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Take It Slow

The Slow Food movement is about reconnecting with our food’s sources—then actually taking the time to enjoy it.

People unfamiliar with the slow food movement might visualize a slow food event as a group of wealthy people with a lot of time on their hands spending hours together eating food that was cooked slowly. But slowing down and enjoying food is really just one part of this global, grassroots movement that now has thousands of members around the world. According to the Slow Food USA website, “Slow Food is an idea, a way of living and a way of eating…It links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment.”

   The mission of Slow Food USA, the American division of a global movement that was founded in Italy in 1986, is to “create dramatic and lasting change in the food system. We reconnect Americans with the people, traditions, plants, animals, fertile soils and waters that produce our food. We work 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.”

At its most basic level, the Slow Food motto, “Good, Clean, Fair,” says it all.

“The organization has three platforms—food politics, food sustainability and the conviviality of food—and we wrap that all under the edict of good, clean and fair,” says Larry Martin, governor of Slow Food Northern California. “For Slow Food, the idea of good means enjoying delicious food created with care from healthy plants and animals. The pleasures of good food can also help to build community and celebrate cultural and regional diversity.

“When we talk about clean food, we’re talking about nutritious food that’s as good for the planet as it is for our bodies. It’s grown and harvested with methods that have a positive impact on our local ecosystems and promotes biodiversity.

“Finally, we believe food is a universal right. Food that’s fair should be accessible to all, regardless of income, and produced by people who are treated with dignity and justly compensated for their labor.”

Planting the roots

The Slow Food movement was initially the brainchild of Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist, as an antithesis to fast food and the lifestyle it represents. In particular, Petrini forcefully opposed the opening of a McDonald’s in 1986 near the Spanish steps in Rome and wanted to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated plants and seeds, domestic animals and farming within an ecoregion.

The Slow Food organization has expanded to include more than 85,000 members in approximately 800 chapters (originally named “conviviums”) in 132 countries. The head office is still in Italy, and the country still has the highest concentration of chapters by far, with 360—almost half of all chapters—being located there. Each chapter has a leader responsible for promoting local artisans, farmers and flavors through regional events such as Taste Workshops, wine tastings and farmers’ markets.

In 1998, Slow Food hired Patrick Martins in New York to act as the first executive director of Slow Food USA to start the American arm of the organization. By 2008, the grassroots movement had spread to approximately 16,000 members.

Slow Food USA’s first major convention, Slow Food Nation, took place in San Francisco on Labor Day weekend in 2008. It was the largest celebration of American food in history. Ten thousand people were expected to attend—more than 85,000 showed up.

Today, the Bay Area has the highest concentration of Slow Food chapters in the country, with a total of six just in Sonoma, Napa and Marin counties. Several factors have contributed to this, including our food and wine-centered culture, our agricultural landscape, as well as the beliefs, ideas and activist-minded culture that’s prevalent here.

“The food and wine culture is what draws a lot of people to the Bay Area,” explains Chris Carpenter, vice chair of the Board of Directors for Slow Food USA and one of the co-leaders for the Napa Valley Chapter. He joined Slow Food in 1998, the start of the movement in the United States, after living through a harvest season in Italy and longing for the pace of life and culture that’s centered around food.

“The access to the kind of foods we get out here, the freshness of that food, the farmers markets we have, the culinary artists who are drawn to that—there are little spots of that elsewhere in the United States, but there isn’t the concentration we have here. For people who are into food and into activism, Slow Food is the perfect combination.”

Barbara Bowman, co-founder of Slow Food Sonoma County, agrees. “We’re rural, we’re agricultural, we’re food and wine producers, we have lots of small producers and small family farmers, and the people who live here really value those things. So it’s sort of part of your makeup when you live in Sonoma County—the valuing of good food that’s grown carefully and prepared well runs in your veins.”

Bowman further explains that another reason there are so many chapters in the North Bay is because the local chapters have purposely tried to stay relatively small to build a sense of community where everyone can get to know each other.

