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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Slow Food Nation Attracts 50,000 — Beneath The Surface
  • Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:59:56 -0600


Slow Food Nation Attracts 50,000 — Beneath The Surface
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/09/slow-food-nation-attracts-50000-%E2%80%94-beneath-the-surface/
by Shepherd Bliss / September 2nd, 2008

“Come to the table,” Slow Food Nation invited. And come to San Francisco over
Labor Day weekend they did — around 50,000 people attending perhaps the
largest food celebration in American history.

Tables and straw bales appeared in the heart of the city’s Civic Center
around a victory garden on about a quarter of an acre that had replaced a
lawn. It was surrounded by a huge marketplace, which was like an
old-fashioned farmers’ market that gets food directly from the farm to the
fork, bypassing corporate super-markets.

A couple of miles away by the Bay at Ft. Mason — inside an old military
hangar stretching over the length of a couple of football field — people
strolled down a long aisle to taste fresh seafood, chocolate, wine, olives,
ice cream, Indian bread and other delightful options. They could also attend
free film showings and rock concerts at the former military base transformed
into a cultural center.

Meanwhile, inside large auditoriums and smaller meeting rooms people
discussed the growing global food crisis, how to respond to it, and imagined
possible futures for farming. The final panel included the following key
voices in the growing world-wide sustainable agriculture movement: Italian
Carlo Petri, the founder of Slow Food in l986, physicist Vandana Shiva from
India, Kentucky poet and author Wendell Berry, UC Berkeley professor Michael
Pollan, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse Restaurant, and Fast Food Nation author
Eric Schloesser.

Petri emerged as a storytelling organizer, Shiva as a radical scientist,
Berry as an elder statesman, Pollan as a teacher with a broad theoretical
frame, Waters as an inspiring chef, and Schloesser as a reporter from the
field.

“Good, Clean, and Fair”

“Good, clean, and fair” are Slow Food Nation’s (SFN) goals, described in a
panel as the “Triple Bottom Line.” Good means food that has a welcoming taste
and fair means that the farmworkers and others are treated well. Clean is
more difficult to describe, so a panel “Exploring the Meaning of Clean” was
offered.

SFN was fortunate to be covered by more than a couple hundred daily
newspapers and other corporate media. However, this coverage by the fast
press gave little or not attention to the substance beneath the pleasurable,
attractive surface. This article focuses more on the critique of our food
system that many of SFN’s Food for Thought speakers articulated.

“We’re not the leaders,” the elder Berry asserted. “We’re the catalysts. More
and more people are talking to each other and doing things for each other.
This is the cooperation principle.” Berry focused on the importance of being
thrifty, growing a local economy, and being a good neighbor.

“We’ve made terrible mistakes in this country in terms of exploitation,”
Berry admitted, echoing one of SFN’s main themes of social justice. “We
continue to do so with the migrant population of Mexico.”

“The themes here are the themes of the next century,” Petri declared,
painting a larger picture in Italian, which was translated into English. “If
they are not, there will not be a future. Sooner or later these issues will
arrive on the tables of all politicians.”

“Lets get rid of the heavy coat of being consumers, which destroys our
lives,” Petri continued. “It allows all the injustices we have been hearing
about. Enough of being consumers. Try to consume less every day. Lets all
start wasting less. Lets free ourselves from this consumptive disease.”
Frequently waving his arms, the bearded, grandfatherly Petri often brought
humor and laughs to serious matters with compelling stories.

“Food Matters”

“Food matters,” Pollan asserted. “It is about politics and our health. The
food issue has gotten on the national agenda because of the world food
crisis. Food prices are high and the era of cheap food is over. Yet
politicians have not been talking about food; they need to deal with it. It
involves all the issues — energy, the price of oil, climate change, and
health.”

Pollan continued, “We have been eating oil for 30 years now. We don’t have
the oil any more. Agriculture is the original solar energy. We can eat
without oil. We need to return to a diet of contemporary sunlight.”

