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Wednesday (ok Thursday) Food: A Cursory Guide to Slow Food

Slow Food: a movement founded in Italy in 1986, which began in opposition to the global expansion of fast food chains. Some main objectives of the movement and subsequent organizations include: encouraging sustainable and organic farming practices, reducing the use of pesticides, preserving family farms, addressing the dangers of the commercial agribusiness and the negative impact of globalization on food and agriculture.

Slow Food USA: (from their website) “is a non-profit organization that seeks to create dramatic and lasting change in the food system. Its programs reconnect Americans with the people, traditions, plants, animals, fertile soils and waters that produce our food and seek to inspire a transformation in food policy, production practices and market forces so that they ensure equity, sustainability and pleasure in the food we eat.”

Slow Food Nation: the first food event of its kind in the US, 60,000 people gathered in San Francisco over Labor Day, 2008, to celebrate sustainable food. A subsidiary non-profit of Slow Food USA, it was also the first time the Slow Food organization embraced corporate sponsors (Whole Foods, Food Network).

Key Players:

Carlo Petrini: (Italian) founder of the Slow Food Movement. Coined the term “eco-gastronomy” to describe good tasting food that is sustainable. Petrini writes, “the global market economy is destroying the Earth. We give more strength to local economies and we have better sustainability, better human relations and no need to fly food halfway around the world.” Author of Slow Food: the Case for Taste, which charts the origins and breadth of the Slow Food Movement.

Alice Waters: (American) Recently dubbed “the mother of Slow Food” she is co-owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley est. 1971, where she was the first to utilize produce that was grown by local food growers. Waters introduced a now popular trend in restaurants to patron local farmers for seasonality and freshness. She’s taken initiative to combat childhood obesity through school programs that encourage fresh foods. She is also the author of numerous cookbooks.

follow for criticism and links…

Criticism:

As the movement is still relatively young, it is pigeonholed to the upper-middle class. While the current administration lends a more sympathetic ear, a voice for the movement has not yet been established in terms of political activism and influence. To some, it appears to be a network of food aficionados enjoying the privileges of $4 cage-free eggs, and artisan cheeses, an overall diet comprised of fresh and relatively expensive food. The movement has also gained celebrity endorsement, which denotes it to the frivolity of a passing trend.

All this being said, one could argue that environmentalism was in a similar place 30, even just 20 years ago. The movement must first be grounded in the mainstream through entities like Whole Foods* and farmer’s markets, before it can branch out to include a more racially and socio-economically diverse demographic, which as of yet, is simply not represented.

*while Whole Foods provides organic food choices free of artificial additives, preservatives and hydrogenated fats, they are not a reliable source for locally produced food.

Links:

For US Slow Food:

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/

For a more eloquent criticism of Slow Food:

http://peoplesgrocery.org/brahm/peoples-grocery/slow-food-elitist-irrelevant-or-just-too-defensive

A few interesting articles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/22food.html?_r=2&hp

http://www.slate.com/id/2138176/

March 26, 2009 - Posted by ebolden | Wednesday Food | | 9 Comments

9 Comments

  1. I attended a Slow Food Event a few years back. It was, as you described, a gathering of a select group of vendors who had all prepared a dish that was being ‘held’ in an array of crock pots thus conveying a rather confusing message given the Slow Food title. For a nominal fee, but a fee nonetheless, the public was invited to take part in this elite but by no means gourmet ‘pot luck’ introduction to sustainable foods, in hopes of enrolling members – think club not co-op. Our community has since established a local co-op which now holds a much more effective twice yearly “Eat Local” challenge complete with suggested shopping lists, weekly menus, recipes and always a cheerful and very well versed vendor or employee on hand to answer questions and encourage its’ cause. The Thursday edition/entry was… Food for Thought, however I will look forward next week to yet another of ebolden’s delightful recipes complete with artistic depiction.

    Comment by bonita | March 26, 2009

  2. Sustainable I’ve heard. Food Security, that’s what one of my housemates does. But I hadn’t heard of slow food. Thanks for the intro and links, ebolden.

    Comment by Old - Doug Johnson | March 26, 2009

  3. Slow Food doesn’t have to be Yuppie Food. Unfortunately that’s how it’s shaping up in the US.

    Another world is possible.

    Rather than escalating the destructive practises of gargantuan-scale industrial farming and then distributing its inferior, malnutritious products as charity or welfare, Belo Horizonte made a courageous attempt to create a food economy that would meet the standards suggested by Carlo Petrini of the Slow Food Movement: good, clean, and fair. (Here’s a video clip of Petrini explaining his standards and their implications.) As the Slow Food web site explains:

    Slow Food is good, clean and fair food. We believe that the food we eat should taste good; that it should be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health; and that food producers should receive fair compensation for their work.

