I wish I could let the poets speak for themselves here, but it would be impossible to recreate the impact of last night. The poets each spoke about food in incredibly different ways, reminding us of what food can-and can’t-do. The poets included host Poetri, Lynne Alicia Elman, Joshua Merchant, and Kirya Traber as well as Josh Healey and Ramona “Mona” Webb. They might have mentioned foods we thought we were familiar with, eggplant or a lamb chop, but each artist presented the experience anew and used the medium of spoken word to do that in different ways. And so the second floor of the  Museum of the African Diaspora became the site of that complicated process of cultural production, consumption, appropriation, modification, narration, and exchange. It happened between each poet, between each member of the audience. It sounds too simplistic right? That we could come to a nuanced appreciation of ourselves and others across cultural and personal lines over the course of a single night? But I have this suspicion that this is how it happens, measured in one night increments, in stanzas and lines. It happens when we listen to each other.

And this listening happens in a variety of ways. Josh Healey read a poem about seven years of vegetarianism and a single lamb chop at a friend’s barbecue. He built up the defense, the explanation of vegetariansim and then he slowly let it fall apart. Holes in the fortress came in the form of a stubborn bowl of grandma’s matzo ball soup. She insisted on using chicken broth because that was how she had always done it. And suddenly the bowl was transformed. She was not offering chicken broth with matzo balls and perhaps a few carrots, she was offering herself, her past, her present, and asking that her future be honored. So to say food is complicated is as useful as saying culture is complicated, but there is no other way to spin it. It’s up to us to work through these things, to articulate and narrate our own identities and to listen to and honor the narratives of others.

I’m not an aspiring spoken word artist but I am going to try to start recording my food memories, save them in a cookbook, and hand them down to my children with the family recipes. I encourage all of you to do the same. And if you need inspiration, be sure to check out the rest of sfnoir’s events including a Meet and Greet with vegan soul food chef Bryant Terry tonight 6pm-8pm at Marcus Books in the Fillmore and a Wine and Food Gala Saturday night 7pm-11pm at 101 Second St. to sample Caribbean, Soul, Cajun, Vegan, Southern, Creole, and African food.

I was thinking about school lunch last night at the Food From the Heart event at the Ferry Building. It was a beautiful event. Commuters wandered into the building and found red and purple linens stretching to either end of the hall. Spreads of ceviche, pastries, empanadas, oysters, meats, mushrooms, fondue, and, of course, wines welcomed visitors into a packed party and out of the gray rain. I used to hate eating in the school cafeteria. It was so rushed and always unsatisfying. I’m wasn’t a shy kid but situations like that, with kids yelling and teachers scolding, made lunch an event to be avoided. My dad used to come by and rescue me and my siblings when he could just so we could eat on the benches out front with him.

So what made the crowd so different last night? Ed Bruske wrote about Michelle Obama’s “tall order” for school lunches in the Washington Post today. He took a trip to a D.C. school to see how lunch is made, served, consumed, and sometimes not consumed. At the end of all this, he asks how we get from here to there. What made lunch in a small town in Ohio so different from last night’s event? This may be an unfair comparison. The vintners and vendors profit from their quality and creativity, whereas school lunches are a public service whose only beneficiaries are big agricultural business lobbies. And then of course there’s the discrepancy in wine consumption which may have done something to elevate the mood last night along with the live music and tango dancing. But even in the middle of the rush, vendors excitedly answered questions, vintners discussed late-season harvests, and people smiled even as they bumped into each other. So, in addition to the vegetables, the reintroduction of cooking, and the participation of the child in every stage of the eating process, from seed to stomach, perhaps we need to encourage kids to taste, perhaps we need to tell them about the breads they’re eating, perhaps we need to give them the opportunity to respond. Bruske points out that the cafeterias rely on consumption to secure aid and so they look to kid-friendly versions of edible. But what if kids were encouraged to actively taste and not passively consume throughout the day, tasting the difference between a green bean brushed with cool dew and that same green bean warmed in the afternoon sun? What if we made them write it down, pushed them to expand their vocabulary and be articulate? What if we offered the time to develop an understanding of pleasure based not on ignorance but on knowledge? Maybe the pink, sugar frosting wouldn’t hold the same appeal anymore. Maybe lunch time could feel a little more like a meal.

