel this human thing. It was very emotional and made me cry. Some recipes for corn bread, for example, had been handed down for twenty generations," Downing continued. "I love the apple farmers here in Sonoma County. They are courageous. There is a history here that we need to remember."
"Slow Food is an opportunity to re-connect with our food and local growers and to understand the plight our planet is in. Our immunity and the immune system of the Earth are linked; building from here is a source of our healing," explained Ana Stayton of Golden Nectar Farm. "It helps create a sense of what real nourishment is. It brings farmers, children, and the community back into the food system, rather than leaving it in the hands of large corporations. Slow Food encourages people to grow and cook their own food and remember the pleasure in that."
"Being at Terra Madre was a powerful bonding experience," Stayton added. "It was intense being around people from over 150 countries in their traditional dress who have this common bond and language of the land, growing food, preserving local food cultures, preparing, serving and nourishing others."
"I discovered Tierra Vegetables last December while shopping," Mary Killian explained near the Slow Food table. "They have a delicious heritage bean. They so inspired me that I bought them as Christmas presents and included information about Slow Food." Slow Food also provides heritage turkeys from Sonoma County, one of its most active chapters.
Networking is common at Slow Food events. One grower at the Sebastopol market, Deborah Ramelli-Toth of Gratitude Gardens, was proudly carrying a couple dozen free-range eggs, though she has no chickens. "I traded them for tomatoes, of which I have many," she explained. She also made arrangements to share her canning equipment with a friend, Deb Kindy, who lives nearby in another town.
Waters spoke about the need to do something with all the food that is wasted, "We need to do more foraging and gleaning. Lots of food is wasted on the ground which is very edible."
On the land where Ramelli-Toth lives there will be a Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Slow Dinner the week before SFN, hosted by the Culinary Underground and Voluptuous Smoke under the apple trees at Nana Mae's orchard. According to the invitation the Gravs "have a long history yet are mostly ignored by the culinary mainstream." It adds, "Eating is a political act. Eat your view!"
"We've been writing a declaration and petition calling for a new national food policy," explained Michael Dimock at the SFN table at the Sebastopol Farmers' Market on July 27. Dimock has chaired Slow Food USA, been active in California Alliance for Family Farmers (CAFF), and is president of Roots of Change. "We need healthy food and agriculture," Dimock asserted. The declaration will be released Aug. 28 and will include a preamble, set of principles, and call to action.
The August 28 National Congress is composed of 300 delegates who represent the 16,000 U.S. members of the international Slow Food Movement, which has over 86,000 members in more than 100 countries. They are organized into what internationally are called convivium and are beginning to be called chapters here in the U.S., where there are around 200.
The Congress takes place every four years. Participants will engage in peer-to-peer networking and in leadership training and professional development. They will also vote on revisions to the National Statue. This year, for the first time, 35 Slow Food in Schools projects leaders will meet to discuss their garden-to-table efforts.
"When kids grow and cook their own food, they all want to eat it," Waters explained from her experiences with edible education programs. "They want an interactive education. They are happy to be in the garden. Kids are not just hungry for food. They are hungry for people to take care of them and for nature."
Direct democracy is important to the Slow Food Movement. When asked about the leadership of the Russian River Slow Food chapter in Sonoma County, Paula Shatkin explained that they have a leadership team of eleven persons, who do not have a hierarchy.
Shepherd Bliss, sbliss@hawaii.edu, has run the Kokopelli Farm in Northern California since l992 and currently teaches at Sonoma State University. His writing on agropsychology and agrotherapy are scheduled for various books during 2009.
29 Comments so far
Show AllYard gardens will be a larger part of our future. For more info. on how the world will change as a result of oil becoming more scarce, google James Howard Kunstler or kunstler.com.
