Posted
January 28, 2007

Building a Slow Food World

Noted Philadelphia restaurateur Judy Wicks reports from a worldwide gathering of the slow food movement.

Sitting among a cheering crowd of 6,500 attendees at Terra Madre, I was awestruck by the rich diversity of food cultures, ethnicities, languages, dress, and traditions. This opening ceremony of the international Slow Food conference in Turin, Italy, this past October began with great fanfare. As the name of each of the 150 participating countries was announced, a representative dressed in colorful traditional garb walked to the stage carrying their national flag: a sesame farmer from Kenya, a reindeer herder from Russia, a saffron producer from India, a vegetable grower from the Hopi Nation in the US, a cocoa farmer from Ecuador, a deep sea fisherman from Japan.

While so delightfully different, we were bound together by our love of good food – not only delicious food, but food produced “slowly,” with painstaking individual care, reverence for the earth, and the knowledge passed down over many generations. From the far reaches of the planet came farmers, shepherds, winemakers, brewers, cheese makers, bakers, fishermen, teachers and chefs, not only to share knowledge and exchange ideas in support of a community-based “slow food” way of life, but to stand united against the “fast food” production practices of the corporate-controlled industrial food system.

White Dog chef Andy Brown, my daughter Grace, and I attended Terra Madre as members of the 20 person delegation representing the Philadelphia “food community,” which also included Mark and Judy Dornstreich of Branch Creek Farm, growers of organic vegetables and greens we serve at the White Dog, and Nancy and Bill Barton of Yard’s, brewers of many of our favorite beers.
Terra Madre is comprised of 1,600 food communities from diverse bioregions and cultures around the globe. Food communities not only produce food for the people of their regions, but are also repositories of farming, fishing and production practices that respect the earth, its animals, and in many cases preserve the traditions of ancient cultures. A global food system based on a network of local food communities provides local self-reliance in basic needs, while trading through fair trade relationships for products that are unique to a particular region. In this system, economic control resides locally and ownership is spread broadly.

To the contrary, the export-based industrial food system concentrates ownership in the hands of giant transnational food companies. Unfair trade laws in the US and EU provide large subsidies to corporations, enabling them to dump their subsidized commodity products into less developed countries (and even our own) at below-cost prices, putting small farmers out of business around the world. Self-reliant local food communities are being destroyed, leaving much of the world?s population dependent on large corporations for their food. Many farmers who once supplied their local community by working their own land, now work as serfs for corporate plantations, slaughterhouses and factories, where they are subjected to unhealthy and dangerous conditions.

Not only is the industrial food system unjust, but it is also destroying our natural environment. The petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers on which the system depends destroy our topsoil, pollute our rivers, and create “dead zones” in our oceans. The barbaric factory farming of animals is not only unspeakably cruel to the pigs, chickens and cows raised in confinement, but also the concentration of manure is polluting our water system. Rainforests are burned down to raise cattle for fast food burgers or to plant commodity monocrops such as soybeans.

Corporations are causing further damage through seed patenting, genetic modification, and homogenizing seed varieties, which result in the loss of the rich plant diversity gained over centuries of farming, leaving us more vulnerable to blights and changing environmental conditions.

On top of all that, much of the food produced by the industrial system is not even healthy for us. Diabetes and obesity are epidemic in industrialized countries, and diet related heart disease is on the increase. After the recent spinach scare when 3 people died and 200 sickened, Nina Plank, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, explained that this deadly strain of E. coli is produced not by cattle which are fed their natural diet of grass, but by those which are fed grain – a practice of factory farming based on the low cost of subsidized grains.

This new deadly strain of E. coli, which develops in the stomachs of grain-fed cattle, has worked its way into our ground water system – water that is then used to irrigate farms growing spinach and lettuce, and so continuing its poisonous route into human consumption. It is not the vegetables that are harmful, but the industrialized meat system that is contaminating our food.
The best safeguard for eating healthy food is to buy locally. Rather than trusting a system with food shipped thousands of miles from anonymous sources, where tracing the cause of contamination becomes nearly impossible, buying locally allows us to know where our food comes from and how it is produced, ensuring accountability.

Back home from Terra Madre, we continue to build our own food community in the Philadelphia region, surrounded by the rich farmlands of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where we have the opportunity to know who grows our food, bakes our bread and brews our beer – relationships that enrich our lives. The Fair Food project of the White Dog Cafe Foundation, in partnership with others, is working to increase fresh food access for consumers, expand outreach and markets for local farmers, and advocate for policies that ensure local food security.

Through our political and food choices, we as citizens and consumers can control the type of food system that will prevail. By becoming activists in Farm Bill reform (see www.foodfirst.org/node/1552) we can help make government programs “support communities rather than commodities.” When we “vote with our fork,” we can chose either an industrial system that makes a few people rich through the suffering of many, or a locally-based system of small producers who work with care, the “slow food” way, to bring us fresh, healthy food. It’s our choice; one we are fortunate to have.

Judy Wicks is the founder and proprietress of Philadelphia’s 24-year-old White Dog Cafe, and president of the White Dog Cafe Foundation, which works to build a sustainable local economy in the region. She is also co-founder and co-chair of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), an international alliance of 45 local networks in the US and Canada. This essay originally appeared in the White Dog Cafe Newsletter, Winter/Spring 2007.