Write it down. Be articulate, write to your representatives:

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5986/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=828

So when you’re considering your spring garden, perhaps you should check in with Fred Bové first to get a better understanding of how you can work with the local environment. But Bové’s tour seems to be about more than just improving a personal understanding of the life growing all around you it is also about understanding how you, as a responsible forager and consumer, fit into that life and how to cultivate a similar bond of thoughtful exchange within your own community. To that extent, forageSF hosts community dinners, walks, and an underground farmer’s market all in support of their larger CSF program, which brings wild, local foods to its members. Created by Iso Rabins in 2008, forageSF and its CSF seeks to provide a link between forager and consumer, providing opportunities for full-time foraging. If you’re interested in learning more, check out: www.foragesf.com or head to the Underground Farmer’s Market. The Market features the wares of backyard gardens and home kitchens. The next one is set for January 28th from 5pm-11pm at 199 Capp St. The event typically features music and even demonstrations.

The evening promises to be a little more informal than the conventional farmer’s market, which requires purchasable goods to be produced in a regulated kitchen space. Serving as a stage for the experienced home cook, such a social happening recalls community events as varied as the county pie contest or bread day at the local bakery when families would come and wait their turn to use the baker’s oven. Though community dinners are part of the forageSF mission, forageSF rightfully seeks to make every step of the meal, from the foraging/planting to the finding/sharing to the eating/experiencing, a shared process of community between each other and the earth. It reminds us that these spaces do exist, that the city does offer us nourishment and companionship so long as we offer it respect and patience.

And so here on the Slow Food San Francisco blog I will seek only to echo and affirm the mission of forageSF as a mission that challenges us to slow down and examine the place we call home and the people who make it home.

If you came to the meeting last night with germinating ideas on how to revolutionize our food system and if you began to see them grow through conversations last night, then please check out Digging Deeper SF. San Francisco design professionals worked in collaboration with the Mayor’s office to develop a challenge to all citizens to present their ideas on how to make our city more sustainable. The entries have been broken down into two categories, the first of which will be dominated by professional designer types comfortable with creating architectural diagrams but the second is an incredibly flexible category open to ideas about education, outreach, product design, incentives to buy local produce or even grow your own food, coordinated community garden efforts, irrigation systems, methods to track the provenance of the food we consume, etc etc.

Entries are due January 31 by midnight and if you feel you can only go so far with an idea, you can contact the designers sponsoring the effort and they will help you streamline your idea.

Check out both http://diggingdeepersf.ning.com/ for general guidelines and submission information as well as http://diggingdeepersf.ning.com/forum/topics/brain-storming-potential to get started thinking through the diversity of issues that surround our food system.

What part of that life would you select? Well, look to the young, virile, and well-dressed New York thirty-something crowd for some suggestions.  Described in an article published today in the New York Times, this group calls themselves urban cavemen. The element of Paleolithic life they’ve selected? Consuming large quantities of meat, sometimes raw, and then fasting for a few days to recreate the cycles of hunting and consumption that defined pre-agricultural life in an effort to achieve the physical prowess and “fearsome feats” of prehistoric man. There is no mention in the article that these men actually do the hunting in which that physical prowess would be so necessary but they do the fearsome eating. A Frenchman mentioned in the piece who similarly admires the cave life but favors a caveman chic version, espouses the benefits of “mouvement naturel” like the “essential skill” of “playing catch with stones.” New York’s savage nobles pride themselves on mitigating the numbing world of climate control and comfort by walking the city streets. One such innovator claims, “New York is the only city in America where you can walk.”

Up to this point, I was trying to be somewhat sympathetic. With a few laughs at the embarrassing masculinity of it all, I understood that they were trying to rediscover a relationship with food. Slow Food could hardly scoff at that. But the relationship they discovered, or perhaps created is a better word, reveals less about anything “naturel” and more about the complicated stories we tell about ourselves through our food, the strange ways we construct our bodies and our habitats through how we frame our consumption patterns. San Franciscans can immediately see that story start to unravel when our caveman claims that New York is the only walkable city. But what about the freezers full of meat? The exercise retreats of boulder jumping? The identification with a group of people completely alien to us?

Though your story may not have quite this much testosterone, you have one nonetheless. But, as is often the case with our most personal choices in life like religion, it is dangerous to pretend that instead of telling a story we are simply fulfilling a pre-written text, we are simply living as we are “supposed” to. What makes us human is not incredible quantities of meat, but our need to tell stories about that meat. It seems misguided to dredge up lives of people we don’t understand and pretend we do. The cavemen had their own stories, their own systems, their own fabricated order of things. But stocking a freezer full of meat whose origin doesn’t even warrant a thought let alone concern is a dangerous story to tell, a myth that obscures its own process of signification in the spirit of Roland Barthes’ mythic speech.

