Rare Breeds Recipe Contest

Once raised by small-scale family farmers and bred for hardiness, survivability and FLAVOR, many heritage breeds have been lost to mass-market industrialization. Our RAFT alliance partner, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, is leading the way to bring these rare, diverse breeds back to US farms and tables.

Rare breeds have unique qualities that make them suitable to small farm pastures. That also means they need special (or at least different) treatment in the kitchen. Just like we’re learning that we can’t prepare a grass-fed burger like a grain-fed one, we can’t prepare a Pineywoods steak like an Angus, or roast a Buckeye chicken like an industrial one.

How do we learn what to do?  Before you start raiding the shelves of used bookstores looking for pre-1950’s cookbooks, ALBC is coming to the rescue later this year with a Rare Breeds Recipe Book. They are creating the book by hosting a rare breeds recipe contest. 

Are you already familiar with cooking a particular rare breed? From now until September 1, you can submit recipes to ALBC. The first place winner will receive a free registration to their national conference this November in Houston. To learn more about the contest, click here.

If you’re the experimental type and want to test your rare breed recipe creation skills, use LocalHarvest to find a producer of a rare breed on Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste and start cooking!

Cooking, N’Awlins Style

Today I’m interviewing Poppy Tooker.  Poppy is the founder of Slow Food New Orleans, a chef, a food activist, the chair emeritus of Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste Committee, and the author of the just-released Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook—among other things.  I mean, what hasn’t this woman done?

The book is self-published by marketumbrella.org, an independent New Orleans-based non-profit that brings vendors and shoppers together to preserve local culture, generate wealth and support the local economy, with its central axis being the Crescent City Farmers Market. When you buy your copy of the book from marketumbrella.org,  not only will 100% of net proceeds go to benefit the work of marketumbrella.org; in addition, you can request that Poppy personalize your book with a message!

Q: Reading the cookbook, I was struck that what you have there in New Orleans is not just a market, but a community built around food.  Can you tell us a bit about that community, and how it came to be?

Tooker: People in New Orleans truly live to eat. When visitors come to the city they find that hard to believe…I’ve had people say that they just stand still on a street corner and listen to the conversations of people as they walk by and what they are all talking about is food.  As arguably the greatest food city in the US, it goes hand in hand that we would also care about where our food comes from.

Richard McCarthy [Executive Director of marketumbrella.org] knew that we needed a real food market that could create a real sense of community, more than a place to just buy food.  We created guidelines that in order to be part of our market, you have to produce the food that you bring, and we only sell food at our market.  The farmers from the Northshore were very suspicious about coming across the lake, but Richard sweet-talked them and that is how our little food community began.

More after the jump

A Slow Food Reading List

From time to time we get requests from people for a Slow Food reading list.  In the days before the blog, there was the Slow Food Forum, and on it lived an evolving document to this effect.  We’ve decided to compile a new list by asking some of our staff, Board of Directors, Advisory Board and friends: what inspired you to get involved in sustainable food?  What inspires you still.  Below are some of their answers.

Josh Viertel, President of Slow Food USA
An Agricultural Testament, by Sir Albert Howard
The New Organic Grower, by Eliot Coleman
Malabar Farm and Pleasant Valley, by Louis Bromfield
Epitaph for a Peach (and others), by David Mas Masumoto

Brian Halweil, SFUSA Advisory Board member, Publisher of Edible Manhattan, Edible East End, and Edible Brooklyn, and author of Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket
The Unsettling of America , by Wendell Berry
Small is Beautiful, by EF Schumacher
Ecological Literacy, by David Orr

“I read all of these during my junior and senior years of college when I first realized I wanted to learn about how food was raised and how it could be raised differently. They all blew my mind, opened me up to the connections between food and the environment and between food and politics and gave me solid grounding for discussing these issues, even though all the books are a decade or more old.”

More after the jump

Gastropolis explores NYC’s Food Voice

by Slow Food USA staffer Jerusha Klemperer

I sat down with Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch over pancakes at the NYC icon Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn to discuss their delicious new book, Gastropolis: Food and New York City. 

We may think of NYC’s iconic foods like knishes and egg creams (and diner pancakes) as fixed, but this collection of essays makes the case for the ability of each individual, each immigrant wave to leave its imprint on the ever-evolving foodscape of this city.  In fact, the archaeological remains of old New Amsterdam itself reveal how shifting ecology, shifting economy, and shifting populations can change the course of eating history and culture.

