Slow Food: a New Political Movement

By Peter Langley

The Slow Food Movement held a four-day event in San Francisco during Labor Day weekend. Thousands of people paid the $65 admission to the Slow Food Nation’s Taste Pavilions at Fort Mason. These featured items such as homemade jams, fair-trade coffee, artisan chocolate and biodynamic wine.

Visitors also strolled through a Victory Garden at the Civic Center, a quarter-acre area where Slow-Food volunteers had planted vegetables and herbs grown worldwide. A farmers market was set up nearby, where shoppers could buy locally-grown fruits and vegetables and fresh bread.

In addition to eating, people could attend discussions about how to reform our food delivery system. One presenter was UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan, who has written two books on food: “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

So, you may ask: why do we need Slow Food, and how is this supposed to work anyway? You will find a good explanation in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

Pollan starts out by identifying our problem: We are omnivores, that is, we eat a wide variety of animal and vegetable substances. Our dilemma, he argues, is that our predisposition to eat just about anything in nature produces constant anxiety about what we should eat.

This is complicated by the fact that we live in an industrial food system in which we are far removed from the growing and processing of food. And the efficiency necessary to make this system profitable is producing crops and meats that are demonstrably less healthy for us.

Further, he argues, we just don’t know how producing food this way will affect our health and our environment long-term.

The driver of this system is corn, because $4 billion to $5 billion of our tax dollars subsidize growing it every year. This is not the traditional sweet corn we buy. It is genetically-engineered by companies such as Monsanto, and grown in Iowa and other Corn Belt states. In fact, according to Pollan, it has transformed rural Iowa into one huge corn monoculture (along with soybeans).

This cheap corn feeds cattle and poultry in huge feedlots and, increasingly, farmed fish. It is also the basic foodstuff for many grocery store items: cereals, snacks, soft drinks, toothpaste “… you name it.

Feedlots are unhealthy and unnatural. Cattle are ruminants: they like to eat grass and chew their cud. And chickens and turkeys like to peck around pastures and eat grass, worms, and whatever other grass eaters leave behind.

Animals fed this way, and fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides, are the stuff of the Slow Food Movement. To see this firsthand, Pollan spent a week at Polyface Farm near Swoope, Va. There he met a man with a mission — owner Joel Salatin.

A self-described grass farmer, he’s raising cattle and chickens and pigs on grass and sweet corn. He rails at the Department of Agriculture, which he views as a tool of the industrial food system.

Example: another local grass farmer would like to build a small slaughterhouse where cattle would be slaughtered more cleanly and humanely. But the USDA won’t send out an inspector because the facility is too small. It is set up for inspecting only large corporate slaughterhouses, like Tyson Chicken’s. Thus, Salatin has to send his grass-fed beef to a large facility, which increases the retail cost.

These kinds of barriers get broken down only if people demand food produced more naturally at a price they can pay. Whether this will happen on any scale remains to be seen.

We are a fast-food nation; becoming Slow Food consumers would be a huge cultural and economic shift.

There is evidence, though, that people in Martinez and the broader Bay Area want to buy locally-grown food. The farmers market, which rotates through East Bay communities, including Martinez on Thursdays, is thriving.

And people like former Supervisor Tom Powers, who grows wine grapes, olives for oil, and a variety of vegetables on his Alhambra Valley farm, are reviving the local agriculture that was once a staple around Martinez.

Although these are positive signs, the Slow Food Movement is still in its infancy. But as awareness of our unhealthy food chain grows, it will too.

Peter Langley is an attorney in Martinez, and a former member of the Martinez City Council. He can be reached at columns@bayareanewsgroup.com.

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