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.
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)]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.