Alice Waters on “60 Minutes”

If you missed Alice Waters on “60 Minutes” last night, you can still watch the piece here.

Also, check out the New York Times Sunday Styles’ piece on The American Academy in Rome, and how Alice—and a former Chez Panisse chef Mona Talbott—have transformed the dining hall there.  As Mona says in the article: “We came with a mandate to create a new model for institutional dining — to change the culture of institutional food so that it’s seasonal, nutritious and local. But it has become more than I ever expected. We have created a real community.”

The Northeast “Grows Out” Heirloom Vegetables

This growing season, rare heirloom vegetables are getting special attention in the Northeast.  Thanks to efforts spearheaded by Chefs Collaborative (as part of the RAFT Alliance, of which Slow Food USA is also a part), 3 cities in New England—Portsmouth, Boston, and Providence—will be experimenting with what is called a “grow-out” of rare seeds.

Using seeds donated by Seed Savers Exchange, Fedco, High Mowing, and Old Sturbridge Village, farmers will plant the seeds, grow them, and then sell them to local chefs, with the farmers and chefs working together to increase eaters’ awareness of delicious foods that have long and interesting histories in their region. For instance, did you know that in 1870, the Trophy Tomato was developed by Colonel George Waring of Newport, Rhode Island?  At the time, the Trophy Tomato was grown by individuals hoping to win a prize at their local fair, and when they were introduced, a seed pack cost the equivalent of seventy dollars in today’s currency.

The past two weekends the three projects were launched in each respective city, with buy-in and excitement from the local Slow Food chapters—not to mention other chapters throughout New England who have picked up the buzz and will do grow-outs of their own.  As the season progresses we’ll be checking back in with the growers and chefs to see how their peppers, squash, tomatoes etc. are faring, and ultimately to hear reports from eaters as well!

More after the jump

Another victory for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Thanks to all of those of you who wrote letters to Florida Governor Charlie Crist, urging him to acknowledge the slave labor conditions in Immokalee Florida.

After several months of resistance, and after the past week’s push (visits by food organization leaders and writers, including SFUSA President Josh Viertel; political theatre and press conference on the steps of the capitol in Talahassee), Gov. Crist has finally agreed to take a meeting with the CIW on March 25th.

From The News-Press: “What’s most important is what happens after the meeting,” worker Leonel Perez said. “We hope the governor can set the record straight that not a single case of slavery is acceptable in the 21st century - period - and that he can help us move the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange out of the way of our agreements with food industry leaders.”

Josh Viertel, president of New York-based Slow Food USA and part of a group of food advocates who visited Immokaee earlier this month, agrees. “We should be eating food with a story behind it that doesn’t make us lose our appetite,” Viertel said.

Stay tuned at CIW’s website for breaking news and reports, as well as comprehensive coverage of Josh’s visit last week and photos (everything from abysmal worker housing to shots of the tomato fields to pics of the delegation hearing about the issues from CIW members).

(photo by Jacques-Jean Tiziou)

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

Slow Food USA President Checks out Immokalee

“We need to understand every time you eat something you are eating the story behind that food.”  - Josh Viertel

On Wednesday, SFUSA President Josh Viertel went in search of that story.  He joined a group of leaders from national food organizations on a tour of Immokalee, Florida, the epicenter of this country’s industrial tomato industry.  As reported on several Florida TV stations and news outlets up and down the Eastern seaboard, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) led their visitors on an up-close tour of the dismal working and living conditions of the people who pick nearly 90 percent of the tomatoes eaten in the US.

Josh was quoted in the Naples Daily News saying: “This movement has been missing something fundamentally important. Today we are making that connection…Historically this movement has focused on the environment, health and preserving small farms. But we’ve completely missed the boat when it comes to work. Farmworkers need to be part of this movement.”

