Slow Holiday gifts

Nothing slow about running around like a (heritage, free-range) chicken with your head cut off looking for last minute gift ideas. Our intern Leo has a nice, short list of "Sustainable Santa" ideas over on the Slow Food on Campus blog, and right here, a few more ideas.

Tshirts: The new Slow Food USA t-shirt, or this "Beet the System" shirt from our friends at Just Food.

Books: Check out Jeff Roberts' Atlas of American Artisan Cheese, the first comprehensive guide to the artisan cheese movement. Or an oldie but goodie, Gary Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods.

Food: Consider ordering something from Native Harvest, the online catalogue of the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota. Here you can buy an assortment of Manoomin Wild rice products, in addition to coffee, honeys, hominy, and more.

Magazine: Order someone a subscription to GOOD, "the magazine for people who give a damn." When you order, the entirety of your subscription money goes to one of the 12 selected charity partners–and you get to choose which one! Guess who is one of the 12 partners this year…? Slow Food USA.

(Food and) Farm Bill Update

As of today, the Dorgan-Grassley amendment– the amendment that proposed payment limits for subsidies–failed on the Senate floor, 56-43. That's 56 votes FOR the amendment, and yet, that counts as failure, oddly enough, based on an agreement made by the two parties that 60 votes would be needed for it to pass.

For many of us, educating ourselves on the Farm Bill has been an education in the evils of subsidies, so the failure of this amendment is a disappointment, if not a complete surprise. It is worth noting, however, that this amendment, like several others, was the source of some debate amongst sustainable ag proponents.

Much in the same way, the School nutrition amendment has also ruffled some feathers. While this amendment puts some major restrictions on what kind of junk food and what size packages can be sold/served in public schools, many are upset because it allows these foods in at all.

Both of these are good object lessons in what a labrynthine tangle this Farm Bill is, and how difficult it is to make change wihin an existing (messed up) system.

That being said!

Despite the failure of Dorgan-Grassley, there are nearly 40 more amendments taking the floor in the upcoming days, including the Tester amendment — which would help make it easier for independent livestock producers to get their animals to market , and an amendment to be offered by Senator Lincoln (boo! hiss!) that would limit eligibility for conservation programs. Now is a terrific time to call your Senators and reiterate your priorities: 202-224-3121

The Case for Taste

Tom Philpott over at Grist gives us one more reason to eat and savor a Louisiana Heritage strawberry, say, rather than an industrially grown big red thang.

Not only are the industrially grown strawberries pretty flavorless, but they struggle to survive in soil that hasn't been sterilized by methyl bromide or methyl iodide, 2 compounds that are proven to cause cancer.

Older, heirloom varieties of strawberries do well in regular old soil, soil that doesn't need cancer-causing agents to keep it going. And also: they TASTE better.

but what if I eat it slowwwly?

This bit of news is too ridiculous to pass up:

Around 40 McDonald's restaurants in the UK are imposing substantial fines for motorists who linger too long in the parking lots eating their meals. Apparently parking spots are at a premium and it's the chain's way of keeping people from abusing the lots. One man, The Guardian reports, took nearly an hour to eat his meal and drink his coffee.

Perhaps, in those forlorn parking lots, in those grease-filled, fry-smelling cars, the Slow Food movement is taking root…maybe it starts with eating your value meal realllly slowwwwly…(while the restaurant writes you a ticket).

Slow Reading

A kindred spirit in Southwestern Ontario named John Miedema has a blog called Slow Reading. There he mentions his affection for Slow Food and local eating, based around a wonderful book called The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating

It was the kind of meal that, when the plates were clean, led some to dark corners to sleep with the hushing of the wind, and others to drink mulled wine until our voices had climbed an octave and finally deepened, in the small hours, into whispers.

I am just finishing The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Smith & MacKinnon (2007). The couple tells of their year of eating food only grown within a hundred miles of their home. I'll be reviewing it here soon. The quote above is about the meal that inspired the effort. The 100-Mile Diet is not so different from the Slow Food movement that encourages local cooking and eating. There is something about slow food that satisfies on multiple levels.

He has a cool graph too (really). Check it out here.

(Food and) Farm Bill Update

After a giant log-jam, as of yesterday, things are finally moving in the Senate again. This means that the (Food and) Farm Bill has a shot at getting passed before the Senate takes its holiday recess. Of course, many speculate that the President will veto the passed version, but we'll try not to get ahead of ourselves.

In the meantime, 260 amendments to the bill are going to be up for debate (that's a lot of amendments to get through in just a few weeks!) and we'll be highlighting some of them in upcoming posts. Stay tuned…

good, clean, and yes, FAIR

You might know Eric Schlosser best for Fast Food Nation, and the subsequent movie version, and the subsequent for-teens book called Chew On This. It turns out that his muckraking about the food system created an itch to uncover food worker abuses, an itch he's been scratching for the past few years. After exposing the horrific conditions of immigrant workers in the beef slaughterhouses that supply our nation's fast food restaurants, he next turned his pen on the abused hog slaughterhouse workers at the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

For his incisive and hard-hitting 2006 piece called "Hog Hell," in The Nation, click here.
For ways that you can help take action against Smithfield's treatment of workers, and in particular their treatment of workers who try to unionize, click here.

