Even though EVERY day is earth day

Earth Day (April 22) is coming up, a welcome reminder each year that the Earth is our home and provides generation after generation with life itself. Did you know that our current food system is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gases? Protecting our planet requires action by everyone, and supporting local food systems and sustainable food production will help value and protect the land that feeds us all. So what can you do?

Organic Valley, the family-farmed owned organic dairy cooperative, encourages people to host "Earth Dinners" with homemade, local food and conversation centered on the origins of what is being served. They've created a deck of conversation-starter cards to be used at Earth Day Dinners. More details and sample cards can be found on the Organic Valley web site.

If you live near one of these Slow Food Local chapters, you can participate in their Earth Day events, including:

Slow Food Monterey Bay will participate in the annual Central Coast Vineyard Team Earth Day Food & Wine festival in Santa Margarita, CA on April 19
Slow Food Huron Valley, Michigan will host Capuchin Soup Kitchen's Earth Day Commemoration on April 22, featuring speakers on sustainability, the soup kitchen's Farm Stand, and the establishment of a local monastery's organic farm. Proceeds will benefit the Soup Kitchen and Earthworks Urban Farm.

Slow Food Miami will host a Seafood Picnic in honor of Earth Day on April 27 to benefit their Pre-K school garden program.

Slow Food Spokane River's Earth Dinner at Wild Sage restaurant will connect diners to the local producers who grow their food.

Or, consider the possibility of treating it as a new year of sorts and making an Earth Day resolution. What will you do this year to help take care of the earth?

The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized

by Slow Food USA staffer Makalé Faber Cullen

This month's Harper's magazine features an excellent article by Nathanael Johnson who takes on the North American black market in raw milk and it's odd bedfellow… high tech "bio-active" dairy.

The defense of the fresh stuff (aka "green top milk") has been a steady, under-the-radar activity and a 20-year Slow Food campaign since the US Food and Drug Administration banned interstate sales of unpasteurized milk in the 1980s. Most of us, in fact, have been raised to believe pasteurization is a good thing. It protects us from salmonella and E-coli poisoning. It prolongs the shelf life of dairy products, which means more people in more places have access to them.

But as Johnson explains, it's not the fresh milk from a Holstein grazing on grass that's producing health threats. It's the other way around. To put it simply, grass-grazing cows eat in a way that allows them to produce milk containing enzymes that are often beneficial to us humans. "Dirty milk," an insider's phrase, comes from modern dairies which, in their clamor for high volume and high profit, use pasteurization as license to be unsanitary, to feed inappropriate food to cattle and engage in other unsavory activities. Ever colorful, Johnson says, "After a century of pasteurization, modern dairies, to put it bluntly, are covered in shit. Most have a viscous lagoon full of fit. Cows lie in it." And with that, Johnson navigates us through the public health thicket of industrial milk production and the volatility of raw milk markets, with regular tours through the anatomy of cattle and how we try to alter it.

The issue is far, far more complex than I've described above and Johnson remains respectably objective. Please read the article. Johnson is an entertaining writer. His piece is reference quality and yet doesn't compromise a bit on good storytelling.

I support the idea of people's right to sell and buy raw milk and raw milk products—often of finer quality since the proteins and sugars haven't been altered by heat. To reference Gil Scott Heron's potent and poignant 1971 release, The Revolution will not be Televised is to commit to taking the investigation and the story a bit further. Slow Food USA's Raw Milk Cheese Producers Association is trying to do just that –change by the producer for the producer.

While thinking about Gil Scott and the fight for justice, I'm reminded of a February post about the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. debacle. Industrial food workers, whether they're in dairies or meat packing plants deserve humane treatment as much as animals do. What's the story on dairy workers forced to put in 19-hour days in these "lagoons?"

Rising Food Prices: The Perfect Storm

We here at Slow Food USA have been saying for quite some time now that food in this country is too cheap, and have been urging people to think about the true cost of food. No one could have predicted, though, how quickly food prices would rise around the globe, changing the conversation quite significantly. In the NY Times last week, Kim Severson talked with Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and other sustainable food advocates about this rise and what it could/will mean for the average consumer. The title of the article? "Some Good News on Food Prices."

Good news? Not so fast, say some. Tom Philpott over at Grist took issue with their analysis/predictions and got some good conversation going in his comments section.

Meanwhile, over at Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Raj Patel, the author of Stuffed and Starved: the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. The title, of course, refers to the paradox of the twin epidemics we face right here in our own country but also around the world: obesity and hunger.