PS--I grow my own herbs on my tiny condo balconey--there's nothing like fresh basil. And, I'm fortunate to have a mostly "local" producer in Hollywood, Florida who runs a once a week produce market. Best testing produce I've ever had--tastes infinitely better than the wasted-looking organic stuff in my big produce chain. And, that's the point. Alice Walters is, I believe, primarily an aging San Francisco hippie who got into "local" primarily for taste and low-cost (low-cost if you grow it yourself).
Hey melchiori, I expect you to be able to read!
And even if all of America didn't know what slow food is, it's a fact that the majority of the world does NOT eat fast or prefabricated food.
I live in Europe, and I don't care whether your horizon is so limited that you actually believe that you in your Midwest one-horse towns are "the world".
Because I know that you aren't the mainstream, although you think you are. I'm just trying to make you realize that it doesn't matter whether only few Americans do what the majority of the world actually does: YOUR lot is still the MINORITY in this world and you just live in an uniformed fast food bubble.
hemp4victory: Speaking from a rural heartland in Red State America I can tell you this. Food is normally very plain and boring. But even here, the times have been changing. Young people are going back to farming in order to produce wholesome, naturally raised food on land their parents and grandparents farmed and than kept as a part-time income. People might not know what slow food is or even like the term, but high food and energy prices are presenting an economic reality to rural areas. And besides, almost everyone in a rural area gets at least one deer a year.
Listen aqueerion, ask anyone outside od SF bay or boston what the slow food movement is and the answer will be "the what?" you know it and so do I. you live in a bubble.
"Terra Madre was a heart event. It was a thrill to see families still making the food they have made for centuries. You feel this human thing."
Indeed. And this still happens in many places around the world...except for the rapidly westernizing regions, which now means many places, unfortunately.
Sitting down to a home cooked meal made of local (or even better, home grown) foods is the most human and sacred thing one can do.
This is a wonderful, and some would say, blessed, movement. It has the potential of taking us back to the best parts of the way life was before hyper-consumerism swept us all up. Elitist, or not (NOT).
Marc melchiori, Omaha is fortunately not the world.
FAR more people around the world are eating so-called "slow food" (aka home-made food, mostly of local origin) than fast food or prefabricated food.
So it's YOU who lives in a bubble if you think that the way they do it in the American Midwest is the reality. No, it's the exception, looked at globally. YOU are the minority.
And BTW: They look the part, those folks in the Midwest.
Come out to Omaha and ask anyone there what slow food is. You people live in a bubble - not in reality. What the F are you people talking about.
slow food? at an elitist restaurant in northern Calif? Give me a break. What about NO food in poor countries...because of grain specualtors who dine in these fancy resturants and laugh all the way to the bank? Give me a break ... I know people who are so poor they might eat the "cook" at Mcdonads.
I love how liberal is now being painted as elitist. If one looks up the meaning in a dictionary, it would seem to point more toward the Neo-con side. And does everything have to become political? Even a garden. Jeez. Its only in the last 60 years that people have become so removed from their food source. I have a garden , because I like to grown some of my own food. Being a little independent is not a polictical statement. Its real!
So RTDury,
How is SFN doing in RURAL California? If it's not working there, SFN had better change its rhetoric and as another poster pointed out, incorporate slow food into social justice or else it will be another 50 years of poor people staying shackled to McDonalds while the uber-wealthy go healthy. I'm not saying that SFN is elitist per se but the way they're presenting themselves is piss poor and has yet to reach the audience it is really intended for.
RTDury - "respecting life is to eletist" I hope by respecting life you also incude the unborn and the aged.
And now I must go water my very thirsty garden. That's the one thing about container gardening - they gotta be watered no less than every three hours from sun up to sun down. They also gotta be fed. But it's a labor of love because they're really giving back to me.
I have a small yard and no place for a garden - or so I thought. I had nearly stopped eating because the smell of "fresh" vegetables in the stores made me gag, and I couldn't remember the last veggie I'd eaten that tasted like a carrot, a zuchinni, lettuce, and so on. So last winter I sat in my recliner and designed the garden I was going to plant so I could have real veggies again.