The impulse is understandable. We want validation that our stories, our choices are correct or authentic. We want to think our engagement with food is more profound than what we are served systematically through impersonal commodity chains. The efforts of fast food empires to serve these uniform products with a smile of personal warmth have not fooled us. But replacing the wrapped up hamburger with a slab of raw meat is more of a lateral move into an alternatively branded regime of consumption. As far as prescribed eating goes, I’ll stick to Slow Food’s good, clean, fair because it helps me to tell a story, a story still in the process of being told whose promises still need our active verbs, in which our relationship with food is not validated by an ability to throw stones, leap across boulders, or admire feats of strength but is instead affirmed through food’s ability to connect a community, to provoke reflection on our role within that community and our subsequent responsibilities, and to push us to live our lives for each other. My food story doesn’t move through the principle of survival of the fittest but rather through an understanding that no man is an island.

1. Ask. When I shop, when I eat at restaurants, when I eat with friends ask about where it’s coming from, ask about what it means to them, ask about what they think about when they think about food. I suppose I used to think it would seem rude if I asked a waiter where the carrots came from, that it would just bother them. But, if done politely and humbly, it actually reflects a sincere interest in food and the deepest respect for the all who work with food. When dealing with friends, I felt similarly. My decision not to eat meat because of the difficulty in determining a certain provenance seemed personal. And I don’t think I need to try to convert anybody to anything. But I do think everyone should have to answer for their food choices. Everyone should have to be a conscientious eater. And on top of my desire to push people to become conscientious eaters, I am also simply interested in their food histories, how certain things came to be important to them.

2. Try. I want to try a new recipe once a week. A great way to force myself to do this is to sign up for a CSA. It’s a bit like Iron Chef with a surprise ingredient. This one requires less of the long term, slow momentum of the first resolution, it means simply signing up now that I’ve moved into my new apartment. But the effects will hang around. I’ll have new recipes on standby for company and I’ll continue to get to know myself in the kitchen. I’ll be able to read a recipe and understand why it is in a certain order or know when to substitute according to my own developed taste. I’ll be working toward my own culinary identity.

3. Write. I’ve been having these dreams about Obama. They started after the summer election in Iran. We sit down to lunch, both order salads, and I tell him what I think should be done. Sometimes we talk about the opposition in Iran, the UC system, health care, and agricultural reform. It seems quite silly (why do we always just order salad? is that the decided meal of diplomats?) but it’s wonderful that I feel I have this relationship, this ability to speak. We all have that ability. Maybe I can’t meet up with him for lunch but I can write to him, to my representatives, to department heads. I want to either call or write once a week to tell those in power to prioritize agricultural land reform as a matter of economic and environmental sustainability. I want to ask them to reject the influence of large lobbyists who have made it so every farm must have a separate bathroom set aside for the sole use of the inspector sent from the USDA, adding yet another cost hurdle for small farmers. I believe in pestering. I believe in coordinated, large scale pestering. I guess I’m making a resolution to pester and asking you to think about doing the same.

That’s my initial toe test of the waters of resolution. Let me know if you have any suggestions and happy new year!

In a neighborhood house designed by Julia Morgan in the early twenties, San Franciscans sat looking out at the night lights of the bridges and buildings below. Well, it wasn’t quite that calm. There was laughter, wine, and crab all set to the music of local band Mighty Mississippi. But every now and then the low-hanging moon would demand attention, seeming to pull the distant city a little closer together. And that was the spirit of the night; the distant made close. Every element of the night had something to say to the other elements. The building itself serves as a multi-generational meeting ground for after-school programs, senior nutrition classes, and a variety of programs geared toward children caught up in the juvenile corrections system. The crab was served by students of the California Culinary Academy. The dessert, provided by the San Francisco Baking Institute. Beverages came from all over the Bay Area from Bodega Del Sur Winery, Magnanimus Wine Group, Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, and Citizen Bean. In between conversations held by the guests, if you listened closely, you could hear a conversation of community. That is to say that without words, the generosity of all those involved made its presence felt.

It was the perfect post-Thanksgiving night of giving thanks. All the things I forgot to be thankful for last week, I now had an opportunity to acknowledge. I am thankful that in a big city far from what I call home, I happen to sit next to a fellow-Midwesterner. I am thankful that there is such a city, such an organization, that can gather people whose interest in food grew out of diverse landscapes. From the farm kids of the Midwest, to the couple who flew in just for the Slow Crab and Oyster Fest from New Jersey, to the San Francisco natives who grew up knowing the start of crab season, Slow Food has a place for everyone. It has a place for the State Senator, the fisherman, the aspiring chef, the college student, the social activist, and the concerned eater.