“One of the things all of the original members of Slow Food Sonoma County realized was, we didn’t want to be huge like Slow Food Rome or Slow Food Turin,” explains Bowman. “Slow Food Turin has more than 1,000 members. It’s impossible to build a community and even to find a place to have an event for that many people. So we wanted to keep the chapters small enough so we would know one another. That’s why some of our original Slow Food Sonoma County members went out and started other Sonoma County chapters.”

Bowman goes on to caution that this appreciation of good food isn’t a given, you have to value and protect it so it can continue. You can say you support local agriculture and you believe in eating locally, but if, as a consumer, you don’t purchase food from local family farms, those farms cannot continue to exist.

There are many factors that discourage farmers from continuing to use their land for fruits and vegetables, or to produce meat and dairy products. Not the least of these is one of the lowest ROA (return on assets) out of all industries, not to mention facing a whole slew of natural events that can further decrease profit margins such as insects, weather, drought and floods. In the North Bay, especially, farmers have a unique dilemma in that the draw to grow winegrapes is strong. And while wine is a wonderful thing both for our palate and our local economy, it nevertheless diminishes the amount of land devoted to other crops, resulting in a less-diversified agricultural landscape.

“Ultimately we’d want a sustainable food system that’s not only flavorful, but healthful and easily accessible for the food buyer, one that would naturally help sustain small production farmers,” says Carpenter. “We’re losing those. Napa is a really good example of this—we have an enormous monoculture of grapes, which I benefit from and I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t say that. I enjoy my craft, but I also yearn for the diversity you have in Sonoma County in terms of small farmers and people who grow other specialty crops. We don’t have that here.

“There’s so much economic pressure for growers to plant grapes rather than, say, tomatoes, which fetch about $60 per ton in the San Joaquin Valley. Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Napa Valley, as an example, can pay out at several thousand dollars per ton, which drives the planting decisions of growers. That’s a huge amount of economic pressure on landholders, who have to be able to pay the bills. Naturally, as business people, they lean toward what makes the money. But a lot of farmers out there choose otherwise, strictly for the love of what they’re doing—but it’s tough.

“We want to keep those people around, because they’re going to be the models and the people who teach the next generation of organic growers or small local farmers how to do it. If we don’t keep them around by way of buying their products, we’re going to be lost. We’re going to have massive farms where public health issues [like salmonella or E.Coli outbreaks] pop up once in a while. Plus, we won’t have the diversity of crops we have now.”

One program that’s helping promote local farmers’ marketing efforts is Marin Farmers Market’s (MFM) “Farm to Fork.” The program is a local distribution system that delivers food from the MFM’s farmers and food purveyors to local schools, restaurants, corporate cafeterias and catering services. The food is picked up straight from the farmers market at the Marin Civic Center and delivered directly to customers twice per week. The program began in early 2006, and is only a small (yet successful) part of the MFM’s 25-year history of connecting communities with local food providers.

Home grown

So why is this important? What’s wrong with all of our food coming from commercial agribusiness? Sure, the diversity would be lost and most people would argue that food loses much of its flavor when grown in gigantic proportions, picked before it’s at peak flavor and then shipped often hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to land in your grocery store bin.

Although one can argue this can be an efficient way to feed our large—and growing—country, it can also come at a severe cost when food safety and food security are concerned. The massive recalls and subsequent public’s fear of E. coli contamination in otherwise healthy foods, such as spinach and tomatoes last year, are a testament to the cost of supporting commercial agribusiness.

“After 9-11, our government did a study of our areas of vulnerability to terrorist attacks, and food systems is a huge one,” says Gibson Thomas, co-leader of the Marin County and Petaluma Chapter of Slow Food. “You have these big feed lots in the Midwest for animals. If someone wants to do harm to the United States, they could just slip one mad-cow infected cow in there. Wouldn’t you rather have a more spread out, diversified food system, so we’re not subject to one orchestrated attack? Because they’re not going to go to every farm and ranch and do something.”

Another important factor to consider in ensuring we continue to retain many small producers in lieu of a few mega factory farms is that those small farms also help to preserve the local pastoral landscape that we prize so much. If we want to continue to live in areas with significant open space, we need to give farmers the support they need to continue using their land for agriculture rather than selling it for development.

