Quickly returning to Slow Food

This past weekend was the Slow Food Nation wingding in the city. We did not go: I was busy wrestling my indecently fecund tomato plants into submission and scheming about the placement of the raised beds so I can start my winter greens. Also, I feared that attending would ignite my contrarian streak. I could see myself bolting for the nearest McDonald's, then dancing on the periphery of the festival, popping McNuggets into my mouth and shouting, "Mmm! Factory farming and processed beyond recognition! It tastes like America!"

But I did read a fairly eye-opening article in San Francisco magazine, "Slow Food Was Here." I was not filled with admiration for the movement:

[Slow Food Founder Carlo]  Petrini’s diary entry sprays acid on the [San Francisco Ferry Building] market. He describes his first Dantelike descent into the Saturday throng in 2003, with Waters as guide, through a hell ring of glamorous poseurs, “most of whom seemed to be actresses whose social status was pretty clear: either wealthy or very wealthy.” He saves his heftiest scorn for a few slacker sellers, “amiable ex-hippies and young dropouts turned farmers.” One grower gouges the rich buyers bagging up his squashes so he can “spend hours surfing on the beach.” Petrini hints at the invisible underclass of farm laborers who toil to pick this high-priced swag for their dude masters, and who themselves are forced to eat at fast-food joints. It’s a portrait of a place that had perverted the all-inclusive, worker-centric goals of the organization Petrini helped found 20 years earlier in Bra, a town in northwest Italy with the size and humble vibe of Benicia.

[...]

Though talking heads inside—and in favor of—the organization have grown tired of the knee-jerk charge of elitism, a nuanced critic like Raj Patel, a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, is hard to ignore. As he describes in his book Stuffed and Starved, Slow Food in the States has chosen mostly to ignore the social-justice component of Petrini’s message, essentially becoming an exclusive dining club—at the same time protesting that it’s anything but. High-profile events like the Golden Glass (an annual wine-tasting event in San Fran­cisco that’s an important fundraiser for the city’s 700-­member Slow Food convivium, or chapter) only reinforce the notion of an organization content to speak the language of high-ticket pursuits. At the very least, the event’s organizers seem deaf to the irony of floating the word golden to promote a group sensitive to the charge that it exists primarily for the gilded class. The fundraiser might as well be called the Jewel-Encrusted Chalice.

[...]

It’s not just that poor families are priced out of the occasional restaurant splurge. It’s also that quotidian groceries are held out as eco-gastronomic exemplars of good and clean. Patel recently took a documentary film crew to the Ferry Building. He wanted to see what he could buy for $21, the weekly allowance for someone on welfare. “We man­aged to get six eggs, a loaf of bread, a bit of cheese, and six tomatoes, and that was it,” he says.

By the way, tickets to the Slow Food Nation festival started at $45.

Anyway, there's that article, which illustrates pretty well the wide gulf between lofty aspiration and the gritty reality of who produces or consumes food. And then there's my friend Stephanie's experience volunteering with Slow Food Nation this weekend. In "Something is Rotten in the State of the Nation," she shares her hair-raising experience and concludes:

Next time you do an event, Slow Food Nation, take better care of the people who turned out to help spread your message. We may not have been "paying guests" in the monetary sense, but we paid with our time, energy, and goodwill and we deserved to be accorded the same respect as those forking over cold hard cash. This was a high-profile chance to show a whole mess of people that you are better than the average food industry expo, and in some ways you did. In other ways, you really didn't.

I wonder what Carlo Petrini would have had to say about it.

Comments

[Lauren]

My friend went with her two kids, and paid $61 per ticket (not sure if the kids' tix were cheaper). She said for that money, she'd expected it to be _a lot_ less crowded, but that they ended up having a good time.