I have a couple of whiskey barrel halves, and quite a few large flower pots or containers. I now have a monstrous tomato plant in the barrel, loaded with tomatoes. In the same barrel I have two acorn squash plants that simply crawled over the sides and are running into the bark beneath, and are covered with squash. In a smaller large container I have a zuchinni that has provided me with enough zuchinni for me to have one a day. I have a monster bean bush, about six plants in a long plastic window box planter with trellises in an inverted V over it, but as yet I've only gotten four beans, and have serious doubts about it. I planted a bunch of carrot seeds around the edge of the other whiskey barrel because there's a flowering bush in it I didn't want to disturb, so I just confined it to the middle of the barrel. Unfortunately, I only have five carrots, but they're doing great.
I got a strawberry plant from a neighbor who was moving. She'd had it for years, and it was in a small plastic planter the kind you buy plants in at the store. It had runners that had gown against the side and it was really pathetic. She also gave me a small wooded planter box, about 1' X 1.5" and I took the plants from the plastic pot, and ended up with six very sickly plants, and put them in the wooden box. They're huge, healthy, and producing. Runners are growinig over the sides into pots of soil sitting there waiting for them.
So space is no excuse for not planting a garden. Where there's a will, there's a way.
hemp4victory: "It's too elitist to make an impact"
Too elitist? Taking care of one's health is too elitist? Respecting life is too elitist? Yes of course, these are too elitist for brainwashed enslaved red state America. When is red state America going to break the chains of oppression?
In order to be relevant to anyone other than rich white folks who can afford to spend $6 a pound on heirloom tomatoes, SFN needs to shift the focus from "slowness" to "justice". If the Slow Food movement doesn't do a better job of incorporating social justice issues into its platform, they run the risk of helping to create a system of "food apartheid," which will leave poor folks behind at McDonald's while their rich, enlightened counterparts eat local, sustainable, organic, healthy, farmworker-friendly food. A group like SFN, who has the resources to spend $2 million on a 2-day event that will take place just blocks from one of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods should expand its world view and work in collaboration with anti-hunger and anti-poverty organizations in order to affect change that will cross economic barriers. I challenge SFN participants and organizers to walk the few blocks from San Francisco's Civic Center to the Tenderloin and check out the food lines in front of Glide or St. Anthony's. Take a look at the faces of hunger in the US, then make a commitment to work for economic justice, and the promotion of healthy eating as a hunger/poverty/health issue.
There are at least a million soccer moms who don't know how to cut up a chicken or plant a row of potatoes or feed a rabbit or hang laundry on a clothesline. I think a lot of them will learn next year. Until then, shop til you drop.
If you're in a staunch blue area such as San Francisco, then yeah it'll gain plenty of momentum. But out in red state America or even stark red areas of blue states? Forget it. It's too elitist to make an impact.
Mandi: Your children are lucky to have you as such a caring intelligent role model! I never had a green thumb but I have begun to garden and planted fruit trees... it is a great feeling to pluck a fruit from one's own garden, although birds and lately grasshoppers are challenging my claim to these items.
The biggest thing for me is knowing where my food comes from and it is very satisfying to me when a majority of what is on my plate grew from my own garden. The same garden I tended while working more than full time because it is important to me. Location can often be an issue for having a garden, but full time employment should never be the issue. You just have to make it a priority if it matters to you. It matters what I feed my children. It matters that we eat it at a table, with candles lit and no tv. It will matter to them too someday.
I don't know if fast food is the cause or if it is the result, but I do know that it has no place in my own very busy life.
"slow food is about survival" half of you retards could never grow a f- ing weed much less an edible plant. i would love to see the slow food movement become a reality - I'd have alot of you dumb dumbs knocking on my door asking me for food.
now you all are gonna tell HOW to eat as if telling me what to eat was not enough. This is obsurd. Get the hell out of my life and the lives of other folks. If you all wanna eat slow go ahead. Leave us the F alone.
There are plants you can grow in pots in your home to supplement purchased food and dilute the toxins in your diet. Buy a few organic items if you can afford them. Make as healthy choice as you can when you have to eat fast food.