“Markets are being stolen from farmers,” the activist physicist Shiva
asserted, indicting industrial agriculture corporations. “The Gates
Foundation is doing everything wrong in India. It continues the obsolete
paradigm of getting pesticides into Africa and elsewhere. I think that the
Gates Foundation is criminal. Monsanto and Cargill are killing people. We
need to enforce anti-trust laws against them.” Shiva described the large
number of farmers in India who are committing suicide because they are being
displaced and loosing meaning in life.

Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Kansas echoed Shiva’s concerns, “What
the Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation are proposing is a new Green
Revolution. The data is in about its (negative) consequences.”

“The U.S. shapes global appetites and is destroying our laws in India. GMOs
(Genetically Modified Organisms) are being placed on fast forward. Your local
solutions need global consciousness.”

“You cannot underestimate the powers of those who will resist change,”
Schloesser commented. “We need to create and broaden a real movement. We need
a Slow Food Nation in Des Moines, Iowa. Our policies and companies cause harm
to thousands who have not had a seat at the table.”

In an earlier panel that he moderated with workers and their advocates,
Schloesser noted, “The sustainable agriculture movement has been successful
in the last ten years.” He pointed to the growth of farmers’ markets, organic
food, animal rights, and “a renewed appreciation for the taste of food.”

“But something has been missing,” Schloesser contended, “human rights. The
people who harvest, process and prepare the food” have not been given their
fair share. Schloesser and other panelists described the slavery involved in
the tomato industry in Florida and the particular difficulties of
meatpackers. Farmworkers and restaurant workers are among the poorest paid in
the U.S.

International activists such as Petri and Shiva and their U.S. colleagues
help pull down the veil placed by the corporate fast media in this country.
It conceals much of the deadly action of our food system (which one
government official described as “acceptable risks”) that systematically
exploits workers in the U.S and world-wide, drains natural resources from
around the globe, and exports our deadly chemicals and practices that thwart
traditional agriculture.

As such notables discussed food inside to sold out crowds sitting in
comfortable chairs, a soap box was set up outside in the Victory Garden where
farmers and others educated the tourists and casual observers who came there
just by chance or deliberately and sat down on straw bales. The marketplace
surrounding the garden on about a quarter of an acre often had long lines at
booths where farmers from around California offered their diverse foods. One
felt like they were in an old-fashioned village where people were enjoying
themselves with slow conversations, bumping into each other in a crowded
plaza.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom strolled by the garden and explained, “Both
Alice Waters and I got down and helped plant the garden. We plan to leave it
up at least through Thanksgiving and the end of November. Then we will decide
what to do.” Waters added, “I’ve been wanting a garden on the White House
lawn for a long time.”

At the soapbox orchardist Peter Jacobson of Yountville, California, spoke
about “Learning from Chefs.” He advocated and described the growing trend of
chefs developing relationships with local farmers. Both farmers and chefs are
under a lot of pressure — usually at different times of the day. Farmers
often begin their work before sun-up and chefs often continue past sundown.

50 Million More Farmers Needed

“We need 50 million more farmers if we are going to be able to farm
sustainably” in the U.S. Jacobson asserted, echoing a theme raised at SFN and
by Wendell Berry in his l977 The Unsettling of America: Culture and
Agriculture, published by Sierra Club Books.

SFN offered a specific panel on “Edible Education,” which focused on schools
for children. The long weekend itself also became an educational process.
People learned about food and agriculture by what they heard and saw, as well
as by what they tasted. Musicians reminded participants that agriculture and
the food that it produces is a basis of culture.

RSK Arts and Drumming played traditional Nigerian drums and told stories,
including one about a native doctor who used food as medicine. They sang a ”A
Farmer’s Song” and Rasaki Aladokun explained, “We mean real farmer’s labor,
not mechanized.” The drums sent out a heart beat rhythm throughout the
victory garden that could surely be heard in downtown offices and which
inspired little blonde girls to dance among the vegetables. The drums
themselves were made of plants and animal skins, which provide us nourishment
in other ways as well.

“We all eat everyday,” master chef Waters noted. “There are consequences to
the choices we make with respect to our health, environment, and culture.
Edible education is to help children understand those consequences.”