Hauck-Lawson and Deutsch have put together a collection that ranges in tone and approach, from Jessica Harris’ story of her personal food heritage to a history of the streets’ peddlers and markets to an examination of Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights and its array of Central and South American cuisine.  But it does not attempt to capture everything.  The authors acknowledge the impossibility of that, instead presenting what they call “noshes,” little bits that ultimately fill you up as richly as a big meal.

“I would say that this book would be great required reading, especially for new New Yorkers,” Hauck-Lawson said, “as an accessible source of New York City food history and foodways and out of a measure of respect for the privilege of being a New Yorker.”

More after the jump

2008 Highlights

We thought we’d get in on the year-end roundup action by posting our Top Ten 2008 highlights.

  If it helps, please insert
a) a drumroll
b) a celebrity reading the list straight to camera
c) a lot of enthusiasm, as indicated by the proliferation of exclamation points (!)

10)  A New Office: The SFUSA staff enjoyed a move down two flights into a space double the size of our old one.  Although we miss tripping over each other, we’re sure happy about having more room. Stop by and say hello if you’re ever in Brooklyn.

9) A New Baby: Finance Manager Kehinde Yeku welcomed the birth of her baby girl Ebu last May!

8) New States in the Union: Our first ever chapter in West Virginia.

7) Two Staff Weddings: Deena Goldman in June and Erika Lesser in November!

6) A New National Statute: This year, with the help of chapter leaders from around the country, we revised our national statute.  It’s leaner, cleaner, and clearer.

5) Terra Madre: For the third biennial small-scale sustainable food producers conference, we brought over 700 US delegates with us, including a huge number under the age of 30.

4) A New Book: The publication of here for an article about in in the New York Times.

3) Can’t stop growing: 8,000 new members!

2) A New President: Nope, we’re not talking about Obama, we’re talking about Josh Viertel, Slow Food USA’s first ever President!

and the number 1 highlight of 2008…...

1) Slow Food Nation: Slow Food’s first US-based national scale event.  With everything from sustainable street food to a victory garden on San Francisco’s Civic Center steps to star-studded discussion panels, Slow Food Nation brought San Franciscans—and the country—together in a conversation about the future of our food system.  The event, our first annual, attracted over 85,000 people over the course of three days.

Last Minute Holiday Gifts

It’s a little late in the game for buying holiday gifts, but hey, you’re slowwwwww and slow’s a good thing, right? 

If you left your shopping for the last minute, and are feeling a little bit nervous and a lot uninspired, we’re here to offer some delicious, nutritious, (not that ambitious) sustainable gifts for you.  Most of them won’t arrive in time, but you can give your loved ones an IOU that promises good things to come.

   
• Slow Food USA membership: How about a membership for that friend who keeps meaning to join but never gets around to it? Or a donation to the organization?
   
• T-shirts: our friends at Just Food have three that are simply adorable—“Beet the System,” anyone?
   
• Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Know someone interested in saving and savoring the endangered foods of North America? Check out the book!
   
• Feed the Hungry: Donate money to your local Food Bank in somebody’s name
   
• Slow Food in the Heartland: Slow Food USA Board Member Kurt Friese has written a beautiful book that explores the culinary traditions of the Midwest    
• Pleasures of Slow Food: Check out the Endangered Hog Foundation (in support of rebuilding Arie McFarlane’s farm and stock)
   
• Take back the tap! Bottled water is soooo 2008. Buy a SIGG bottle and take your tap water with you every day.
   
• Like it sweet? Try the unusual Guajillo Honey—newly boarded to Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste.
   
• Like it spicy? How about the crazily spicy Chiltepin Pepper, also an SFUSA Ark food? It’s pictured above…

Happy and Healthy Holidays from your friends at Slow Food USA!

Slow Money?

A year ago, investor Woody Tasch’s book Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money might have seemed way out there; slow money?  Isn’t that like a slow racecar or a slow rocket?  An oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp?  Suddenly, with Wall Street in shambles (the victim of too much too fast), Tasch’s vision for a more patient and holistic investment philosophy that values relationships (between people and other people, between people and the natural world) doesn’t seem so strange after all.

I sat down with Tasch and asked him to explain a bit more about his book.

Q: In the book you say “Slow Food gives us a way to engage that is proactive, even celebratory.”  What does celebratory investing look like?

Tasch: Let’s just say that when that answer is clear to the world then…it will be a beautiful thing!  It’s funny you should ask that because I just shared a day dream with a bunch of investors in Vermont, that at the end of a Slow Money investors conference we would all be dancing together in the aisles like attendees were at the end of Terra Madre.

