Slow Food Movement Picks Up Momentum in the USA
* Trying To Get Up To Speed, Slow Food Makes US Push
By JM Hirsch
Associated Press, Sept. 1, 2008
Straight to the Source
SAN FRANCISCO - A lush, under-the-stars spread of handmade bread, gourmet
olives and fine wine makes an unlikely launch for a weekend dedicated to
ending hunger, empowering poor nations and transforming farming as we know
it.
A sign points the way to a display of apples at a farmer's market during
Slow Food Nation in San Francisco, Friday, Aug. 29, 2008. The four day
celebration of food goes through Sunday. Slow Food has grown into a cause
advocating fair trade, sustainable farming practices and celebrating
traditional foods. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Welcome to Slow Food Nation,
epicenter of the split personality that is America's burgeoning foodie
reform movement.
Some 30,000 people were expected to gather for this Labor Day weekend
festival that started Friday as one part gourmet nibbles, one part social
justice soapbox. It's a gustatory effort to persuade Americans to reject
fast, cheap food and embrace organic, local agriculture and a return to the
kitchen.
"There are public consequences to every choice we make," organizer and
sustainable food advocate Alice Waters said Friday. "For a long time we
thought it was our own private business how we feed ourselves. But now we
understand there are consequences."
It's a delicious message - that food should taste great and be produced in a
way that is kind to both the people and the land from which it comes. That
we should spend more on quality food now to save on healthcare and the
environment later.
But in our harried nation, it's also a hard sell that frequently has been
hobbled by its own pretensions.
"A lot of people don't like to cook. They like to nuke," said John Fiscalini,
a festival exhibitor from the Modesto-based Fiscalini Cheese Company. "We do
live in a society where our time is so valuable that we don't sit and enjoy
meals like our forefathers did."
Slow Food Nation marks the first major event for Slow Food USA, the American
branch of an Italian-born organization. But popular appeal has been minimal,
in part because - unlike in Europe - here it has been mostly co-opted by the
wine-and-cheese set.
But this weekend's event saw the launch of a new strategy for the growing
coalition of food reform and social justice groups that form the backbone of
Slow Food, a strategy they hope can remake the movement's image and
re-energize its members.
On Thursday, they released their "Declaration for Healthy Food and
Agriculture," a 12-point plan they hope can be used as a blueprint for
remaking the federal farm bill, the $300 billion measure that influences
virtually every aspect of the American food system.
Critics have long complained that the farm bill favors industrial
agriculture and undermines efforts to promote sustainable, organic and
family-based farming - all principles central to Thursday's declaration. The
declaration also encourages greater clarity in food labeling and better
treatment and pay for food and farm workers.
"The farm bill is making very, very few people successful. The vast majority
are hurting," Michael Dimock, president of Roots of Change, said of small
farmers. "The big commodity regions of the country are becoming poorer and
poorer. We have to reverse that."
The group says it wants to collect 300,000 signatures before taking the plan
to Washington to demonstrate to lawmakers that there is popular support for
real reform. Food safety scares, energy woes and worries about obesity are
generating tremendous awareness of the role of food in other problems, they
say.
"Energy, health care, climate change. You cannot make progress on those
three issues without addressing food," organizer and author Michael Pollan
said Friday.
And if the food tastes great, all the better. Waters has long advocated
persuasion via the palate, an approach clearly evident at a 500-person
dinner of oysters; grilled, herbed chicken; and spit-roasted porchetta on a
plaza outside City Hall.
Likewise, on Friday the theme of campaigning by cuisine drew several hundred
people who strolled through the Slow Food Victory Garden and farmers market
set up on the plaza, both events open to the public.
"I love it," said Gretchen Reisch, of Santa Rosa, who explored the offerings
with a friend.
Reisch lived the slow food life for a while in France. "You sliced up some
tomatoes with some of their olive oil, cheese and prosciutto and you just
put this dinner together and it was beautiful," she said.
But at home, where she has to juggle schedules and soccer practices and the
other details of life, "it's been hard to recreate that."
She thinks the movement has a chance to go mainstream, so long as its
advocates keep things simple, as they did with the victory garden.
"That's the one thing I don't want slow food to go to, is that elitism -
cooking where it gets so complicated and it's almost like wine snobbery."
More events were planned through the weekend, ranging from lectures on world
food prices to cooking workshops that would be taped and posted to
YouTube.com.
Yet organizers acknowledge that they have an image problem that won't be
bridged by dinners such as Thursday's invitation-only affair.
"This isn't real. I know this isn't real," Slow Food Nation executive
director Anya Fernald said of Thursday's feast. But she remains convinced
that these diners will bring the message home, and from there it will
spread.
Associated Press Writer Michelle Locke in San Francisco contributed to this
story.
© 2008 Associated Press
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