African American Van Jones of Green for All in Oakland was one of the most
applauded panelists at SFN. “The clean energy wave is what I focus on —
replacing pollution-based energy,” Jones said. “We have a crisis in our
public school system. The schools fail to teach kids about how to get jobs
and how to eat. We need to change how we fuel our buildings, as well as our
bodies. The green economy that we are building can pull everyone together. We
need to put the hungry kids without resources at the center. We need a
movement to go from diesel to soul.”

“The interests of big business is a big part of why agriculture is failing.
We need to put the interests of big business to the side,” the chair of SFN’s
board, Katrina Heron, noted. “Big likes to talk to big,” noted SFN Executive
Director Anya Fernald. This makes it difficult for small family farmers to be
selected to provide food to the massive school lunch programs.

The Climate Change and Food panel was opened by moderator and author Mark
Hertsgaard as follows: “We are gathered here today three years and a day
after Hurricane Katrina. Today Hurricane Gustav is roaring through the
Caribbean and headed toward New Orleans. It reminds us of the enormous power
weather events have on food. How do we feed the world as we look out over the
next 25 to 50 years?” The deadly specter of famine was raised.

Hertsgaard continued, “The rising temperatures will have ominous impacts on
our food production. Yields of corn and other staples are projected to
decline 10-20 percent in the Mid-West.” He added that projections in Africa
are up to a 50% decline in the next 20 years. He said that there are now 800
million people in water-stressed parts of the world, which is projected to
rise to some three billion people in 25 years.

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, noted that, “fossil
fuel-based civilization is unsustainable. The uncertainty of climate change
is what is problematic. The farm bill locks the U.S. into five years of
unparalleled disaster. There is a profound denial about food in American
politics. Politicians do not get it.”

“The thunderstorms that hit the Mid-West last year are creating soil erosion
in Iowa and elsewhere,” the Land Institute’s Wes Jackson noted. “For future
generations this could be more significant that Katrina. We have to get back
to the stuff that we are made of, which is soil.”

“What scares me about this historical moment is that some of the big
bio-technology and agribusiness corporations are presenting themselves as
solutions to the problems,” revealed author Anna Lappe of the Small Planet
Institute. “But biotechnology neither increases yields or diversity nor does
it democratize the food system.” She later added, “Organic agriculture can
match or pass the yield of chemical, industrial agriculture. Industrial-style
agriculture depletes resources in ways that are not accounted for.”

Echoing what her mother Frances Moore Lappe wrote about in Diet for a Small
Planet, her daughter asserted that “the problem today on the planet with
respect to hunger is not a question of scarcity. We have enough food to feed
us all. It is a crisis of democracy, as my mother wrote thirty years ago.”

The Food for Thought speakers’ series took a systems approach. It related
food and agriculture to issues such as climate change, social justice,
re-localizing food, and the policy and planning needed to replace our current
food system with a more sustainable one. Food security, energy security, and
climate security were approached as intimately linked.

“Food is a universal right, not a privilege,” declared Josh Verteil, the new
president of Slow Food USA. He will coordinate the some 200 Slow Food
chapters in the United States, which has around 16,000 members among the more
than 80,000 members in the international organization.

Six hundred leaders in the food industry were invited to come to a
Changemakers Day at the beginning of SFN to discuss key issues. At these
sessions one could hear lively conversations between different groups of
people, including farmers and government regulators.

Local, National, and International Implications

SFN’s agenda was local, national, and international. On the local level the
intention was to turn people toward what they can eat from local farmers,
especially at a time when gasoline prices are rising, which contributes to a
rise in food prices. The average travel distance from field to fork in the
U.S. is 1500 miles.

On the national level, the draft of a Declaration for Healthy Food and
Agriculture of slightly over 500 distilled words was released. Six months in
the writing, the intention is to gather some 300,000 endorsers and take the
document to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2009 to influence the next farm
bill.