He explains the rising food prices as a "perfect storm:" the combination of last year being a bad year for crops, the rise of interest in biofuels, developing nations eating more meat (which uses much more grain than it would to eat grain directly), and the rise of oil prices. He calls ethanol as an alternative to oil as "madness," and comes down hard on the U.S.' free trade agenda as being partly responsible for the present food riots in the developing world.

A Potato with a Past: the Makah Ozette

by Slow Food USA Regional Governor Gerry Warren

In the 1980's an unknown fingerling potato was recognized to be a staple in the diet of Pacific Coast Native Americans of the Makah Nation. The Makah occupy the region around Neah Bay, Washington, that is the most northwesterly point in the United States. Tribal lore reported that this potato had been used by these people for about 200 years. The Makah had named this potato the Ozette after one of their five villages located around Neah Bay.

All potatoes originated in South America and it was thought that all potatoes now in the Americas were first taken to Europe by Spaniards before they came to the Americas with the European colonization. However in 2004 phylogenetic analysis conducted at Washington State University showed evidence that the Makah Ozette potato was certain to have been imported directly from South America. How did this happen?

After their conquests in South America the Spanish began a mission to further establish their empire on the western shores of North America. In the spring of 1791 they established a fort at Neah Bay and as accustomed a garden was planted that surely included potatoes they brought directly from South America or Mexico. Over the winter of 1791 the Spanish found the severe weather conditions at the forts harbor was unsafe for moorage of their vessels. The Spanish abandoned the fort in the spring of 1792.

The Makah people, who were in need of a carbohydrate source either traded or found volunteers of this rather weedy plant left in the garden of the abandoned fort. They quickly adopted the potato and became its stewards, growing it in their backyard gardens for over 200 years. Not until the late 1980's was this potato catalogued and seed was grown outside the Makah Nation. There has to date been very limited commercial production of this potato although it is noted to be grown by a few small farmers in several regions of the U.S.A .

The Presidium

The Makah Ozette potato boarded the Ark of Taste in September 2004 and a presidium application was submitted in November 2006. The partners in the presidium were SFS, the Makah Nation, several farmers who supply restaurants and sell at farmers markets, a laboratory which produce potato seed, USDA at an Agricultural Research Station, and the Seattle chapter of the Chefs Collaborative.

In the early development of this project Slow Food Seattle (SFS) used a portion of its treasury to purchase five hundred pounds of certified seed potato. One hundred pounds was sold to home gardeners and 400 pounds of potatoes that were sold to farmers interested in growing this crop. The growers sold to the fresh market in the greater Seattle area in the fall of 2006.

SFS received enough potatoes to sell to cover the cost of the seed and to mount a public relations campaign that produced considerable press and demand for the Makah Ozette. In addition 9 chefs featured the potato on their fall menus.

Our 2006 activities produced a significant demand for the potato but the primary seed growers had a crop failure and seed was very limited in the spring of 2007. This prompted us to call upon Pure Potato, a laboratory who worked to certify the potato as virus fee and are beginning the three year process of becoming a local seed source. We have found that based on our publicity many small farms did a limited planting of the Makah Ozette for the 2007 harvest. In the fall of 2007 we again mounted a campaign to further regional awareness of the Makah Ozette potato, featured it as a menu item for our RAFT picnic, and continued the development of a local seed source.

Standing fast against fast food labor practices

By Slow Food USA staff member Winnie Yang

In the Spring 2008 issue of the Snail (coming soon to a mailbox near you, if you're a member), Candelario Velazquez describes the struggle of farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida, and the work the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is doing jointly with the Student/Farmworkers Alliance (SFA) to fight the fast food industry's unjust practices. For decades the industry "has used its power and leverage to demand cheap produce, translating directly into lower wages and poorer working conditions for the workers picking that produce."

The Snail article goes on to describe the remarkable successes CIW and SFA have realized, but their work is far from finished. And now, you can help.

SFA's Meghan Cohorst wrote to let us know that CIW has recently launched a petition campaign to urge Burger King to work with them to end sweatshops and slavery in the fields. The campaign is based on a similar one used by 19th-century British abolitionists, who began their movement to abolish slavery with a petition drive. The CIW petition will be delivered to Burger King on April 28.

Find out more and sign the petition.

(photo by Meghan Cohorst)

Zap it?

by Slow Food USA staff member Jerusha Klemperer

Today, in the Dining Section of the NY Times, Mark Bittman and Harold McGee both approach the subject of the microwave.

Actually, I hesitate even to mention microwaves since we have this problem here in our office of getting calls from people wondering about our stance on microwaves (we don't have one); this will mean that Google searches will start turning up "slow food" and "microwave" in the same textual vicinity and our office will get even more confused callers. Ah well.