Right now there is no such thing as celebratory investing; there’s no such thing as investors sharing the joy of building something together and celebrating community like Amish people building a barn.  May of us are, in fact, building a new, restorative economy, one bit at a time but we don’t know how to celebrate the process.  No,  celebratory investing is still a ways off in the distance.

Q: You discuss the economic terms “internal” and “external accounting,” with external accounting being that which takes into account “multiple stakeholders and qualitative distinctions.”  Do you think that now, after the collapse of our financial system that investors are finally ready/willing to look at external accounting?

Tasch: The whole question of externalities, it is both aspirational and pragmatic, meaning there are a whole bunch of people right now who have been working on statistically relevant, defensible metrics that can add social and environmental metrics to financial metrics.  I consider this very important incremental change, but it’s only incremental because where were trying to get to is an economy where investors are close enough to that which they are investing in that they can make qualitative judgments about it.  If you were living down the street, in enough proximity to that which you were investing in, or even just knew enough about that which you were investing in, if you knew the managers of the business personally and trusted their values completely, you wouldn’t need to rely solely on quantitative metrics.

Where we need to head is away from bigger and bigger and more and more complicated enterprises, to an economy that celebrates—there’s that word again—enterprises that are smaller, less centralized, more comprehensible.  We need to return to a world where people make qualitative judgments and aren’t afraid to.

More after the jump

Marion Nestle Coming for Lunch, Explosions

by Slow Food USA staffer Kate Evanishyn

As you can imagine, we like to eat well here in the Brooklyn offices of Slow Food USA. Generally, we gather around our communal table around 1:00, reading the paper, doing the Times crossword (it’s a group effort) and eating whatever we happen to bring that day. A few times a year, however, we like to organize a staff potluck, usually timed with a guest.

Marion Nestle is coming for lunch tomorrow, and we’re completely excited, talking about who’s bringing what all day and thrilled that we’ll have the chance to spend some time with one of our heroes. For my part, I thought a frittata would be a good addition to the mix of roasted root vegetables, autumn salads, tasty deserts and more. But the last thing I expected was a kitchen mishap. Or in my case, an explosion. My ceramic and supposedly direct flame safe casserole shattered in a volcanic showing of egg, cheese, chorizo and pottery.

I have a back up, but that was supposed to be tonight’s dinner. I’ve got to admit, I’m really concerned about how to scrape egg off the ceiling. The gruyere is like glue.

One of Our Heroes: MFK Fisher

by Slow Food USA Intern, Cecilia Estreich

To open the recent panel discussion on MFK Fisher at the The New School, food historian Andrew F Smith noted that there are only two reactions to the renowned food writer’s work. First, there are the people who, after reading a sentence, devour everything the woman has ever written. Then, there are the ones who cannot make it through that same sentence no matter how doggedly they try. Since I finished my first MFK Fisher book, I have fallen devoutly, passionately (militantly?) into the former category. I would read a compilation of her grocery lists if only someone would publish it. 

Until listening to the panelists at the New School, though, it had never occurred to me how forcefully her attitude towards gastronomy reflects the Slow Food mentality. Fisher’s observations and musings on the things she ate are always one part poetry and one part practicality.

More after the jump

Delicious Revolution: a Conservative Cause?

by Slow Food USA staffer and blog editor, Jerusha Klemperer

Check out this thoughtful article from The American Conservative magazine. Its embrace of Slow Food may be surprising to some, but it's a welcome addition to the conversation.

It reminds me of a lunchtime visitor we had a few weeks ago, a farmer from South Carolina who noted that when it comes to Slow Food, conservatives and liberals may be on common ground. Everyone from homeschooling homesteaders to harvesting hippies can get behind good, clean food and the virtuous revival of sitting down together over a meal and appreciating its bounty.

Now some may flinch, like I did, when the author says that "life's inevitabilities don't warrant our shame," (when referring to Michael Pollan's shame that not everyone in this country has access to delicious food), and some may take issue, like I did, with his assertion that industrialized ag is just more productive than organic ag.* But it is interesting to see how true, traditional "conservatives" don't like the darn Farm Bill and its subsidies any more than the liberal democrats, and that they too would like to see a return to more mid-scale and regionally based food systems and economies.

Most delightful? The realization by an East Coaster like myself that in San Francisco, even the traditional conservatives have CSA shares, cook from The Art of Simple Food and quote Wendell Berry.

* Some may even want to share with him, say, Paul Roberts' The End of Food which explains quite clearly how those large yields end up producing diminishing returns after a few years.

PS: Also check out this interview from the same issue of American Conservative –Michael Pollan and Rod Dreher, the author of Crunchy Cons.