In between the 2 conventions you followed and perhaps attended, 60,000 Americans headed to San Francisco for a different convention: Slow Food Nation. Actually, convention isn't the right word. Festival is more like it. A friend convinced me to go by calling it "the Woodstock of food." Foodstock. If we're going to have a new era of hippies, count me IN. I'm still pissed I missed the '60s the first time around.
The event got mixed reviews, and I have mixed feelings about it, but in the end I'm glad I went. You'll be hard pressed to find that many foodies in one spot, and I was absolutely thrilled to finally meet Bonnie Powell of The Ethicurean and to see Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally again. And the best part of all (for me)? Hanging out with Kossack Eddie C, and watching his reaction to all of the new things he learned (and ate!)
Pictures and details are below.
Because covering the zillions of different events at Slow Food Nation is near impossible, here's my plan. I'll give you a short intro to what SFN was, then give you my pictures from the various things I attended, and wrap up with a few reviews from various different media outlets.
About Slow Food Nation
Slow Food Nation was put on by the group Slow Food International. The group was founded in Italy as a backlash against fast food, and few years back they had a big gathering in Italy. Alice Waters (legendary founder of Chez Panisse restaurant) and other American Slow Foodies wanted to have an American Slow Food get together, and Slow Food Nation was the result.
During the long weekend, the goal was to take over the city with good, clean, fair food. Events were held all over San Francisco, from lectures, to food tastings, a farmers market, a garden, hikes, dinners, and more. The events ranged in price from your first born child to free. With so much going on, planning a schedule was near impossible (and it didn't help that the website was awful).
I opted to attend the entire lecture series, 8 star-studded panels on various food-related topics. The best way I can describe it is "the entire Mt Olympus of Food Gods, all in one place." Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Raj Patel, Anna Lappe, and more. Wow! That took up Friday and Saturday, leaving Sunday. I planned for an 11am-3pm tasting session, not really knowing what to expect. And, because it fit in my schedule, I signed up for a Taste Workshop on Southwestern foods.
THEN Eddie C signed up. I take full credit. SFN sent out a press release that they were teaming up with Outstanding in the Field, and I knew Eddie would love it. I forwarded the press release and asked him to diary it. He called me a few hours later with a plane ticket. (You can read his absolutely stunning diary on the event here.)
Pictures
I don't have any pictures from the lectures, but I do have recordings of a few. I've got Marion Nestle and others speaking about food policy, Anna Lappe on climate change, and Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser on a new movie called Food, Inc. Email me if you want any of them. The SFN site will eventually have all of them available for download for free.
My experience at the lecture series was ruined by my migraine condition. I get headaches from projectors, and they were projecting an image of their logo behind the speakers. I fell asleep during 2 panels and ultimately just left with a copy of Marion Nestle's new book Pet Food Politics (highly recommended!) to sit outside and read.
What I will share here are a few of my favorite pics with links to diaries that have more details and more pics.
The Victory Garden
San Francisco let Slow Food Nation plant a victory garden in front of City Hall. If you're in the area, go check it out between now and November.
The Marketplace
Next to the Victory Garden, visitors could stroll through a farmers' market.
Tasting Pavilions
Of the official Slow Food Nation events I attended, this was the highlight for me. They had booths devoted to each of several different categories of food, with experts there to give you tastes and explain what you were eating. I was surprised that I didn't like some of the foods - things I normally like, like espresso or olive oil. One goal of the event was to show the need for preserving biodiversity and resisting McDonald's-style standardization. They certainly succeeded!
(You can see more about this at http://www.thewhofarm.org/ - go there and sign the petition!)
The absolute best parts of the weekend for me were two meetups. One of SF Kossacks (omg - homogenius is soooo funny!!!) and one of food writers and bloggers. Slow Food Nation couldn't have planned something so fun if they tried, but they certainly managed to get all of us in town at the same time and I'm glad for that!
At the writers/bloggers event, I finally met Destin of Eat Well Guide, one of the coolest resources around. You punch in your zip code and the site gives you info on where you can get good food in your area. Now, they have a new travel tool that works with Google maps to help you find good food if you're going on a trip. They also have a new E-book (PDF) out to help foodies use the web effectively.
What People Are Saying
So now it's all over, and it's time to find out what "the media" has to say about the event. Time wrote an article that was at times right on and at times downright inaccurate and depressing.
