Slow Food Nation comes to San Francisco, CA

“Get Your Hands in the Dirt”

Inspiring people to be conscious of, and there for responsible for, their own nourishment, is part of the mission of Slow Food Nation. With heath problems soaring as people exercise less and eat more fast & convenient food, trying to get people's attention that this issue is extremely personal is vital! The health and economic costs of life-style bad habits impacts the entire planet, from crop priorities to fuel costs transporting food products. The subject is vast.


By Shepherd Bliss

“Get your hands in the dirt,” recommended physicist Vandana Shiva of India. She was speaking at Slow Food Nation over Labor Day Weekend in San Francisco, which attracted around 60,000 people. While in the Bay Area Shiva also gave a presentation in Sonoma County on August 27, partly sponsored by the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. She wrote the book “Soil Not Oil—Securing Our Food in Times of Climate Change.”

“We have to get back to the stuff that we are made of, which is soil,” Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Kansas declared, echoing Shiva. The word human, after all, shares a root with humus, the black, organic matter in soil. Perhaps it is also related to humility and humbleness.

Shiva and Jackson were among the Food for Thought speakers at Slow Food Nation (SFN). Most of the SFN’s events, other than the speakers, were free, including a Victory Garden that replaced a lawn in front of City Hall. A soap box was set up in the garden where farmers and others gave lively presentations and engaged people in discussion. A huge marketplace surrounded the garden and offered healthy food. A few miles away at Ft. Mason the SFN Taste Pavilio--the length of two football fields--also offered “good, clean, and fair” food. Free music, films, and other cultural expressions also occurred, because agri-culture is the basis of culture.

The Food for Thought speakers’ series took a systems approach. It related food and agriculture to issues such as climate change, social justice, re-localizing food, and the policy and planning needed to replace our current food system with a more sustainable one. Food security, energy security, and climate security were approached as intimately linked.

21st century agriculture is dependent upon petroleum. As UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan said, “We eat oil.” Oil is necessary for industrial agriculture. It is needed to make pesticides and fertilizers, for tractors, to transport the average morsel 1500 miles from field to fork, to make plastics for packaging, and in so many other ways. But guess what? The cheap 20th century supply of petroleum is dwindling. We’re running out of oil. This is no longer the Peak Oil theory. It is the fact of diminishing oil supplies meeting growing demand as China, India and other countries rise.

Other prominent speakers at SFN in the growing sustainable agriculture movement included “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser, Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, chef Alice Waters (Slow Food Nation Founder), and Italian Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food movement. He founded Slow Food in 1989 to protest fast food culture. It has spread to 100 countries and has over 80,000 members. Slow Food USA has over 200 chapters, including an active Russian River chapter, and 16,000 members.

Speakers described how our food system is broken, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. Food shortages are occurring around the world, leading to food riots, which are likely to continue as the global food crisis grows.

Farming used to be based on human muscle, then animal power was harnessed. At our family farm in Iowa in the late 40s/early 50s we had no electricity, which had not yet reached the rural mid-west. No TV. We had ice boxes, gas lights, an outhouse, a windmill with a pump on it for the well, and cold cellars. Muscle, mules, and hand tools were the main means of our farming, as well as some draft horses, and eventually tractors. Life was good. When electricity did arrive, life seemed to get somewhat easier, but I am not sure that it was any better.

One of the SFN panels was titled “Help Wanted: 50 Million Farmers.” Most Americans used to farm, which continues in among many traditional peoples on the globe. But in the U.S. less than 2% of the population farms today. If we are to survive, more people must grow their own food and become gardeners and farmers. We are fortunate here in Sonoma County, because we have the climate, soil, and some people who remember how to do such old-fashioned farming.

“Slow Food makes a political statement, though we do not do politics as such,” explained Randi Seidner of the Russian River chapter. The visibly pregnant Seidner was taking a brief break from selling organic fruit. “We are not just about getting together with friends to have dinners. We want to make changes in our food system.”

“Slow Food can help support local farmers,” Seidner added. A month after SFN in San Francisco, on October 5, Seidner and others are organizing the Russian River Convivium’s annual event at the Barndivia Restaurant in Healdsburg, They are joining with a group called Fork and Shovel, which brings together local farmers and chefs.

“The big folks are starting to get it. There are many signs of change. Major publications are realizing that things need to change in our food system. It is a shame that our president and government do not see that we are in a total crisis,” Seidner said.

“I think it is courageous to grow apples,” commented Sebastopol Farmers’ Market manager Paula Downing. “It is courageous to keep working the land when you can sell it for houses, courageous to keep growing Gravenstein apples when they are out of style and don't pay like grapes do, courageous to believe in something that is not necessarily in fashion right now. I feel it is important to honor the apple farmers who have this courage,” she added.

Some of the leading voices in sustainable agriculture have written a draft Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture that was released at SFN. “Food Fight” author Dan Imhoff of Healdsburg and Santa Rosa’s Michael Dimock, President of Roots of Change, which initiated the declaration and co-sponsored SFN, were among its framers. They intend to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures and present the petition in Washington, D.C., to Congress by the fall of 2009. One can learn more about or endorse it at www.fooddeclaration.org.

“We all eat everyday,” master chef Waters noted. “There are consequences to the choices we make with respect to our health, environment, and culture. Edible education is to help children understand those consequences.”

"Seed by seed, plant by plant, peasant by peasant, community by community, country by country, we will reclaim our food freedom,” Vandana Shiva writes.


Shepherd Bliss, sb3@pon.net, has farmed in Sebastopol since l992, currently teaches at Sonoma State University, and is writing chapters on agropsychology and agrotherapy—farms as healing places—for books.