As a city dweller who has lived with mostly teeny, tiny kitchens, I got rid of my microwave years ago when I moved into a studio apartment. Counter space was precious and a big plastic box meant no room to chop veggies, so I gave it to a friend, wondering as I did so if I'd miss it terribly. I never did.

Once, about three weeks after I moved, I wanted to melt some chocolate for brownies. I unwrapped the chocolate, put it in a pyrex bowl, and cast my eyes about the small kitchen, confused and forlorn. So I pulled out a pot, put the chocolate in the pot, and once I realized that "hey! You can, like, heat stuff on the stove!" I never looked back. In four years I haven't felt cramped at all (well, maybe physically but my style, no my style has not been cramped).

It seems like Bittman and McGee, though gamely trying to find the virtues of a microwave for the sake of their articles, agree with me. I think, deep down, they do. No, Slow Food isn't about being anti-microwave, but I do think it's about knowing your food; McGee talks about pine nuts cooking on the inside but not browning on the outside, and the strangeness of needing to keep opening and closing the microwave door to assess the state of affairs, and it makes me think that a microwave gets in the way of that knowing.

Monday Morning Meat-ing

We've been talking about meat a lot lately–mobile slaughter units, meat recalls, laptop butchershops–and we're not the only ones.

Issue #3 of Meatpaper jut hit the stands and it's the best one yet. They cover everything from the controversial presence of retail pork in Israel, to the hunt for roadside goat testicles in Tunisia. And over at Chow.com, they've got Meat Week 2008, kicking off with a very comprehensive feature on buying meat direct, with a bunch of great sidebar stories on bison, innards, greening your meat consumption and more.

The final whimpers of the Food and Farm Bill

Although Congress passed an extension on 2002's Farm Bill until April 18, requiems are already being said for the hopes and dreams everyone had for radical change.

"A little more than a year ago," The Wall Street Journal said yesterday in this excellent article, "the stars appeared to be aligned for significant changes to the complex piece of legislation known as the farm bill… But now serious reform is likely to be left behind like corn husks flung from a combine."

As explained by Lauren Etter and Greg Hitt, the farm lobby continues to be an extremely powerful force on Capitol Hill (n.b. this link is only free to non-subscribers for another 5 days).

Meanwhile, over at Gourmet magazine, they've got an article by Sam Hurst called "Betting the Farm," that examines the Farm Bill, subsidies, and one South Dakota family living in the heart of subsidy country, but following a different path. "I've got a philosophical problem with growing corn," says young farmer Michael Stiegelmeier, "Most corn goes to livestock. I prefer to feed grain to people, and I prefer for cattle to eat grass."

Bruce Sterling & Metropolis Miss the Point: By, well, about as far as you can miss it

The March, 2008 issue of Metropolis focuses on the overarching idea of localism and its relationship to sustainability. It is, as always, a beautiful and well-written issue, but in it one particular columnist, Bruce Sterling, has taken Slow Food to task accusing us once again of that old canard, elitism.

Now while it is true that the movement is often accused of such things, it is not true, nor is it always such a bad thing anyway. Bear in mind that most of the great social movements throughout history were begun by the so-called "elite," (witness abolition and suffrage - not to mention that Ghandi was a well-to-do attorney). But the places Mr. Sterling gets it wrong are so manifold it's hard to know where to start.

Let's try here:

The Cornish Pilchard. The Chilean Blue Egg Hen. The Cypriot Tsamarella and Bosnian Sack Cheese. You haven't seen these foods at McDon­ald's because they are strictly local rarities championed by Slow Food, the social movement founded to combat the proliferation of fast food. McDonald's is a multinational corporation: it retails identical food products on the scale of billions, repeatedly, predictably, worldwide. Slow Food, the self-appointed anti-McDonald's, is a "revolution" whose aim is a "new culture of food and life."

Actually you haven't seen these foods at McDonald's because McDonald's sells hamburgers. Here Mr. Sterling has blundered by believing that who/what Slow Food is is somehow stagnant and monolithic. If such things were true then the US would still be a few puritan slave owners dotted up and down the east coast. Or the Chicago Cubs would have been the National League power for the last century. He goes on…

Slow Food began as a jolly clique of leftist academics, entertainers, wine snobs, and pop stars, all friends of Ital­ian journalist and radio personality Carlo Petrini.

