Responding to the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in a historic quarter of Rome in 1986, a movement began to take back the food system from processors that were usurping the place of freshly cooked food in the lives of ordinary people.
Called the Slow Food movement, it slyly played on the industry’s term for convenience foods, “fast food.”
This year, the organization is hosting a gathering called Slow Food Nation in San Francisco to discuss the state of the food system today. The event, scheduled for Labor Day weekend 2008, and they’re optimistically estimating up to 70,000 participants from all walks of life.
The most important goal the Slow Food people could achieve, in my opinion, would be to bring in mainstream consumers who are curious about the movement, but not gourmet cooks or high cuisine aficionados. Regular beef-stew-eating, Budweiser-drinking Americans are the people this organization needs to invite on board the sustainability bandwagon.
Only when mass-market consumers comprehend the stakes will the economics of the food industry change for the better. If average home cooks learn that that beef stew will be more delicious, more humane, and not despoil the land if they use pasture-raised beef, then the’lly have incentive to pay that extra buck.
If Slow Food is seen as a society of elitist gourmets to whom money is no issue, then it will remain a niche, and the problems of factory farming and monoculture cultivation will continue to grow.
Struggling middle-class and economically disadvantaged citizens need a reason to change their diets. Most base their food decisions on one factor: price. That scenario will always favor the factory producers of food, who have not been held accountable for the ecological damage their systems engender.
In a July 23 article in the New York Times, San Francisco food writer Corby Kummer, a board member of Slow Food USA, expressed the hope that Slow Food Nation would be akin to a culinary Woodstock event, but only if it could draw less-affluent, younger attendees than typically show up at urban farmers’ markets. By introducing people of modest means to diverse foods raised on small farms, the Slow Food Nation event could create some buzz in the communities that have been slowest to adopt those ethical edibles.
I know many people involved with the Slow Food movement, and they are deeply committed to making our food supply more healthful, sustainable, and humane. Anybody who can get to the SF Bay Area on Labor Day weekend will find a city transformed into a garden to illustrate the possibilities.
The lawn in front of city hall is being dug up and planted with vegetables. Artisanal cooks will be teaching how to pickle and preserve great harvests to you don’t have to buy so many imports in the winter. The city will be an ad hoc university of land stewardship, great ingredients, and inspired cooking.
Especially if you’re interested in ways you can preserve America’s culinary heritage, support small producers, and make a difference in the health of the soil, waterways, and air of our land, this is a rare opportunity to educate yourself in ways to help.
In late autumn, the Italian Slow Food organization is organizing the “Salone del Gusto” and “Terra Madre” events in Turin, Italy, to promote local farm-to-table culture. To learn about those events, scheduled for October 23-27, 2008, check out www.salonedelgusto.com, www.terramadre.info, and www.slowfood.com.
Jay Weinstein’s blog posts are provided by LifeWire, a part of The New York Times Company.
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