My favorite quote from the Slow Food Nation conference this weekend came from Wendall Berry (poet, essayist, farmer, panelist).
He held up a copy of a San Francisco Chronicle piece that said the best advertisement for the Slow Food movement was the pleasure of carefully preparing and lingering over a meal, and then described what the article got wrong. The following account of what he said is from the Journal:
[Berry] said the reporter described pleasure, as it relates to the Slow Food movement, in a limited view — that the description treated pleasure as a specialty, “a form of idleness,” which leaves out the possibility that good work could also be pleasurable… By limiting the ideas behind Slow Food to just “tasteful consumption,” Mr. Berry argued, the movement is limited in its growth.
If the Slow Food movement is going to catch on outside the upper-middle class, it’s going to be a movement about making people want to farm and distribute food locally. Not making them want to drive to consulting gigs in the city, come home, put on Graceland, and cook said locally farmed and distributed food and sit around talking/blogging/referencing David Sedaris. We need more farmers, working less efficiently, in the sense of using less fossil-fuel burning, soil-eroding methods. (See my lionization of Prince Charles, who is admirably blighted with nostalgia for agrarian England.)
Image: Slowfoodnation.org
September 1st, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Slow Food Nation might get support for “more farmers working less efficiently” if they’re big show had been a little more efficient. All I learned from the Taste Pavilions is that slow food is a rip off. I will gladly pay for food that is sustainable farmed and harvested by workers making a living wage. What I will not ever again gladly pay for is the opportunity to enter a disorganized event centered around standing in line. The Slow Food Nation event at Ft. Mason was awful. The “slow dough” was never advertised — the original tickets made it seem like you would have the opportunity to taste everything. In the end for us, though, the limits from the slow dough didn’t even cause the biggest problem. We had plenty left over after spending 3.5 hours to visit 4 pavilions due to the lines. And worse yet, the lines were not marked nor was there anyone there to direct you. At our last tasting pavilion, ice cream, we waited around thinking we were going to blow our last little slow dough circles on a bowl, only to find out we had entered the free taste line, where all you got was a little spoonful. And of course, showing our tickets and asking the worker to just go ahead and give us a bowl didn’t work. Now, we would have gotten in other line and done some more waiting at this point (we were pros by this point in the evening!), but even though it was 8:55pm, they had closed down the line.
I will spend the rest of this week making sure everyone I meet knows to never support this organization again. I thought we were supporting slow food. Instead, we were supporting a bunch of rip off artists. Go to the farmers’ market, go to Whole Foods, plant a garden. Do anything but support Slow Food Nation is you want anything other than to waste your money.
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:30 am
Its amazing to know about the slow food event by Americans, I think such fets will help people to come together and can enjoy the foods from them.