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.
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