I've often wondered what it is about food and wine that makes those who appreciate it automatically labeled "snobs." Wine is just fermented grape juice actually one of the simplest foods known to man. Appreciating quality is not snobbery. Pretending to know something one doesn't actually understand - that's snobbery. For some reason someone who appreciates the inner workings of a fine internal combustion engine is not a snob, but someone who likes a well made buerre blanc is.

The group is the suave host for massive international food events in Torino. Other Slow Food emanations include a hotel, various nonprofit foundations, and—in a particularly significant development—a private college. The University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded in 2004, is the training ground for 200-plus international Slow Food myrmidons per year, who are taught to infiltrate farms, groceries, heritage tourism, restaurants, commercial consortia, hotel chains, catering companies, product promotion, journalism, and government. These areas are, of course, where Slow Food already lives.

My, we are sinister, aren't we? We are "suave," and we are "infiltrating" a host of consortia and other institutions (notably journalism, after all, here I am) with our "myrmidons." (Curious? Yeah, I had to look it up too - despite my apparent position in my ivory tower as an intellectual elite - it means "a follower who carries out orders without question." Evidently now we're a cult)

I'm not sure why Mr. Sterling considers these ideas to be so threatening, but the fact is Slow Food couldn't care less what the McDonalds and Monsantos of the world do, until they start to crap where we live. In the meantime, we promote these ideas because we believe them to be good ideas worthy of proliferation and preservation. Food defines who we are as individuals and as cultures. We are truly what we eat, and too many people are fast, cheap and easy. The right of ADM or Monsanto, Applebees or Burger King to swing its arms ends at the tip of the eater's nose. Who owns your food owns you, and it is unwise to let that power rest in the hands of a very few wealthy corportations.

As the spiritual, political, and ideological wellspring of all things "eco-gastronomic," Slow Food has woven a set of quiet understandings with the city of Torino, the region of Piedmont, the Italian Foreign Ministry, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Sir, due respect and setting aside your constant condescension for a moment, but there's been nothing "quiet" about it. Logos for those government bodies and organizations are emblazoned on, for example, ALL the literature regarding the Salone del Gusto, (need proof? click that link) the largest food show of its kind, atracting 200,000 people each year. Oh, and yes, it's in Italy. The organization was founded there, that's why. Our last International Leaders' Congress was held in Puebla, Mexico because preserving the foods and traditions of the so-called "developing" world is at the top of Slow Food's mission list. We are not as exclusionary as you seem to think.

In regard to Slow Food's Presidia project, he had this to say:

The cleverest innovation to date is the network's presidium system. The Slow Food "presidia" make up a grassroots bottom-up version of the European "Domain of Control" system, which requires, for instance, that true "champagnes" must come from the province of Champagne, while lesser fizzy brews are labeled mere "sparkling wines." These presidia have made Slow Food the planetary paladin of local production. Slow Food deploys its convivia to serve as talent scouts for food rarities (such as Polish Mead, the Istrian Giant Ox, and the Tehuacan Amaranth). Candidate discoveries are passed to Slow Food's International Ark Commission, which decides whether the foodstuff is worthy of inclusion. Its criteria are strict: (a) Is the product nonglobalized or, better yet, inherently nonglobalizable? (b) Is it artisanally made (so there's no possibility of any industrial economies of scale)? (c) Is it high-quality (the consumer "wow" factor)? (d) Is it sustainably produced? (Not only is this politically pleasing, but it swiftly eliminates competition from most multinationals.) (e) Is this product likely to disappear from the planet otherwise? (Biodiversity must be served!)

Sterling seems to think this is being done for our organization's own aggrandizement, or perhaps even profit. Simply not so. it s being done because, as the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity do clearly states:

5% of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900

93% of American food product diversity has been lost in the same time period

33% of livestock varieties have disappeared or are near disappearing

30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct in the last century, and one more is lost every six hours

The mission of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity is to organize and fund projects that defend our world's heritage of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions.

We envision a new agricultural system that respects local cultural identities, the earth's resources, sustainable animal husbandry, and the health of individual consumers.

And yes, Mr. Sterling, biodiversity MUST be served. Nature does not function without it and the industrialization and standardization of food and flavors is a direct threat to that diversity. For those who would like to know the true mission (and criteria) of the Foundation for Biodiversity and the Presidia Projects, please click here.

It is, among its many other roles, a potent promotion machine. Transforming local rarities into fodder for global gourmets is, of course, profitable. And although he's no capitalist—the much honored Petrini is more justly described as a major cultural figure—he was among the first to realize that as an economic system globalization destroys certain valuable goods and services that rich people very much want to buy.

