Slow Food USA’s Original Restorative Work Shed in Favor of Easy Math
Slow Food USA has played a large role in moving the needle on the dial of more sustainable food systems in this country. It is not unusual that the founding person or organization of a movement that captures the attention of people is vilified for not doing, or being, enough. Said organization/person then feels pressure to change their approach and respond to their constituency. At that juncture, though laudable to listen and react, the reaction can rarely capture the genuine spirit and passion of the original mission. It is the original mission that should be guarded with an army of shields. Changing the game plan a bit to achieve the mission can help, but altering the core of your person / organization will ultimately make it a different being altogether.
This reality faces Slow Food USA at present. The recent Chowhound article that boils the consternation down to cheap food vs. elitism about more ethical food fails to capture the real struggle the organization faces.
Early followers, or leaders as the case may be, of the movement were attracted to a variety of elements of what Slow Food communicated as its goals. Two of them stood out as unique, and not addressed in the same way by any other food organizations, and they were important to these pioneers of the US Slow Food conviviums… that’s right, conviviums, not chapters.
Pork & Pale on the Patio Potluck - Red Wattle Hog- 5 Cuts Cooked
That’s point number one, a convivium is just that, a group that gathers and enjoys a shared passion together, in this case, food that is good, clean & fair. It is convivial and there is pleasure at the table. Not all of the conversation had to be political or address some admitted failing of our food system. Chapters are an organizational structure to conduct business, change #1 that whittled away at the distinct personality of this food group, and began to make it conform to today’s standards. Chapter events demand a unified purpose and banner and issue to address. Convivium events and activities celebrated what was good about food production, farmers, artisanal products, regional flavors and slow cooking methods. Methods that often are the only way to successfully prepare sustainably produced foods.
Which leads to the attraction of the second element that made Slow Food so unique in its original format, a populist organization that addressed the importance of biodiversity. Cheap organic food typically comes from practices that still put our food system at risk. The products are grown en masse, in monocrop format, using only those seed types that work in that sterile environment. The continued downsizing of our gene pool still puts our food at risk – at risk of being obliterated by one bad bug, and at risk of being flavorless.
The Ark of Taste took many things into account in its quest to preserve nature’s greatest strength… its biodiversity, an inherent ingredient in its resilience. Was the species at risk of disappearing forever? Did the food have a cultural history and flavor unique to its growing region? And ultimately, did the food Taste good? This was not a narrow-minded plight to save every food on the basis of science only, but one rooted in reality. If the food in question that needed a boost in visibility to survive the homogenization of our food supply didn’t taste good, it just wouldn’t stand a chance of garnering enough of an eating audience to support it in the marketplace. The new term, Biodiversity Committee, isolates the conversation to just one of the questions, the scientific one that has the least potential to appeal to the masses.
Not until our country’s food production occurs on a level financial playing field can we really evaluate the cost of food, cheap or expensive. When agricultural subsidies are either equally eligible or ineligible to all classes of food producers, and the full environmental, ethical and health costs of industrial methods are factored into food prices, it’s a bit of a ridiculous debate at all. Not ridiculous because the inequity of access to healthy food for people and planet isn’t a legitimate problem, but ridiculous because we’re not having the correct debate. The issues that create the current disparities don’t lay in the hearts of the people who choose to get involved in doing what they can to promote a better food system. The issues are political, financial and structural and ask us to band together to change them, regardless of our motivation.
Fracturing the conversation about what is the best food system based on cost alone panders to the industrialism that got us here. The cause of and solution to the problems we face is much more complex than the bill at the grocery check-out. Therefore, there are many pieces of the puzzle that need our help, that need champions.
Slow Food’s early success was motivated in part by the flexibility and allowance for a wide variety of those pieces to be reason enough to be involved. Some of us feel the nearly extinct tradition of families gathering to eat at the table is a travesty, one that has eroded community and tolerance and the ability to carry on a conversation without an electronic device. Conviviums just convening people over food began to address that.
Cheap or expensive, when people gather over food, it adds to the value of each bite or sip. Somewhere along the way, most of the population in this country, even some of the most active Slow Food members, forgot that it’s an organization whose local presence and therefore impact is based 100% on volunteer efforts. The shape of what Slow Food is, and can be, at least in the old model, relies on people getting involved. A collective voice creates a collective vision. Naysayers from the sidelines creates division.
Slow Food’s ability to embrace the emotional, sensory and ethical qualitative values of food attracted enough people to the conversation to warrant more attention. The recent more quantitative approach appeals to some, but limits the value of the organization to some of its early adopters. It starts to resemble the problems we were working to fix.
Fed some, cleaned up after some, and listened to stories about how they raise their animals.
