Wine, Cheese, and Change

How fast can Slow Food fix the way we eat?

By John Schwenkler,  September 28, 2008

Surveying the crowd of eager foodies who had packed into the Fort Mason Center, it became clear at a glance that this, at least, was not the place where the Slow Food movement was going to meet the American masses. What had to be hundreds of thin and well-dressed yuppies – present company included, I guess, though I could never have afforded a ticket if it hadn’t come with my press credentials – waited patiently in appropriately slow-moving lines for pizza, cheeses, and assorted charcuterie, their small children squirming restlessly but with a silent resignation that my own son has never been able to muster. Our $65 tickets had earned us each a small piece of paper worth $20 in “Slow Dough” – a bit of a raw deal, I thought at first. The self-proclaimed “Food Woodstock” was starting to look a bit more like a gastronomic version of the Magic Kingdom than an establishment-defying assault on fast food culture.

Then again, the Taste Pavilion was never really where Slow Food Nation’s hoped-for populism was meant to manifest itself, and the trickle-down theory behind it – get the upper crust to shell out for the exclusive smorgasbord, then use the proceeds to fund some events for the rest of us – made a good deal of sense. A unit of Slow Dough would get you much further in the Taste Pavilion than would the corresponding piece of American currency in the world outside. And it was back at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, just off the subway and in full view of City Hall, that the heart of the event resided: a huge and beautifully-maintained “Victory Garden,” open to the public and bursting with flowers and fresh produce, was surrounded by a ring of stalls hawking everything from late-summer peaches and artisan tomatoes to grass-fed beef hotdogs and raw milk butter and cheese. Still not quite Woodstock, but at least the expensive entry passes weren’t required.

Even there, however, the prices were considerably in excess of what the fabled Average American was used to spending. The five-dollar bill I had in my pocket when I visited the Civic Center location couldn’t get me much more than a tomato salad or a few pieces of fruit, so I ended up buying an unsanctioned Polish sausage from a vendor on the corner. The garden, too, was hardly a paradigm of food justice or sustainable agriculture: for one thing, its immaculate appearance was largely the responsibility of a pair of prestigious gardening and landscape architecture firms; for another, it was due to be torn up in November and the grassy sod of the Civic Center Plaza replanted. Rather like a Disney movie, once again, but with Monsanto and the Bush Administration standing in for the fire-breathing dragon and the wicked witch.

Brahm Ahmadi, who is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit People’s Grocery in nearby West Oakland and has been an outspoken critic of the Slow Food movement in the past, tells me that it is exactly this disconnect between public image and grassroots reality that makes Slow Food a problem for organizations like his. “The main concern,” he says, “is that this is an all-white, relatively elitist, privileged organization that is now presenting itself to represent a national movement. What we’ve seen again and again with Slow Food is that when they make an attempt [at public outreach] they’re not inclusive and they end up regretting it later. Slow Food Nation was an example of that. There wasn’t a diverse turnout because there weren’t diverse planners and leaders. Had there been diverse co-conveners and co-planners from the beginning I think we would have seen a very different event.”

Eventually these sorts of criticisms began to sink in, and Ahmadi was invited to be part of a private panel where he spoke, as he put it to me, about the need for Slow Food USA to be “very careful about whose toes they step on, what space they usurp.” While he was happy to be a part of things, Ahmadi insists that such efforts weren’t enough. “It was all an afterthought,” he says. “I got a call for the first time in June, asking me how can we get people of color to come – we should have heard from them a year and a half ago.” It will be interesting, he adds, “to see if the learning is transferred – I hope it is.” But that doesn’t change the fact that the way the event materialized left him and other community leaders with “lots of concerns about cost and inaccessibility.”

When I discussed these concerns with SFN executive director Anya Fernald, she readily admitted that the event “ended up paying the price for a lot of errors and missteps,” though she also insisted to me that “most of the criticism was for stuff that was beyond the scope” of Slow Food Nation itself. The goal of the weekend, as she put it, was to use the free publicity that attends the Slow Food brand to shed light on our food system’s social and ecological injustices – less to be a “leader” or a “big tent” than to provide “a stage for people to shine on,” a “platform” upon which conversations about the future of the global food movement could be had. Local organizers didn’t have to worry about the Slow Food behemoth stepping on their toes: “This is a local organization with local leadership, and hopefully there is a conversation that will emerge from this.”

It’s hard, though, not to sympathize with Ahmadi’s frustration at the sharp gulf between the tremendous human and financial capital that went into a three-day event like Slow Food Nation and the crippling budgetary constraints within which organizations like the People’s Grocery have to work. And even if we leave issues of fairness aside, there’s no getting around the need for the Slow Food movement to operate at a bit less of a remove from ordinary people’s everyday lives – if its cultural and political goals are ever going to viewed as something more than the dreamy preoccupations of a privileged elite. Next time they invite people to “Come to the Table,” they might start off by leaving the china in the cupboard.