[Sosfbay-discuss] Slow Food gospel on way to San Francisco: 50, 000 expected

[Drew Johnson]

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10305353?nclick_check=1

Slow Food gospel on way to San Francisco
3-DAY FESTIVAL EXPECTED TO DRAW 50,000 VISITORS
By Aleta Watson
Mercury News
Article Launched: 08/26/2008 01:30:26 AM PDT

For Alice Waters, food is never merely fuel. It's a reflection of culture,
a barometer of health, and a measure of commitment to saving the planet.

The doyenne of California cuisine, and creator of Berkeley's celebrated
Chez Panisse restaurant, long has been an evangelist for fresh, locally
grown, and - ideally - organic food as the answer to many of the world's
problems. Now she's bringing her gospel to San Francisco over Labor Day
weekend in an extravaganza of food, lectures and performances dubbed Slow
Food Nation.

Part agricultural fair, part political rally, the three-day event is the
Slow Food movement's first big festival aimed at a larger audience. It's
expected to draw about 50,000 visitors to the epicenter of the food
movement on the West Coast to sample artisan food, tap their toes to name
bands and hear arguments for a new national food policy.

In Taste Pavilions set up at Fort Mason, food lovers will pay $65 to munch
on handmade products ranging from chocolates and cheeses to pickles and
beer. At Civic Center Plaza, they'll be asked to sign a petition for a new
U.S. food policy.

A revolution

The petite, soft-spoken Waters calls her crusade "the Delicious
Revolution." She wants to seduce people with the tempting flavors of
fresh, seasonal food. She considers the industrialized global food system
responsible for much of the pollution in the world as well as disease and
obesity.

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"We're losing our culture, we're losing our natural resources and we're
losing our health," she said. "So we're kind of on a train that's going
over a cliff and we just have to stop, get out, and find another way."

Waters has spent much of the last decade working to bring better nutrition
into schools with her Edible Schoolyard garden project at Martin Luther
King Middle School in Berkeley and the Yale Sustainable Food Project in
New Haven, Conn., where her daughter, Fanny Singer, went to college.

Critics nonetheless argue that Slow Food USA is for the most part an
elitist group of chefs and affluent consumers out of touch with the
working class and poor people who are in most critical need of a system
that is less reliant on fast food.

"The majority of Americans are not in a position to engage in fine dining
on a regular basis," said Brahm Amadi, executive director of People's
Grocery in West Oakland. Farmers markets may have spread throughout the
country and organic products may have gone mainstream, he said, but "very
little substantive change has come to our poorest neighborhoods."

Slow Food is an international organization founded in Italy nearly two
decades ago by activist Carlo Petrini, who was outraged by the opening of
a McDonald's in Rome's Piazza di Spagna. The name was chosen as the
antithesis of fast food and the initial goals were to save endangered
traditional foods, support small farmers and artisans, and preserve the
pleasures of the table. More recently the group has simplified its message
to "good, clean and fair food" for all.

In an interview in the dining room of her 37-year-old restaurant, Waters
said she felt a kinship with Petrini the moment she met him in 1999. "I
realized Chez Panisse has always been a Slow Food restaurant," she said.
In May of that year, she hosted a dinner to honor Petrini and launch the
first U.S. convivium - the organization's name for chapters - in Berkeley.

Now vice president of the more than 80,000-member international group,
Waters also serves on the national board of Slow Food USA and is the
founder of Slow Food Nation, its offshoot.

Although the U.S. membership is still small at only 15,000 members
nationwide, its core philosophy has spread rapidly thanks in part to the
work of writers such as Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling
"Omnivore's Dilemma." In 2007, the Oxford New American Dictionary named
"locavore" - a term for people who try to eat only food grown or produced
within a 100-mile radius - its word of the year.

"I think that good, pure, affordable, wholesome food should be available
to everybody," Waters said, "and it should be a right and not a
privilege."

Threat to food supply?

Dennis Avery, an agricultural economist and director of the Center for
Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, contends that the
anti-industrial stance of the movement poses a threat to the world food
supply. "No sooner did we get the green revolution, no sooner did the
specter of mass starvation get pushed aside than we got this organic
nonsense," he said from his offices in New York.

"I just find them arrogant and elitist," said Steve Sando, who sells rare
varieties of beans grown from seeds he's tracked down in Latin America.

Last year, Sando blasted Petrini in his Rancho Gordo blog for a passage in
the founder's book, "Slow Food Nation," criticizing vendors at the Ferry
Plaza farmers market for their boutique prices. "I get a basic disdain for
America and the American way of doing things from Slow Food," he said.

Anya Fernald, executive director of Slow Food Nation, said that the
event's goal is to bring people together around food. "We're building a
stage on which a lot of organizations could bring their message and their
hope for a more sustainable and more just food system," she said.

Although a number of attractions, such as the Taste Pavilions are pricey,
Fernald pointed out that many more - including a farmers market at Civic
Center Plaza and performances on "the soapbox" in the 10,000 square foot
Victory Garden planted in front of City Hall - will be free. Still, all
the tickets are expected to be sold before festivities begin on Friday.

"This event is not about Slow Food," Fernald says. "It's about the food
movement, the necessity to get people together. Our humble goal is to take
a very small step toward a change in the food system for everyone."

Contact Aleta Watson at awatson at mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5032.