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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Slow Food Nation Gains Momentum
  • Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:23:37 -0600

Published on Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Slow Food Nation Gains Momentum
by Shepherd Bliss
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/05/10806/

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.




  • [Livingontheland] Slow Food Nation Gains Momentum, Tradingpost, 08/08/2008

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