CIW and their Campaign for Fair Food has had many victories in the past year (which you can read about here on our blog, over at Gourmet in Barry Estabrook’s excellent piece, as well as Tom Philpott’s coverage over at Grist; their most recent efforts are aimed at the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, who are blocking the penny per pound increase, as well as at Florida Governor Crist, who has refused to pursue federal slavery prosecutions, or even acknowledge the conditions in Immokalee as “slavery.”

To sign CIW’s petition to Governor Crist, click here.

To read coverage in the Fort Meyers news-press, in which Slow Food Southwest Florida chapter leader Rose O’Dell King is quoted, click here.

To read author Raj Patel’s take on the visit, click here.

For an article called “Why the Slow Food Movement Needs to Help Stop America’s Slave Labor,” click here.

Profile in Regional Seeds

by Slow Food USA intern Laura Kate Morris

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need” – Cicero

Perhaps you’ve grown your own vegetables in a community garden, infusing them with the terroir of your soil, eating them at your kitchen table.  But that is only part of the circle – what about the seeds?  Nearly all seeds available today have been shipped from states (if not countries) away, and at the end of the season are lost back to the soil.  What if, in the spirit of sustainability, we closed that circle of seed, plant, table… and back to seed?

The Hudson Valley Seed Library in Accord, NY, is trying to do just that.  It brings together rare and regional open-pollinated seeds, a sustainable business model, local artists, the conservation of traditional skills, and … your local library?  I spoke with the founder of HVSL for further insight into how anyone could possibly fit so many ideas into a tiny packet of seeds.

Co-created by Ken Greene and Doug Muller to support their homesteading habit, the company is committed to staying small and growing food without fossil fuels.  Choosing to raise their seeds by hand, HVSL shies away from a bigger size that would require specialized seed-cleaning equipment, tractors, and machinery.  They look toward a sustainable, community-focused model and away from the nationalized corporation.  (To start finding out more about the corporate seed world, check out this post on Civil Eats.) The Seed Library operates in part like your local library, substituting seeds for books.  You can become a member, “check out” the items of your choice, enjoy and learn from them (in this case, grow them and save them), and return them at the end of the season. 

 

 

More after the jump

Discussing the Limitations of Organic Agriculture

Two articles caught our eye this week, both exploring the potential limitations of organic agriculture.

   
• Paul Roberts’ article in Mother Jones is called “Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008.”  He’s the fellow who last year wrote the excellent “End of Food,” and in this article he tries to examine where organic and local agriculture’s limits might lie.  Can organic ag feed us all?  And who is “us?”  Just Americans?  What about those people living in increasingly desertified Africa?  Sure to ruffle some feathers in the organic/local world, Roberts’ article is worth consideration.
   
• Kim Severson and Andrew Martin’s article in today’s Dining Section of the NY Times.  Remember two weeks ago in our Peanut Butter Recall Redux when we marveled that the “organic” peanuts in Clif bars had been recalled?  Severson and Martin explore organic’s inability to provide consumers with a plate free of anxiety about foodborne illness.  Click here and please, let’s discuss below in comments…

Salvation Army Offers Hope—in the kitchen

Today we’re talking with Timothy Tucker, a 2008 Terra Madre delegate who teaches a culinary training course at the Salvation Army Center of Hope in Louisville, Kentucky.  It’s an innovative model—one he hopes will be replicated elsewhere.  It’s a ten week program that the Center has been running for about 3.5 years, a program in which homeless people are not just given a meal, but also given culinary vocational training that can help get them back on their feet.  Timothy helped design the program, and has been with it since its inception.  He has a commitment not just to culinary training but to good, clean, and fair food.

Q: I know that you were working in Louisville restaurants before moving over to the Salvation Army.  Had you ever taught culinary skills before you began working with this program in 2005?

TT: Never!  I am a much better teacher now than when I started.  I feel like I am more in tune with the students, and as the day changes so do the classes. I feel like I have so much that I want to teach that instead of 3 classes a year, I feel like the last 4 years has been one big class. As the money crunch has happened, we have taught more old school things like canning and curing—you know, the way grandma did it!
 
Q: Can you share any of your favorite success stories with us?