“We’re involved in keeping a slaughterhouse here,” says Thomas. “The only remaining slaughterhouse in our immediate area is Rancho in Petaluma. It had been under contract to be sold, and they were going to put tract housing there. One huge advantage of the downturn of the economy is that that contract has fallen through. No one wants to talk about slaughterhouses—it’s certainly not polite dinner conversation and not a sexy part of the food industry—but we need them if you want to have open space.

“People are either going to develop land for housing or they’re going to ranch or farm there. People can’t ranch somewhere if there’s nowhere to slaughter the animals and they have to truck the animals toward Sacramento to do that—it just doesn’t make any sense. If we don’t keep a slaughterhouse here, we’ll have fewer and fewer ranchers, and somebody will do something else with that land. So that’s a big part of open space preservation—to make it economically feasible.”

Back to basics

At a more basic and personal level, the slow food movement doesn’t just aim to make changes in our food supply system but also to rekindle people’s desire to let food once again become the center of family and community, and all that implies.

“Food isn’t just about fuel [for our bodies]; it’s about enjoyment,” says Carpenter. “We want people to know about how the food is grown and developed, but we also want people to enjoy it. And you do that through the community aspect of food. Think about it—if we were just eating food for fuel, we’d all just eat alone. But we don’t, we tend to eat with people, because there is a certain community and a brotherhood you have when you eat. We want to recapture that.

“We think about social issues around children these days. How many children come home, grab whatever’s being cooked and go and sit in front of the TV and don’t sit with their family? Or they have 101 activities and they squeeze in a little bit of meal just to keep them going without sitting down with their family and recapturing what it means to be a family? That’s something a lot of Americans have lost, and I think a lot of our social issues would be completely eliminated if we could get people to sit back down to dinner with one another.”

Fair farming

So how does a relatively new, grassroots organization attempt to make changes in our nation’s food supply, challenging the farm bill that’s our government’s second largest expenditure only after the military. One fundamental way is to change the public’s perception of how much food should cost and educating them on where their food comes from and how it got from where it was grown or raised to their table.

“We put together a national campaign for Slow Food members to lobby their local legislatures to vote against the existing farm bill and to ask them to support local farmers, which isn’t occurring now,” says Martin.

“The food crops that need to be supported have to be beyond the five commodity crops found in agribusiness—soybeans, cotton, corn, wheat and rice. These commodity crops are receiving the majority of the money from the taxpayer-supported farm bill. California farmers are getting very little money from the farm bill, because they’re growing fresh vegetables. So, the food that’s the most healthy for us isn’t getting any public subsidy, and the foods that are the worst for us, like corn and high fructose corn syrup, are federally subsidized by our tax dollars.”

The organization hopes these are the kinds of changes that will help put fresh, healthy food on everyone’s table, not just those who can afford it. At the same time, a societal shift needs to take place that educates people on the value of food. According to the USDA, in 1929, the first year data of this type was recorded, 23 percent of disposable income was spent on food (reaching a high of 25.2 percent in 1933 and holding steady at about 21 percent in the 1950s). By 1970, the percentage had dropped to 13.8 percent and steadily continued to decline to reach a low of 9.7 percent in 2004. It stood at 10 percent as of April 2008.

“Food has to become more expensive—it’s artificially supported by government subsidies,” says Martin. “Americans are convinced by Wall Street that it’s worth spending money on Armani underwear and cell phones but you’re not willing to spend that money on nutrition. For some reason, people decided nutrition should be cheap and should be a commodity. As [founder and co-owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley and a champion of locally grown and fresh ingredients] Alice Waters said, you pay for it one way or the other. You pay for the poor food you’re eating at the end of your life when your body physically starts to break down because nutrition was so bad, and the environmental damage becomes more and more costly to you living in society. Or, you pay for good food up front, when you can taste the benefit, when you can enjoy the benefit and when you can live in this beautiful area that takes care for the soil. You pay for it one way or the other—in the front or the back.”


To get involved in the Slow Food movement, look up your local chapter on www.slowfoodusa.org, become a member, and/or simply attend an event. In addition, you can support the Slow Food movement and all it stands for by simply voting with your money—buying local, fresh food produced by small production farmers and ranchers, and by eating in restaurants that do the same.