Is Slow Food the New Organic?

Last week Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement offended sustainable food advocates in the Bay Area by declaring that the food at the Ferry Farmer's Market was boutique-y and prohibitively expensive. Here's the report from the SF Chronicle. Needless to say, this didn't make local farmers, like Steve Sando, of Rancho Gordo, very happy.

In case you haven't been following it, in the last year slow food and local eating as gotten a lot of coverage. The idea is to fight the negative environmental and health consequences of industrialized farming and fast food by returning to traditional local foods and local cuisines. Local food advocates believe that eating locally is even more important for the environment than eating organically, because transporting food over vast distances uses huge amounts of energy and produces correspondingly huge amounts of pollution.

Luckily, the Grand Dame of California's own local food movement, Alice Waters managed to smooth everything over. She points out that it costs more to produce high quality (often organic) local food. Others around the blogosphere have been attempting "The Pennywise Local Food Challenge," to combat the widespread view that eating local is unrealistic because local foods are expensive and difficult to find.

If you are interested in eating more local food, you might start at 100 Mile Diet, by finding you local "foodshed." Eat Local has lots of useful resources for the Portland area and at Slow Food USA you can look for local Slow Food chapters in your part of the West.


(photo by Annette Pedrosian of Daily-Craft (who visited the farmer's
market this week), used under a Creative Commons license)