I am a cheese maker. small scale 5,500 lbs total production last year. i resigned my slow food membership a few months ago because for the last three years i have been unable to get an answer to those three questions:
1) why is a cheese produced with recombinant rennet on the ark?
2) why did the raw milk presidium support enforcement of HACCP for all raw milk producers?
3) why CAFOs are included in the raw milk presidium?
As far as dairy is concerned good, clean and fair has been stretched to the limit. Slow Food Nation is a great marketing opportunity, nothing more, nothing less.
Maybe if everyone just took the time and energy it takes to be critical of a messenger, and just looked at the message ...
It is easier to rationalize, and it does free one from having to look at what piece of a good idea might be doable, but health doesn't care about the words, just actions. If you can do one single thing for your health, turning back toward the direction of your natural fit in the actual world your body was born into - just because you can't have it all, doesn't mean the best response is to be critical of others who are trying, making their best effort. I love to see obfuscation, etc., in response to someone who is offering a gift!
I have always had a little garden, even as I worked full time. There is something very thereputic about digging in the soil in the spring or yanking weeds in the summer and mulching and putting the garden to bed for the winter. Many people do not have space for a garden, but most people have at least a small window to grow some fresh herbs.
atheist does have a point. Our competetive hyperactive culture has created a need for fast food. I have to go out to my garden and pick some green beans for supper. bye.
"we all need to be planting gardens"
Yah, well, that's really quaint. Some people have neither the space nor the time to plant or tend a garden.
I believe that fast food is the RESULT of our fast-paced culture, not a contributor to the cause of it. I actually blame computers, or machinery in general. I'm beginning to think that the only people who have time to plant gardens or cook all of their meals from scratch don't work full time.
the food we eat is inseparable from our health (mental and physical) and the health of our environment
Until I see Slow Food Nation's name as sponsoring food stamp or housing legislation, or see California Slow Food members stand up against budget cuts to SSI and CalWORKs, I will agree that Slow Food is elitist. The comment you published from Mr. Temple that the "current industrial model will soon fail for its heavy dependency on homogeneity and petroleum" is true enough but people are hungry RIGHT NOW including many single parents juggling two jobs, dealing with domestic violence, mental illness, and recovery from substance abuse, who need good nutritious food that won't take hours to fix, or who don't particularly care about the esthetics of food. If Slow Food supporters could bring their considerably abundant resources to bear on the poverty issue, maybe we wouldn't have only 50% food stamp enrollment in California, or maybe we'd have a decent health care system by now. Yes, we ultimately do want to transform our agricultural system into a sustainable one with low impact on the environment, our health, and labor, but in the short run many of the initiatives we support (including Prop 2 in California to give hens more room) will either raise food prices or be easily portrayed as raising prices (thus giving a strong moral argument to anti-progressive forces.) The environmental and slow food movements need to take a broader perspective and fight for more food resources for people: (the anti-poverty people have already taken this broader perspective, that's why we're supporting things like Prop 2.) So I challenge Slow Food and its supporters to think about poverty, try to live on a food stamp diet of $3 a day, see how your lifestyle needs would work on an SSI budget of $870 a month, and take some time to learn about CalWORKs and what it is and what needs to change about it.
Lets not make this a brand new phenomenon. Most cultures are only a decade removed from their way of eating, which was slow to begin with. Is it just more sensationalist to say "The Slow Food Movement" and make a quick buck out of it, just to get your name out there, compared to being the driving force behind reviving a lost culture?
Is there no glamour in cooking, eating and growing the way our parents or granparents were? Is it just easier to look down upon the way they were doing things, rather than respect it, and put less time and effort into your own cooking? Is it just "cool" to have the quick fix?
McDonald's took away a lot from the culture. This may seem to be another way to "invent" methods, in this case of cooking, before researching preexisting methods of doing the same in other cultures, and calling it American, as has been the norm of the west.