The author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, Daniel
Imhoff, was the originating author and primary editor of the Declaration.
Among its editors and framers were Pollan, Berry, Waters, Former Deputy
Secretary of the USDA Richard Rominger, and Michael Dimock, who is the
president of Roots of Change, one of SFN’s co-sponsors. The Declaration is
now posted on www.fooddeclaration.org and seeks comments and endorsers before
a final version appears.

“The driving force behind the Declaration,” explained Imhoff while at a Taste
Pavilion at Ft. Mason, “was to describe what healthy food is. We want to make
the link between health and food.” Imhoff seeks to involve the medical
community more in drafting the U.S.’s next farm bill and making the
connection between food and health clearer.

The active presence of the Italian Petri and the scientist Shiva helped place
SFN within an international context. SFN was modeled after the Terra Madre
and Salon de Gusto gatherings that happen regularly in Italy. SFN had a
European flavor, especially as people walked down the promenade at Ft. Mason,
as if they were on Las Ramblas in Barcelona, or similar strolls in European
cities.

Slow Food Nation (SFN) was unlike the dozens of agricultural and food-related
gatherings this reporter has attended for over a decade, such as the
informative annual Eco-Farm and Bioneer conferences. Those tend to have a
couple of thousand committed activists who pay and meet inside. Many of them
were also at SFN, but they were joined by thousands of others, some of whom
were merely curious, found themselves attracted, and dropped in to free
events. Most of those attending SFN did so outside on sunny days in what is
usually foggy San Francisco at this time of year. Sold-out SFN tours left for
farms to the north and south, including to the Russian River in this
reporter’s home county.

Walking through the victory garden were many parents with infants in their
arms and strollers. It was a truly family event with people of all ages. The
lines at the booths at the marketplace were often long where people could buy
the kinds of food and lunches that the gathering advocated. Members of the
Youth Food Movement delegation seemed to even out-number the gray-hairs at
the Edible Education panel. Some of them planned to stay around for a
gigantic Eat-In scheduled for Labor Day in a large San Francisco park.

SFN was a major networking event with so many people interested in food
coming together. “Stop the Spray: Support Healthy Food Systems” flyers were
passed out on the sidewalk to protest the Light Brown Apple Moth eradication
program currently happening in parts of California. A flyer promoting the
showing at a local theatre of the film The World According to Monsanto was
distributed. It will be screened by Jeffrey M. Smith, author of the book
Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of
Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating.

During the weekend both corporate leaders and anti-corporate activists were
together in discussions. SFN’s most controversial partner is Whole Foods
Market, which is criticized for its union-busting activities and running
small local grocery stores and small farmers out of business. In contrast,
among SFN’s media partners was the progressive Mother Jones magazine.

“Whole Foods does not live up to Slow Food’s standards of good, clean, and
fair,” asserted Sebastopol Farmer’s Market manager Paula Downing. “I went to
a panel where a Mexican worker reported that they had negotiated a one cent a
pound raise for their tomato picking in Florida with corporations like Taco
Bell and Wal-Mart. Yet Whole Foods has not agreed to that raise. The
difference is $45 for a ten-hour day, rather than $40. Rather than partner
with Whole Foods, Slow Found should confine itself to stores that do comply
with its standards, like Berkeley Bowl and Olivers in Sonoma County.”

“The role of Slow Food Nation,” according to one of its organizers, Michael
Dimock, president of Roots of Change, “was to convene people and be a
convergence.” A test of its effectiveness will be what happens in coming
months as endorsers of the Declaration are solicited and then when it is
presented to Congress.

Some SFN organizers are already considering hosting another such gathering,
either next year or the following year.

Dr. Shepherd Bliss is a semi-retired college teacher who has contributed to
20 books, most recently to Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, edited by
Maxine Hong Kington. This semester he is teaching two courses, “War and
Peace” and “Nonviolent Communication,” at Sonoma State University in
California. He can be reahced at: sb3@pon.net. Read other articles by
Shepherd, or visit Shepherd's website.





  • [Livingontheland] Slow Food Nation Attracts 50,000 — Beneath The Surface, Tradingpost, 09/07/2008

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