Posts Tagged: slow food
UC Berkeley offers edible education to students and public
Chef and sustainable food advocate Alice Waters has organized a class to be offered at UC Berkeley this fall called "Edible Education 101," according to Mother Jones food and ag blogger Tom Philpott.
The class will be co-taught by Nikki Henderson, executive director of People's Grocery in Oakland, and UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollen, the author of several best-sellers about the U.S. food system.
Henderson told Philpott that the course is subtitled "The Rise and Future of the Food Movement" to acknowledge its outgrowth from advocacy by the white-table-cloth sustainable eating crowd and proponents of food justice for low income Americans.
"Kind of Oakland activists and Berkeley activists coming together," Henderson explained. "Because every successful movement in America, and elsewhere, has found ways to get disparate groups of people to actually work together, especially when they're not in direct conflict with one another."
Henderson told Philpott that the 14-week course will explore class and race and power dynamics in the context of food and agriculture. Each week food experts from a wide variety of perspectives will relate their thoughts and experiences about the American food system. One of the sessions will feature an open conversation with a Walmart executive and a representative from the the largest corporate bulk food distributor in the world. Other confirmed speakers include: Carlo Petrini, Peter Sellars, Marion Nestle, Frances Moore Lappé, Raj Patel, Ann Cooper, Eric Schlosser and Alice Waters.
The two-unit, upper division course will be open to 400 UC Berkeley students and 300 members of the general public. The class will be from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays in UC Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium. Tickets for the general public will be available beginning Aug. 15. Find information and updates on Water's Chez Panisse website.
Sustainable eating and food justice will be combined in UC Berkeley course.
Slow food on a budget
Fast food is cheap, but an Associated Press story that moved on the wire yesterday offered help for eating "slower food" on a budget. AP reporter Michelle Locke Ho opened her story by making examples of two slow-food products: $20 handcrafted cheese and $100 free-range turkey. She talked to UC Davis food systems analyst Gail Feenstra about what appears to be a pricy trend.
"It's been sort of touted as being an upper-income thing, which is unfortunate because that is not the bottom line," Feenstra was quoted. "The slow food movement needs to be about everybody having access to good quality food."
The story was organized into five sections, each with suggestions for cutting the cost of "slow food."
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Do the math and think big
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Organize to localize
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Be a bargain hunter, gatherer
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Get green at the grocery
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Timing is everything
For the "organize to localize" section, Locke Ho spoke to UC Cooperative Extension nutrition, family and consumer sciences advisor Cathi Lamp of Tulare County. Lamp said a lack of large grocery stores and farmers markets in rural areas can be overcome with community organization.
"In one community too small to support a full market, parents are helping run a vegetable stand once a week at an elementary school," Lamp was paraphrased.
If You're Going to San Francisco...
Remember that song??? I remember it well. Its lyrics inspired thousands of people to come to San Francisco. Written by the Mamas and Papas John Phillips, and recorded by Scott McKenzie, the song quickly became a cultural icon.
At age 7, I was too young to travel to San Francisco during the summer of 1967. I won't miss my opportunity this time, though, and will be joining thousands of other like-minded people over Labor Day Weekend 2008 for what promises to be an amazing series of events and activities sponsored by Slow Food Nation. "Come to the Table" invites all of us to travel to San Francisco, to recognize our collective strength, to learn more about sustainable food systems, real food, and to celebrate together.
Top on my list will be a visit to the San Francisco Victory Garden at the Civic Center. In World War I and World War II, the Civic Center was home to Victory Gardens. San Francisco had extraordinarily robust wartime gardening programs, and celebrated the success and importance of this work through a series of public activities. It says a lot about the City of San Francisco that it is once again claiming civic space for such an important activity.
We can learn some important things from our past about the use of civic space for gardening. In WWI, Edith Wilson (President Wilson's second wife) grazed sheep on the White House lawn, doing her "bit" for the war effort. Eleanor Roosevelt planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn during WWII. Photographs of Vice President Henry Wallace working in his Victory Garden, sometimes with his son, were distributed to the Press Corps during WWII. Gardens were planted in public spaces throughout the nation: parks, schools, and city-owned lots. Gardens were planted at homes, on median strips, on military bases and at workplaces...wherever Americans lived, worked, gathered, prayed for the war's end, and hoped for a brighter, more peaceful future.
In WWI and WWII, gardening claimed not only important physical space in American life, but an important place in the American psyche. Gardening was a vital expression of American civic life, bridging ethnic, socioeconomic and class differences. It was an activity to which we could devote our considerable energies without reservation. An activity that united us in hard and uncertain times.
If you're going to San Francisco, this summer, be ready to celebrate Victory Gardens, an old idea that is coming around again. Be ready to learn a lot about America's food system. Be ready to meet other people who share your dreams, your values, and who are ready for a food revolution. If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. And bring your gardening tools.
"A Garden For Everyone. Everyone in a Garden."