TT: Yup,  Cooper.  He was an R and B deejay in the early 80’s on the radio (his voice is like silk).  Drugs took control of his life for along time after that. He came through our program, and he finished my class with an A and perfect attendance, then went to cook for kids at the YMCA safe house.  He has been there for two years, he loves his job and pretty much everyone loves him.  I have many more stories. In fact,  in my book I have a whole chapter on student stories. 
 
Q: Do you think the Center of Hope culinary training model is replicable elsewhere?

TT: YES!!!!!! Please help me… I’m working on it.
 

 

More after the jump

Awakening in the Winter Orchard

This year, for the first time ever, the RAFT alliance (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) will be focusing on apples.  Filling us in on their activities is our apple expert, author Ben Watson. Ben is chairing the Ark of Taste committee and helping Gary Nabhan and the RAFT alliance’s efforts to record, restore and renew disappearing heirloom apple varieties.  On the docket are fruit tree grafting workshops, an heirloom apple experts summit, and education efforts such as a forgotten fruit manual/manifesto, and a series of posts for us here on the blog.

by Ben Watson
(Ben Watson is Chair of the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste Committee and an amateur nurseryman and fruit grower.)

Late February, western New Hampshire. Tonight snow comes down in heavy wet flakes, leaving a fresh white comforter several inches thick over the landscape. Yet those of us who live and garden in this place aren’t fooled by the weather. The sun, when it shines, is stronger now, the days longer, and the signs of spring are only a few weeks away. Soon enough sap will be rising in the sugar maples, small sugarhouses will open their louvered roofs, and white steam clouds billowing from the wood-fired evaporator pans will puff into the bright blue sky. Soon too the snowpack will retreat, and on the sunny, exposed edges of the lawn the first species crocus will emerge, tentative and yellow, followed by other early bulbs: snowdrop, squill, and grape-hyacinth.

It’s a season pregnant with potentiality. We order seeds, clean and sharpen our tools. Like baseball players arriving at spring training, our outdoor ambitions for the growing season are a blank slate. Anything is possible as we enter this Lenten season – we’ve no hits, no runs, no errors. And now is the time that apple growers are contemplating the orchard, though in truth we have never forgotten about it. The trees have stood silent, dormant, but we’re still eating some choice, long-keeping fruits from cold storage: Roxbury Russet, Mutsu, Northern Spy.

More after the jump

What’s for Lunch?

This week we have been focusing on the Farm to College efforts around the country.  Today, we shift our focus to K-12, where what is served in the lunchroom is also a) up for grabs and b) vitally important.  Been in a school cafeteria lately?  If you have you’ve seen that it is dominated by junk food, and reheated calorie-laden, carb-o-rific meals.  A horrible school lunch is a lost nutritional/health opportunity, and a lost educational opportunity.

Last week you may recall that Debra Eschmeyer wrote a letter to Michelle Obama, letting her know about the upcoming reauthorization of the Childhood Nutrition Act, and calling for her interest and participation (the Childhood Nutrition Act establishes the guidelines for school lunch among other things).  In order to take advantage of this moment, today as we post this, the Community Food Security Coalition, the National Farm to School Network, and School Food FOCUS are holding briefings on the Hill—with both the House and the Senate—to make the case for “supporting policy solutions that restore the right of all children to access good food in school; that educate and inform communities about healthy food and its impact on the wellbeing of children; and that connect farmers, school districts, food service companies, and great ideas to the food system delivering school lunch.”  To read their excellent CNR briefing, click here and stay tuned for outcomes and reporting back on their day on the Hill.

Also, make sure you read Alice Waters’ and Katrina Heron’s Op-Ed in last week’s NY Times, in which they call for a radical overhaul of the school lunch program, saying “without healthy food (and cooks and kitchens to prepare it), increased financing will only create a larger junk-food distribution system. We need to scrap the current system and start from scratch. Washington needs to give schools enough money to cook and serve unprocessed foods that are produced without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. When possible, these foods should be locally grown.”