    The city of Belo Horizonte, by boldly addressing food justice and food rights, has begun the process of guaranteeing every person acess to food that is good, clean, and fair. Their success vividly highlights the many failures — nutritional, social, agricultural — of our own industrial and wholly profit-oriented food system. It also suggests that our situation is far from hopeless. If we were to continue with business-as-usual, the future of food looks pretty dismal; but the documented productivity and sustainability of dense polyculture, plus the documented success of the food-as-a-civic-right policy implemented by Belo Horizonte, seem like very well-lit signage beckoning us to a safe exit from the ratcheting finger-trap of industrial agriculture.

    Comment by Bruce F | March 27, 2009

  4. The only Slow Food event I tried to attend sold out before I could buy a ticket, but I do appreciate slow food as a concept. I think my first step was looking up a list (and putting it on my fridge) of local produce by season. That way in the grocery store, I could choose the items most likely to be local; otherwise, at least trying to pick items produced within this continent was a start.
    Discovering community supported agriculture changed the way I think about food. I love supporting a local small business, and I get fresh organic produce for less than it would cost me in the store. There are no downsides for me, and I’m slowly taking up gardening to grow those items I just can’t get enough of from the farm. Currently I have tomatoes and rosemary, and soon will be other herbs, watermelon, and possibly potatoes. I never have to buy produce in a store anymore!

    Comment by Rebekah | March 27, 2009

  5. Bruce F- I am much obliged for the link and thrilled to have a new resource. The criticism of Slow Food that I read and linked to was incredibly frustrating, mostly because those who dealt the criticism had little or nothing to offer of alternative solutions. The post you linked did exactly the opposite.

    I haven’t had a thorough read-through yet, but I didn’t see anything in that post about population control. For me the two are inextricably linked. If, in 40 years, we could cut out monocrops and industrial farming for the more productive diversified polyculture, would that be enough to support a world population of 9 billion? What are your thoughts?

    Comment by ebolden | March 27, 2009

  6. Rebekah- I joined a CSA in January, http://heteronomy.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/wednesday-food-a-word-well-many-on-csa/ and am in great anticipation of the my first box to arrive in June. Not to mention farm-fresh eggs, which I’ve never tasted, and the possibility of visiting some of the growers in Wisconsin. I just wish Chicago had a longer growing season.

    Comment by ebolden | March 27, 2009

  7. eb – Until I read essays like DeAnander’s, I had the sneaking suspicion that the whole Small is Beautiful movement in Food was nothing more than an marketing ploy by well intentioned Hippies. As with so much of what I think I knew (know?), it turns out that I was wrong.

    I’ve come to believe that feeding people is a political quesion. From the earlier link:

    It is not the productivity of land that prevents us from eliminating hunger. It is not the lack of new, improved, ever more phantasmagorical high-tech toys and techniques. What prevents us from eliminating hunger is our failure to return to, and adhere to, a moral code that recognises healthy food as a human right. As F M Lappé notes in a recent article, such a moral code is nearly universal among the people we call “primitive”; early humans, in striking contrast to many other animals, seem to have an innate tendency to share food — even with others not directly related to themselves. Allowing people in our tribe, village, or city to starve is a violation of our primeval human nature. When we muster the political will to continue our ancient food-sharing behaviour in modern dress, the results are astonishing: astonishingly simple, astonishingly easy, astonishingly efficient.

    Population control is a huge subject. I’m a guy typing on the internet.

    What I took away from the article was that Industrialized Farming can’t come close to feeding the population we’ve got now. As it’s externalized costs metastasize, it becomes untenable.

    For a more complete answer, you might take a look at some of the other things written by DeAnander at both Feral Scholar and European Tribune. You could always leave a comment on one of their posts.

    http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2005/7/22/3232/98014#14

    http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/04/24/the-politics-of-food-is-politics/

    I come away from all this with the sense that Population Control is a red herring; a diversionary tactic thrown up by defenders of the status quo, who claim that only they have the answer to (fill in the blank).

    Then again, (I confess?) that I’m no expert.

    Comment by Bruce F | March 27, 2009

  8. A new, related topic I discovered in the last few days is a documentary that everyone should see, in my opinion. I’m spreading the word, so I have already posted it to the recent Slow Food article over at Feministing as well. It’s about Monsanto and covers pesticides, corporate pollution (especially of impoverished minorities unlucky enough to have these pesticide factories move in next door), world food supply, biodiversity (lack thereof), GMO crops, and much more. It is infuriating and extremely necessary information. Please watch it if you can make time at once or in segments. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6262083407501596844

    Comment by Rebekah | March 28, 2009

  9. Video clips of Slow Food founder, Carlo Petrini – http://greenroofgrowers.blogspot.com/2009/03/carlo-petrini-good-clean-and-fair.html

    “Lets give more value to olive oil than car oil”

    Comment by Bruce F | April 1, 2009


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