Next up for Schlosser? The plight of egregiously underpaid tomato pickers in Southern Florida, whose tomatoes end up on the burgers at all of the major fast food chains. In 2005, the Coalition of Immokalee workers (Immokalee is a small town in Florida) succeeded in getting Taco Bell to agree to a one cent per pound increase. Sounds like a pittance, and to Taco Bell it is; to the workers, it's a colossal difference. When Erika Lesser, our Executive Director, met members of the Immokalee Coalition at the Kellogg Conference last Spring, the news was good–they had their sights set next on the other big chains.

In his recent NY Times opinion piece, however, Schlosser documents the glitch in their plan–the Florida Growers Exchange's threat to growers who pay this extra penny per pound. Schlosser pulls no punches in his disgust for the greed of Burger King and one of its top shareholders–Goldman Sachs. To read all about it, click here.

Mesquite Gathering

by Gay Chanler

I celebrated the New Year twice in 2007. The first occasion was on January 1st, in the tradition of the western world. In the second instance it was July first, when I was a guest in the Seri Indian village of El Desemboque, a desert community on the east coast of the Sea of Cortez in Sonora, Mexico. There, the New Year begins with the start of the wild mesquite pod harvest, in early July. I had come to witness and record the celebration and the harvest in preparation for launching the Fire Roasted Mesquite Presidium.

The Seri New Year celebration is linked with the harvest because mesquite is one of the most important traditional staple foods of this hunting and gathering people. Rich in protein, minerals and other nutrients, it was a significant part of their healthy, natural, Native diet. Today, however, as the traditional diet erodes from the onslaught of packaged, processed, non-traditional foods, and children are growing accustomed to sodas, chips, and commercial sweets, there is a dramatic deterioration in health. Many Seri suffer from diabetes and its side effects, and restoring mesquite to their regular diet would make a significant difference in preventing this problem.

The goal of the Mesquite Presidium is to sustain this food tradition and keep it viable by generating income from selling the surplus flour not consumed in the community. The nutty, sweet, gluten–free flour is already gaining popularity in the United States, and interest is growing in Mexico. Marketing part of their mesquite harvest to Mexican neighbors and communities across the US border promotes not only economic gain, but also a cross-cultural exchange that will bring recognition to the value of their food traditions in a larger world.

Teaching us their mesquite harvest and roasting practices, and sharing their tortillas, atole, and tamales with us, infused the New Year celebration with enthusiasm for the Presidium project. In this New Year, fire-roasted Mesquite flour from Seri is coming to market. Look for it at the Center for Sustainable Environments, Prescott College's Crossroads Café, Tucson Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian/National Museum of the American Indian's Mitsitam Café.

Read more about the Seri Fire Roasted Mesquite Presidium on the Slow Food USA website and the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity website.

Mesquite pod flour is also on the US Ark of Taste. Click here to learn more.

Doing good

The holidays have become a time when many people do their yearly community service, and often that service comes in the form of food. At a time when many are stuffing their faces with turkey and Christmas pudding and latkes, etc., it's hard not to think about people who not only don't have food, but don't have people to eat it with. As a chef, Slow Food member, or food enthusiast (or all three) working in soup kitchens and the like is a logical way to give back to the community during the holidays. Why not use what you know/love?

Recently, we here in the National office had the opportunity to meet someone who has created a way to do good with food, and not just at the holidays. Christine Carroll went to New Orleans on a 2006 Henckels Cutting Edge scholarship attending the Share Our Strength conference in New Orleans. There she found a rich culinary heritage and a community in need. But why go there and paint houses (etc.) she wondered, when her real skills lay in the kitchen?

As a result, she founded Culinary Corps, which brings groups of culinary students and professionals to NOLA to do food-centered volunteer projects. As she explains, "Culinary Corps provides team members with an opportunity to transform their kitchen skills and passion for food into community outreach tools." As we write, Christine is in on the Gulf Coast with a group of culinary professionals, on the fourth trip she's led this year, where she and her trip members will be slicing and dicing to help out a local farmers' market and a local church.

If you'd like to get involved with, or donate to Culinary Corps, click here.
If you'd like to find out how to get inolved with soup kitches, etc. in your area, click here.

Because doing good once a year is a nice start, but year-round is better…

What’s in a word?

People are a-buzz about Oxford University Press' selection of "locavore" as its word of the year (having beat out several words some of us may never have heard of– "bacn," anyone?).

It's interesting to think about buzz and how it helps or hinders an idea or movement. If a word is chosen as a word of the year, does that mean it won't be relevant next year ("locavore" is SO 2007), or does it signal it's arrival ("locavore" is here to stay)? And if the press grabs a word and runs with it, is it destined to be paraphrased, simpified, and/or plain misunderstood?

Many people scoff at the notion of local eating because it seems impractical, if not impossible, in many parts of the country. Comments on the Oxford University Press blog reflect some of that cynicism–"Another nice conceit for those in lotus land!" When eating local is understood only as an experiment or something that works only if you follow it to the letter, it is destined to end up a forgotten or rejected "concept." We're all better off, surely, if local can become a pragmatic ideal–to eat local for as much of your diet as it makes sense (i.e.: why eat a New Zealand apple when the farmer in your town/city/county/state is growing beautiful ones just next door?), and to retrain our bodies to eat seasonally as much as possible.

Thoughts?

(for some "local" reading: Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and "My Empire of Dirt.")