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by Slow Food USA President Josh Viertel
This post originally appeared on the Atlantic Food Channel

Letting go is hard for me. I want to touch everything. I have strong and specific opinions about the things I love: I have opinions about how fine to chop parsley and I am adamant about how close together to plant lettuce. Different varieties of head lettuce even get different spacing. I think it makes a difference. I like to think I’m right. But I’m learning to let go.

In my heart, I believe that a community’s collective creativity is always more rich, more inspired, and more impactful than any one individual’s. My mind sometimes gets in the way of my acting on that belief, but my experience keeps reinforcing the notion that large numbers of inspired people, on a mission, left to their own devices, will do brilliant and beautiful things. More and more, I am learning that my job at Slow Food USA is to create a context, offer some direction and support, and then get out of the way.

Nothing has taught me this more than the events that unfolded on Labor Day’s National Day of Action launching the Time for Lunch campaign.

The idea was simple: let’s see if we can organize a series of demonstrations, part pot-luck, part sit-in, all over the country on one day, where people share food they believe in and demand legislation that gives kids real food in school. We will call the events Eat-Ins. If it works, it will be like a virtual march on Washington. The collective story will be told on the Internet and in the media.

We wanted to tell Congress that this is an issue that matters to a lot of Americans, and in the process we wanted to strengthen both the local communities where the events took place, and the national network of people working to change the way food and farming happen in America. We aimed for 100 demonstrations in 25 states. By the time Labor Day rolled around, we had 307 events confirmed, and we had demonstrations in every state in the nation.