Civil Eats

With the freezing summer fog whirling around us, Slow Food Nation Victory Garden Manager John Bela and his team began the installation of the city’s first edible garden in front of City Hall in 65 years. In true San Francisco style, the folks who practice their morning exercises on Civic Center plaza didn’t seemed fazed in the slightest, as a chain-link fence went up around them and the construction site. It was truly exciting to witness the groundbreaking of what could be one of the most important civic statements regarding the future of community food production. Radio and television crews came and went as tourists and locals wandered in and around the site, watching the sod cutters slice neat strips of lawn. John and his crew started pulling back the sod and lifting the heavy grass and dirt onto wheel barrows. Soon thereafter, West Portal residents Meredith and Bill Denny showed up and started loading free sod into their car. “We were going to go to Home Depot until we read the ad on craigslist for recycled sod,” Meredith said. “Now we’ll have City Hall lawn in our backyard.” An hour later, Scottsdale residents and Phoenix convivium members Steve Lewis and Carol Mills-Lewis arrived with their five-month-old grandson, Liam Whelan. Liam in tow, they spent several hours helping the crew dig up sod. Google Café sent over delicious sandwiches and will be generously donating lunch for the crew and volunteers for the next 10 days of garden installation. Stay tuned for more sod removal and landscape fabric installation.

Photo by Naomi Starkman: Steve Lewis & Carol Mills-Lewis with grandson Liam Whelan

Naomi Starkman is a food policy media consultant to Consumers Union and others. She served as the Director of Communications & Policy at Slow Food Nation ’08 and has been a media consultant to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and WIRED magazines. She was previously a senior publicist at Newsweek magazine and was the Director of Communications for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). From 1997 to 2000, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the S.F. Ethics Commission. She is the co-founder of Civil Eats and Kitchen Table Talks, a local food forum in San Francisco, and a board member of 18 Reasons, a nonprofit connecting community through food. Naomi works with various clients on food policy and advocacy and is an aspiring organic grower, having worked on several farms.