Does Slow Food Do Anything?
Thanks Adam and Ji-Young for the comments on my previous post on Slow Food. I agree that until now the movement has been more programmatic (shall we say?) than activist. So in terms of specific programs that they have set up, not much has resulted yet. And in places like Mexico, as my last post on cheese shows, artisanal food producers chug along quite happily without ever having heard of Slow Food.
But, and it’s a big but, Slow Food crystallizes, encapsulates and publicizes a significant body of opinion about food and cooking. The panels in San Francisco show how they could mobilize major writers and spokesmen. Thus it does have political importance.
And what worries me is that many of the brightest students in our best colleges, many of our best chefs, many of our best food writers, are taking it for granted that an industrialized, mechanized food system has been a complete failure, actually worse than a failure, a disaster. And that the way to remedy this is not to fix the problems (which there certainly are) but to revert to nostalgia. These are people of good will who are often prepared to make considerable sacrifices to improve food and agriculture. And these are the people who are becoming the officers in NGOs, writing books, advising restaurants and businesses, and so on.
It’s creating a climate of opinion that is difficult to reverse. That’s because it’s becoming unquestioned common sense. It makes it difficult even to raise reasonable criticisms without being written off as an old fogey, out of touch with reality, and part of the capitalist, corporate alliance. Serious constructive criticism is out of the question.
This may or may not affect American food policy. But some very smart people are already arguing that such attitudes (which admittedly they associate with greens, though of course there is a huge overlap between the two groups) is having a terrible effect on efforts to improve the lot of ordinary people in, say, Africa. Robert Paarlberg makes the case strongly in his well-informed book Starved for Science. And just today there was this interesting piece in the London Times on its effects in Africa again.
So yes, that’s why I think it is really important to take on Slow Food. Here’s an important issue. It must be debated courteously, carefully, and with all the evidence we have at our disposal.
P. S. Nice short discussion of some of the complexities of local and other food issues in Ideas in food, the blog of Aki Kamozawa and Alexander Talbot.
I guess that this way of thinking has been around for at least the last decade, it isn’t specific to SF, but I can see how SF could push this line a lot further.
Examples I can think of foodist hypocrisy are:
– damning the poor for eating cheap in-humanely produced chicken, while also waxing lyrical about the joys of eating wild grouse.
– waxing lyrical about the lovely extra-fine green beans that you get in France (actually grown in Africa, often Kenya). Actually this is slightly racist often (eg. nothing good comes out of Africa).
– Chopping down rainforest to grow “green palm oil”.
– buying imported generic apples v regular local apples.
etc.
I guess the political line from SF gives a lot of people permission to feel OK about all of this?
NEPAD (New Partner for Africa’s Development), The African Union, various UN organizations, etc.. all believe that diaspora networks of scientists and experts are the great hope for turning the African “brain drain” into “brain circulation”. This includes agricultural development, hunger/poverty alleviation, mitigating the effects of climate change, education, technology and science transfers, big business investments, etc..
On the PR and journalistic fronts, there are regional groups of young Africans (almost all were educated internationally) who know how to operate in more than one culture. They are bilingual or multilingual, utilize advancements in ICT to form networks, etc.. They’re young, but are mobilizing quickly. I’ve seen amazing changes in the past 5 years.
I started emailing some of the panelists at SF Nation and will continue to contact more. What can I say here publicly? Provide a PR platform and they will come. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have criticisms of Slow Food.
Natural versus Science is a bit of a red herring when it comes to African ag or ag in general. I see it used on both sides of the argument. More on this later. So far I’ve been hesitant to engage in public discourses. But I don’t have much of a choice now because of one of my jobs.
What you say is a good sign Ji-Young. But just on one specific front, if, say, farmers in a given country are to export to Europe or the US and if that country has in place policies that prohibit, say, GM, then they are not going to adopt that technology however much it might benefit them in producing drought-resistant plants. Or look at the recent fuss in the US about salmonella and the hunt to find the culprit among products imported from Mexico.
And Adam, yes, I do think movements such as SF validate certain ways of thinking.
The more I look at the history of food, the more I am convinced that ideas come first. What we have now is a whole generation of Europeans and Americans who take it as self evident that small farms are better than large, organic is better than anything that has been treated with fertilizers or pesticides, and so on.
Those kinds of attitudes are not harmless because they translate into policy. So that’s why I worry about the consolidation of a rhetoric.
OK, I’ve been reconsidering my initial dismissiveness of SF.
I just came back from a school garden and food bank meeting.
I feel like I live in two different worlds of food. On one side is the glamorous side, the stuff that generates a lot of PR. I run into SF types in this realm.
The other side is agricultural development, hunger/poverty alleviation, environmental stewardship and mitigating the effects of climate change for the poorest of the poor. I never run into SF types here. They never come to these meetings, conferences, speak on panels, volunteer, etc.. That’s why I haven’t taken them that seriously. They’re not visible in these realms.
But I know what you mean about this belief in small farms. Most people I know who believe this aren’t involved in anything. They read stuff and talk about it at the water cooler.
OR if they are involved, well, they have an investment in marketing small farms and related activities. Almost always “artisanal” or “heirloom” type products. Sometimes an activist uses a community garden as a political platform. One very inflammatory case in Southern California wasn’t even about feeding locals. Insiders say that the activists never cared about the small farm or the people. They wanted a soap box and found a group of poor people with little or no PR savvy to manipulate.
I work with small gardens and small farms too. But for very different reasons. They are for hunger/poverty aid and pedagogical programs at schools (including global civics).
I like high quality food and have some disposable income to buy pretty much whatever I want to eat. As a consumer I’m in the right niche for SF products. I suppose I never took the political leap they made very seriously. Clearly others do (people who’s opinions I respect), so I’ll explore them further and see how I can address them.
One person at the meeting I attended this morning is from University of California agricultural and natural resources. We’ve spoken about SF briefly before. Today she told me that they don’t make economic sense (things that have been discussed on this blog), “too small, too expensive” they can’t achieve the economies of scale. She never runs into SF people either.
Hi Ji-Young,
Thanks for the usual long and helpful replies. One of the things that concerns me is that people who know–agricultural economists, people in ag schools, most big farmers, most agribusinesses–simply do not seem to get coverage in the mainstream media nor do they seem to write for the mainstream media. Indeed I think it might be hard for them to get a hearing. Thus the public who reads the major newspapers, weeklies, goes to SF tends to think the whole question of small, local, organic is settled. They are voters and often pretty active too in, say, wanting to change the Farm Bill. I’m no fan of the Farm Bill but the changes I have seen them argue for do not seem to me to address the important questions.
The Starchef Conference begins today, and their theme is ‘sustainable’ and the responsibility of the chef.
I’m not even sure what ‘sustainable’ means.
I’m in agreement with something you said upthread, at least people are talking about the issues.
Knee jerk reactions to sound bytes and slogans will not provide any direction or answers to grappling with hunger.
Thanks Judith, great to hear from you. One thing I’d like to begin doing in this blog is take these words that we all bat about–organic, terroir, sustainable–and lay out how they gained currency. Very odd and tangled histories, many of them.
By the way I was going to buy $10 of vegetables today in response to your question. But it was raining and it was Independence Day and so I’ll put it off for a few days. Nice idea to compare notes.