The Slow Food Movement will have its big event
at the end of this summer in San Francisco. 50,000 people are expected to visit the festival, which celebrates sustainable, healthy food. The Festival is called Slow Food Nation and it will feature exhibits, events and -- of course -- lots of delicious food.
To get things ready, the mayor let the group dig up the lawn in front of City Hall and plant a quarter-acre garden. It will be the centerpiece of the festival, ambitiously named Slow Food Nation.
Events will pop up all around the city over Labor Day weekend. Fifteen architects have volunteered to build elaborate pavilions dedicated to things like pickles, coffee and salami. Lecture halls have been booked, politicians invited and dinner parties planned. Nearly $2 million has been raised.
And for the first time in its 10-year history, the notoriously finicky organization has embraced corporate partners like Whole Foods, Anolon cookware and the Food Network.
The Slow Food faithful say they want the festival to be the Woodstock of food, a profound event where a broad band of people will see that delicious, sustainably produced food can be a prism for social, ecological and political change.
They also realize that it may be their best chance to prove that Slow Food, as a movement, is not just one big wine tasting with really hard to find cheeses that you weren't invited to.
The American wing of the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy in 1986, has a tendency to polarize people. When it first took root here in 1998, some people were drawn to its philosophy, while others were put off by what they saw as elitism and an inflated sense of importance.
Slow Food's leaders, the chef Alice Waters chief among them, bristle at the criticism. But most acknowledge that the organization did not translate well to an American audience. As a result, it has never had as much cultural or political impact as its parent group in Europe.
The concept behind the Slow Food movement makes sense. But the name is just awful. First off, Americans are too busy for any thing that is "slow" -- hence, the popularity of fast food. Next, the idea of food moving slowly along it's designated path is just yucky. How about "Delicious Food USA" or "Healthy Food USA" or something like that? Because Slow Food just sounds too....slow. Find more about the worthwhile, but poorly-named, organization here.