There he goes again, thinking that there is some profit motive behind what we do, like our 501(c)3 status and clear and concise billing as an educational organization is just some sort of front for gluttonous Nobles Oblige rather that an honest attempt to help preserve flavors, traditions, and ways of life. Does he really believe that mankind's only choices are get on board with the agribusiness oligarchs or get run over by them? We think not. We think it's a good idea to try to preserve great food. We think there should be more than one kind of hamburger in the world. More than one flavor of beer. We believe foundations and traditions are important because they make us who we are.

He concludes:

But while McDonald's mechanically peddles burgers to the poor, Slow Food acculturates the planet's wealthy to the gourmand quality of life long cherished by the European bon vivant. They have about as much in common as an aging shark and a networked swarm of piranhas.

Yes, McDonald's does do that, as the overwhelming rates of obesity and diabetes among "the poor" (especially children) so clearly demonstrates. But far from reserving these "cherished" foods of the world for some elite class, Slow Food is working to proliferate them, and to return them to the artisans and yes, often peasants, from which they originated. we seek to make people aware of the connections between food and pleasure on the one hand, and awareness and responsibility on the other.

Mr. Sterling's dismissal of Slow Food's successful efforts as snobbery or elitism rings quite hollow on closer examination of what Slow Food is truly trying to do. I suggest, Mr. Sterling, that you read more, learn more, and perhaps visit Slow Food Nation this coming summer. There you may open your eyes to a food system we call "Good, clean, and fair."

"He who distinguishes the true savor of his food," Thoreau once wrote, "cannot be a glutton. He who does not, cannot be otherwise."

Read Mr. Sterling's entire article here

Building a Mobile Slaughter Facility, part 2

Last week we began exploring the question of mobile slaughter units, and their ability to provide infrastructure to small and mid-sized meat producers. Examining the history of the first ever facility in the country, we hope to answer the question: is this replicable?

What does it take to be the first at something like this? To give a little history about how the mobile slaughter unit project on Lopez Island started: in 1997 a group of farmers approached the Lopez Community Land Trust to explore the feasibility of having a USDA mobile slaughter unit for San Juan County (Lopez, orcas, San Juan and Shaw Islands).

Thomas Forster, the Executive Director at the time, received several grants to conduct needs assessment. As a result, Holly Freishtat was hired as the Community Food Systems Coordinator. As part of the needs assessment, she surveyed the farmers in the county, organized focus groups to determine the demand for local foods and examined the USDA regulations for meat inspection to find an exemption to become first USDA inspected mobile slaughter facility in the country.

11 years later, Holly, now a Sustainable Food Specialist and a Food and Society Policy Fellow, explained to us what that process looked like, and what questions she needed to ask. When speaking with Holly, we asked her what she learned as a result of this assessment and she said that "the issues this island community is facing, of farmers not having access to local infrastructure, and consumers not having access to the local foods they demand, is no different from what rural and urban communities are facing around the country. I thought they were unique because they were surrounded by water and now I have realized that it is a result of a centralized global food system. We have to build the capacity and infrastructure for our farmers and consumers to have local foods."

The idea of the mobile facility, she explained, was to provide a USDA inspected meat that could be sold in supermarkets and in the restaurants, to keep ranching alive on the island and to bring in new, young farmers (combating the aging farmer problem seen all around the country). This process took many years because there were many hurdles to get over, both logistically and financially. How to convince the USDA that it should have an inspector devoted solely to this unit? How to raise the funds to build it? And, looking forward, what would be needed in order for this to be replicated in other communities?

Amazingly, all of the hurdles were cleared and the unit began operating in 2003 and serves four counties. It is owned by the Lopez Community Land Trust and was built with money raised through private sources and also with some government funding. It is operated by a farmers cooperative which also operates a fixed building for fabricating (for the cutting, packaging, and aging of beef). All meat remains the property of the farmer, and it is the farmer's responsibility to take on the task of selling it. They sell to individuals, butcher shops and restaurants, and the unit has—so far—proven to accomplish exactly what Holly Freishtat had hoped it would do when she did her investigations all those years back. Farmers on the island are making a living raising meat, and people who live on Lopez are enjoying fresh, delicious, sustainable, grass-fed product.

After the needs assessment was completed, Bruce Dunlop was hired as the project manager. Bruce is the manager of the unit, and has now become an expert on mobile slaughter facilities. Since getting the Lopez unit up and running, he has helped to build six others, including one in California and one in South Dakota. One of Freishtat's questions had been: can this be replicated in other communities, and so far, the answer seems to be yes, setting an exciting precedent.