Good:
Who cares about the perfect mushroom when more people are going hungry? The movement's leaders are responding, however, by putting politics back at the center of Slow Food's agenda and calling for reform of a global agro-industry they say has failed farmers and eaters alike. "How did we get to a place where it is considered élitist to have food that is healthy for you?" asks Katrina Heron, head of the San Francisco-based Slow Food Nation
Stupid, wrong, and misleading:
Sure, slow food tastes better, but agribusiness has long argued that industrial farming is the only way to economically feed a global population nearing 7 billion. Organic farming yields less per acre than standard farming, which means a worldwide Slow Food initiative might lead to turning more forests into farmland. (To feed the U.S. alone with organic food, we'd need 40 million farmers, up from 1 million today.) In a recent editorial, FAO director-general Jacques Diouf pointed out that the world will need to double food production by 2050 and that to suggest organics can solve the challenge is "dangerously irresponsible."
Grist, a source I much prefer over Time, had 2 articles on Slow Food that I read and liked this week. First, from Chef Kurt Michael Friese:
In response to the idea that Slow Food is elitist:
Slow Food does not do everything right and will never please everyone, nor is it any form of panacea, nor does it claim to be. It can and has made lives better for thousands of people not just in the U.S. and Italy (where it was founded) but from Bolivia to the Ivory Coast to India by supporting farmers and aiding to reinvigorate local food traditions. Here in the U.S. it raised thousands of dollars to help the farmers and fishers affected by Katrina, then raised thousands more for Midwest flood relief. Already Slow Food USA has turned its attention once more to the Gulf in the wake of Hurricane Gustav.
I totally agree with him. In fact, this is why I haven't been more critical of Slow Food and Slow Food Nation. They aren't perfect - and they actually do a few things that really piss me off - but I think they are calling attention to important issues in a very high-profile way and overall they are doing more good than bad.
Then, one of my all-time favorite food writers, Tom Philpott weighed in:
Further, more than any conference I've ever attended, the event exuded sheer ambition. In addition to the glories described above, Slow Food Nation included a lovingly designed and cultivated "Victory Garden," a farmers market that embodied the sheer abundance of San Francisco's celebrated foodshed, and, tucked into the teeming food court, a soapbox from which anyone who wanted could harangue the crowd. These features, I think, were meant to form a populist, accessible counterpoint to the pricy Taste Pavilion, food court, and star-studded panels.
In the end, I think the vast ambition behind Slow Food Nation formed its weak point. By striving to embody and represent an entire movement -- from "artisinal" food culture to urban agriculture -- the event came off like a dreamer with his head in the clouds, disconnected from the struggle in the streets.
No one quite embodied that attitude like Alice Waters, doyenne of Slow Food USA, iconic figure of the sustainable-agriculture movement since she started her Chez Panisse restaurant in the early 1970s, and Slow Food Nation's intellectual author. I adore Waters' cooking style and respect her work as a pioneering restaurateur and school-lunch reformer; as a political spokesperson, she leaves me scratching my head. Asked at a pre-event press conference about the accessibility issue, Waters gave a riff about the Victory Garden and how it "represents our belief that good, clean, and fair food should be accessible to everyone all the time."
Really? Beautiful as it is, the Victory Garden represents tremendous political, cultural, and financial resources. Slow Food Nation convinced the City of San Francisco to allow the garden to be installed on city land, got a prestigious landscape architecture firm involved in its design, and tapped a professional gardening company to help put it together. There's nothing at all wrong with any of this, but Waters seems blind to her own considerable power -- and unaware that other actors in the sustainable-food movement wield much less. And here's the kicker: The Victory Garden is due to be demolished in November; the arrangement with the city is only temporary. The Victory Garden serves as a mighty symbol for the potential of urban public space to be both beautiful and highly productive; as a symbol of accessibility to "good, clean, and fair food," it's a bit of a farce.
Thank you Tom Philpott! He follows up his criticism with more kind words about the event. I think I agree with him... it wasn't perfect, but there was a lot of good that should be recognized. Still, it'd be nice to have an event this high-profile and large go off without so much negative commentary about elitism, etc.
In light of everything, I'm thrilled that 60,000 people came to see how food grows, meet farmers, and taste different varieties of various foods. Currently 2% of the U.S. population says their primary source of food is the farmers market. Events like Slow Food Nation will hopefully make that number go up.