Comments on: Whole Foods, Whole Lives …

By: maryn

maryn — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:51:44 +0000

C., count me among the people who are made uncomfortable by Slow Food. I think saving rare products, plants and artisanal methods is essential and noble. But to me the organization feels, to paraphrase the NYT, like the coolest party you’ll never be invited to — very high level foodies exulting in the stuff that they have access to and you don’t. (This is a fact-based rant, btw; my circle of friends is heavily larded with professional foodies.)

Putting Slow Food Nation in SF is a perfect example of this. On the one hand, yes, the choice makes sense, because SF is the artisanal food capital of the country. On the other hand, SF is the one place that doesn’t need Slow Food Nation, because they’ve already got everything that underpins a sustainable food culture: Mediterranean climate, very lengthy growing season, local small producers, abundant farmers’ markets, excellent public transportation, and – very important – tons and tons of disposable cash.

There are very few places in the US that can meet those conditions – and it’s those places that most need the help of Slow Food or something like it. If Slow Food or people who identify with its goals want to create change, the Ferry Building is the wrong place to be. Where they are really needed is in the parts of the country with growing seasons short enough that people can’t grow enough food in their backyards unless they work at home, with few local producers because industrial-scale ag killed them, with bad urban planning that forces people to drive 50 miles to buy food, with no organic or local produce because that doesn’t fit the buying schemes of the big supermarkets, with low income levels so spending more for food doesn’t make sense for the family budget. The food deserts in the current phrase.

It is very troubling to me that the new food culture is so class-identified. We need to insist “that things can be better” for everyone – not just for those lucky enough to live in places like Berkeley where these issues are easy.

There’s so much more to engage with on this (but I have a deadline and took more time that I should have just to agonize over this post). You’re doing a great job tangling with the topic on this blog, the more so because of where you live – in a place that, if you didn’t think carefully about it, could easily be a food desert, and for some of your neighbors probably is. It’s very valuable.

By: Charlotte

Charlotte — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:55:53 +0000

Thanks for the good comments folks — this is a complicated issue I’m still working my way through (and trying not to let the fact that Wendell Berry has been doing a better job of it than I for 40 years get me down). Kristi — as someone who has led canoe trips back in the days of rubber raincoats and wool sweaters, I’ll always be grateful to Patagonia and REI for bringing us fleece and gore-tex, but I get your point. When I started climbing in high school it was a sport for weirdos, for those of us who really were seeking an encounter with something undeniably real — if you didn’t pay attention, then you could fall. Then someplace in the 80s and 90s those sports were taken over by the “extreme” people, climbing, boating and skiing were taken over by corporate entities chasing the lucrative 18-to-35 demographic and it became less about having some sort of authentic experience of the self in the natural world than it was about some kind of “radical” adrenaline high. But throughout this entire transition, these sports were accused of being elitist yuppie sports that only wealthy white people could afford — no matter how many “hoods in the woods” programs we ran, there was a point there. When I lived in Telluride, it was very white, very wealthy, and pretty monoculutural. But despite all that, there was still an honorable core value there — a desire to live in a more authentic way than we had in those suburbs we’d grown up in, a desire to live in beautiful landscapes, to encounter the mountains first hand, to test our physical selves and our characters against challenges we weren’t sure we could manage.
The food movement seems to me to be going through a similar transitional period — the original crunchy hippies are starting to be successful, they’re building farms and businesses — Slow Food Nation is taking place in San Francisco, and there’s a lot of noise in the media about elitism. Part of this is just “tall poppy” syndrome — the who do you think you are? backlash that is always aimed at those folks who insist that things can be better, that it is important to insist on quality, that food can be beautiful and clean and that we can support the people who want to raise such things.
But what struck me this week as I was walking the dog (when I do my best thinking) was that there’s a common desire running through all these things, the longing to connect with one another, the longing to encounter the physical world — whether by navigating a river in a canoe or trying to coax a carrot out of the ground — in both cases there’s an encounter with forces we can’t entirely control. We’re forced into this fruitful relationship with the world. That’s an ongoing fascination for me …

By: Mouse

Mouse — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:09:23 +0000

Yes, we build the bonds of friendship at the table
Which leads me to wonder if one of the main malaises of our modern society is the lack of care and attention to food, its purchase, preparation and comsumption
So many people buy ready-meals, microwave packets of gunk and eat in front of the TV in a mindless act of filling the stomach when they should be nourishing body and soul around a table with their family and friends
And all the time that is saved?
It’s spent in front of a computer screen trying to communicate with virtual people in cyberspace
All wrong!

By: Kristi

Kristi — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:55:34 +0000

Charlotte, my own thoughts have been traveling similar paths for a couple of years now, maybe longer, and there seems to be so much to say about this. I’m struggling with starting, and I waver between wanting to address it in a fiction piece and wanting to write a non-fiction polemic. We want to get “back to the land” but don’t know how to do it without the corporate intervention — Patagonia and REI. We want “natural childbirth” but have to hire a stranger to aid the delivery. It’s no longer even legal in this country for the wife or mother or daughter (or father, son, or brother) of a deceased person to prepare the body for burial. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m creeped out in the grocery store when I see “fresh” meat packaged with a brand name on it, particularly when I know that company is headquartered in a completely different part of the country. I’m lucky to be in an area that is thick with farmer’s markets, I’m never wanting for locally grown food. I really feel for my family members who live in the midwest — “America’s bread basket” — but can’t get fresh local strawberries or green beans anywhere within an hour’s drive of their home. And where, within that hour’s drive, can they find the “local” produce? Why, Whole Foods of course! Because we still need the corporate mediation, as you say. No local farmer’s markets for the “real” people of central Ohio — why not? Not because they don’t like good food, that’s for certain. But darned if I can come up with the real reason.

By: Martin Sublett

Martin Sublett — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:37:27 +0000

Amen