Civil Eats

Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience. Read More

Through the end of today you can become a member of the organization Slow Food and pay whatever amount you wish.

The organization began in Italy as a political stance against the way fast food was changing the local eating culture, and has since grown to 100,000 members in 132 countries, all interested in building a food system that is good, clean and fair. There are groups, called conviviums, in cities across the US that meet to discuss and enjoy food together. Much of the focus of Slow Food has been on protecting biodiversity: their program Ark of Taste promotes plants and animal breeds that have been dying out as industrial agriculture spreads a handful of species through standardization. But now, they’re rolling back their sleeves and setting their sights on food justice. Read More

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students’ health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.” Read More

At the most recent Kitchen Table Talks session on August 25, the challenges affecting school lunch programs, particularly in San Francisco, was on the menu. With the impending reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act and recent articles in The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, it seems that now is the time to capitalize on the momentum and advocate for healthier school lunch food policies. Read More

In 1946, when President Truman signed the School Lunch Act, he said, “In the long view, no nation is healthier than its children, or more prosperous than its farmers.” If that was a statement of purpose rather than merely a rhetorical flourish, then the School Lunch Act has failed.

Today in America we have steadily rising rates of childhood obesity, and if you were born after 2000, you have a startling one-in-three chance of developing early-onset diabetes. Meanwhile America now has more prisoners than farmers, and among those few remaining farmers the average age is 57.1 and rising. The equation becomes quite simple to understand: No farmers equals no food. Read More

With my recent introduction of the term “Pro Food” and a definition of its core principles, several readers have questioned how Pro Food differs from Slow Food. Rather than try to answer this question on my own, as I am only somewhat familiar with Slow Food, I am opening it up to others to help decide.

Pro Food is primarily focused on driving entrepreneurial interest in solving the complex food system challenges we face. By attracting such talent and energy to sustainable food, from farming through retail to home cooking, it is my belief that the money will follow to support their efforts (new post coming on this subject). Read More

If you think diabetes and obesity are the two biggest health care crises Americans face these days, you’re missing the forest for the trees — literally. Because the roots of all this diet-induced disease lie in two less publicized but even more pernicious epidemics: nature deficit disorder and kitchen illiteracy.

The symptoms include a woeful lack of familiarity with that elusive culinary commodity known as “real food,” or “good food,” or “slow food,” and total estrangement from Mother Earth — who, by the way, keeps hanging around outside pining for a glimpse of you while you remain indoors, mesmerized by your monitor or TV screen and mindlessly munching on ersatz edibles.

Do you have no idea what you’re actually eating, where it came from, or how it was grown? You may suffer from one or both of these maladies. Are you fearful of naked food that’s not encased in microwave-friendly packaging? Petrified by perishable produce that demands any sort of prep? Read More

"Harvest Time in Harlem," an education program run by Slow Food USA.

Last week, Michelle Obama made these remarks (VIDEO) to a group of fifth-graders who had just harvested 73 pounds of lettuce and 12 pounds of snap peas from the First Lady’s Garden on the White House Lawn:

“To make sure that we give all our kids a good start to their day and to their future, we need to improve the quality and nutrition of the food served in schools. We’re approaching the first big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda with the upcoming reauthorization of the child nutrition programs. In doing so, we can go a long way towards creating a healthier generation for our kids.”

It wasn’t Michael Pollan who said those words. It was the First Lady. Coming from her, the phrase “big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda” is a call to action we cannot ignore. Read More

Apples and apple growers are in trouble. At one time, North America had over 14,000 apple varieties populating habitats from coast to coast. But in the 2001 Fruit, Berry and Nut Inventory published by Seed Savers Exchange (Whealy, 2001), the number of apple varieties available to Americans through nursery stocks had dwindled to 1,500. The continued tragedy is that in 2009, only 11 apples comprise 90% of what Americans access and enjoy. Read More

There’s a saying in Arabic: “That is not my apricot; my apricot is some other apricot.” It became a favorite of mine and five other interns two summers ago as we worked on the Yale Farm. When we were confronted with a challenge, the saying made the situation clear. It’s not that I don’t have an apricot—I do—it’s just that that’s not it.

The perennial bed was our apricot. Read More

I ate meat for the first time in over twenty years recently.  The moment presented itself after a culmination of many things, primarily an ever-increasing personal momentum within the world of food.  Writing a food column, owning a cookie company, and working for Slow Food Nation kept bringing me face to face with a myriad of dining experiences.  How could I refuse to just take a taste?  To enter, finally, over the threshold of a zone that can still uphold craft, integrity, responsibility, and culture. Read More

Terra Madre (“Mother Earth” in Italian) is an international network of food producers, cooks, students and educators from 150 countries, united by a common goal of global sustainability in food. They are also united by their shared experience at the Terra Madre conference, held biennially in Turin, Italy, by Slow Food International. Read More

The Pacific Northwest has gotten plenty of great food press over the past couple of decades—salmon, marionberries, beer, wine—the list grows longer each season.

We live, supposedly, in an urban/rural Eden, where we can sip our carefully roasted coffee in the morning before kayaking or bicycling to work under lush trees and looming mountains; on our way home, we can pause to pick a few berries or, heck, catch a salmon before relaxing with locally crafted drinks. Read More

At a Slow Food dinner seven years ago, native foods chef John Farais and California native landscaper Alrie Middlebrook began an ongoing conversation about the importance of integrating native plants into our daily lives and diets. Read More

Before the dawn of industrial agriculture, we had thousands of varieties of vegetables and fruits. Today, we see only a small fraction of that variety: red delicious apples, iceberg lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes. According to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, 75 percent of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900 and during that same period, 93 percent of American food product diversity has been lost. In the last century, 30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct and one more is lost every six hours. Read More

During a recent visit to the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, a bag of tepary beans at the Rancho Gordo stand called out to me as I struggled to make a few choices from their incredible variety of offerings. I knew that they were an ancient bean associated with Native Americans and so I bought a pound. The variety I purchased are small and pale green in color. The photo shows them along with a kidney bean and black bean for scale. Read More