By Catherine Girardeau

This coming Labor Day Weekend, San Francisco will celebrate the intersection of taste, sustainability and social justice that is the Slow Food movement. Non-profit educational organization Slow Food USA is throwing a four-day party they’re calling Slow Food Nation.

SFN’s Executive Director Anya Fernald hopes the debut event, expected to draw some 50,000 people, will reach out beyond the obvious coalition of foodies, health-nuts and environmentalists to, “build momentum and demand for an American food system that is safer, healthier and more socially just.” Highlights of the festival, which runs Friday through Monday, will include the:

• “Slow Food Rocks” concert, serving up not only Gnarls Barkley and the New Pornographers but gourmet beer and locally-grown and locally-produced food;

• 50,000 square feet of “taste pavilions” for which nationally-recognized regional food experts have hand-picked authentic gastronomic specialities from every state;

• A “Victory Garden” — an ornamental edible garden in the heart of San Francisco’s Civic Center planted on the same site as 60 years ago during World War II;

• A speaker series featuring Slow Food luminaries like the movement’s founder, Carlo Petrini, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, author Wendell Berry, and Slow Food Nation founder, chef and slow food activist Alice Waters;

• And for those who can stomach politics along with their pickles and panini, a petition calling for a new food and farm policy for the 21st Century that Slow Food USA and its allies will present to Congress next year.

It’s not surprising that the modern slow food movement was born in Italy, well known for its love of traditional gastronomy and the midday meal. In 1986, Italian journalist and philanthropist Carlo Petrini began to speak out against the industrialization of food. In an effort akin to an ecologist trying to preserve the world’s biodiversity, Petrini wanted to show consumers that fast food was wiping out authentic culinary traditions, and the richness and enjoyment of access to a diverse and unprocessed diet.

Petrini’s Slow Food movement is grounded on the belief that food should be good, clean and fair. His 2007 book, Slow Food Nation, outlines the basic principles behind what he hopes will become a worldwide movement toward a more sustainable, healthy and just way to live, and eat, on planet Earth. Slow Food now has 120,000 members worldwide, with 15,000 of those in Slow Food USA.

In the United States, Michael Pollan’s 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals inspired a national conversation about how our eating choices affect not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains us as well. Pollan’s In Defense of Food, published this year, takes that argument a step further, advocating individual action to re-think the way we buy, prepare and consume food in order to be healthier, take pleasure in what we eat, and bring our own habits back into balance with a planet that needs our stewardship to survive.

Slow Food Nation event director Anya Fernald isn’t looking for overnight converts to the Slow Food way of life. “It’s about everyday little steps people can take,” Fernald said, “like reducing the number of meals we eat in our cars from one in five to one in ten.” And for the other nine meals? “There are ways to eat slow and eat quickly,” she said, pointing out that in California, which the California Department of Food and Agriculture said supplies almost half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, you can make a simple, healthy meal from fresh produce in less than ten minutes.

Fernald points out that fast food is associated with the American work ethic. “Deprioritizing food is considered a value of people who work,” she said. While Slow Food isn’t expecting Americans to adopt the two-hour lunches some workers in Spain take for granted, it does advocate moving your meals out from behind the wheel, your desk or the television and taking time, even ten minutes, to taste, relax and enjoy.

Ferald said Slow Food in the United States is struggling against the perception that it’s a movement for the wealthy, gourmet few. She hopes the Labor Day weekend event will inspire attendees, as well as a larger public, to begin to see eating well and having access to well-grown, unprocessed food as a right, not a choice for the elite few.

“Good food is elite in America, but it doesn’t have to be,” Fernald said.

Which brings us to the obvious question in this era of rising prices for food and fuel: Can Americans really afford to change from fast to slow food?

“Can America afford to eat the way it eats?” Fernald fires back. “We’re on the payment plan with our current system. The logical future of our food system isn’t sustainable. We’re at a moment where we have to make some changes.”

(Photo credits: University of California - Davis; Slow Food USA)

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