And what brought us all together? Fresh Dungeness crab from the local Monterey Fish Market and delicious oysters from Drakes Bay Oysters. I am woefully inexperienced in the art of eating crab but I think it must be fun at any experience level. We compared cracking techniques and celebrated the successful removal of a full piece of leg meat. It was a meal whose own consumption involved us in a bit of theater as we waited to see if the latest crunch would be victorious. But the crab took on a new role in a drama laid out as Senator Mark Leno, Zeke Grader from the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, and Paul Johnson of Monterey Fish Market spoke to the well-fed crowd.

That crab we enjoyed is in danger. Essentially, the issue is that out-of-town fishermen come to the Bay Area for relatively early season-opening date before moving on to fish elsewhere. Their presence depletes crab for our local fishermen. Many of the out-of-town boats come with hundreds more traps than the local boats use, effectively ending the season early. Mark Leno has introduced legislation,AB749, to limit trap numbers and entry for a two-year trial period to be reviewed by the Department of Fish and Game. Governor Schwarzenegger has vetoed it twice. We must write, call, and email his office to let him know that he cannot veto it again. As the PCFFA (or the Fishermen’s Liberation Front for those of you at the Crab and Oyster Fest) notes, this measure, “was intended to: (1) prevent waste (when too much crab hits the market at once); (2) promote safer fishing conditions (avoiding the race for crab); (3) create a stable labor force and keep crab processing in California: (4) assure a supply of fresh, local crab over the course of the season, and; (5) protect the marine environment from lost crab traps on the ocean bottom.” For more information check out http://www.pcffa.org/fn.htm to read about crab fishing, aquaculture, salmon, even fishermen’s health care.

And, as we were reminded last night, the fork is also a powerful tool when wielded in collaboration with the policy. If you’re interested in recipes for this season’s seafood, check out montereyfish.com. I suggest the homemade gefilte fish recipe. Of course, you can’t go wrong with Dungeness crab. It would be the prefect dish to serve at your letter-writing dinner to remind Governor Schwarzenegger why crab is a critical part of San Francisco’s traditions.

I’m sure the couple from New Jersey and all other transplants would share my sentiments in saying, thank you San Francisco for sharing and defending this tradition.

Listening to the speakers at our Labor Day Eat-In, including Senator Mark Leno and author Daphne Miller, it became clear that Slow Food isn’t a typical political movement-in fact, for some it doesn’t feel political at all. But Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini understands the fundamental link between our social experience and our policies and this is why he is able to speak of a “right to pleasure.” This right, like any other, is in need of defense and attention. So when Slow Food demands that schools receive grants for gardens, incentives to buy local products, and an infrastructure to reacquaint us all with real food they do so as part of their defense of the right to pleasure. This is not the sort of pleasure we see on television but the pleasure we see right in our own kitchens. It is the moment Dava Guthmiller described as that first taste of fresh green beans. This pleasure is a complicated one involving the immediate appreciation of a simply good green bean as well as the knowledge of its creation, growth, and history.
Real food in schools means precisely this combination of pleasures. It is partly about getting good, healthy food that will better nourish children. It is also partly about shifting to a sustainable system that brings producer and consumer closer. And it is also about creating a place for children to explore the idea of fairness, of meaningful labor. Not only does the flavor and nutrition of a green bean have something to offer, but also its entire process of being. Children will learn to prepare and to wait until that exciting day when the little leaves of green emerge. There is no better way to learn of a product’s true value than to toil and play in the garden.
And that is what a political potluck is all about-toil and play. The dishes were beautiful and would have made Cezanne jealous. And the dishes were important: the onions slipped into the Civic Center in unsuspecting backpacks, the tomatoes were tucked beneath a towel and the subversive meal began. But it was a Slow Food kind of subversive, full of friendly conversation, letter writing, and recipe swapping. It was the kind of subversive you can bring your kid to-in fact you should bring your kid to.
So if that taste of politics felt familiar enough, then here’s something you can try:
Go have lunch with your kid at school. See exactly what it is you object to, I suspect it won’t be just the food. This is something policy cannot address as effectively and that is why it takes all of us to change. At my school, the cafeteria workers used to blow whistles if we got too loud during lunch. And if they had to blow it three times, we ate our meal in complete silence. And if you broke the silence, you didn’t finish the meal at all; you had to stand at the front of the room for the rest of the period. I wonder how those whistle-yielding workers would have felt doing that if the room was full of parents?
What kind of a food system puts workers in that position? Let’s put cooking back in the kitchen.

This is just the start. Keep reading, keep eating, and keep challenging.

This September Congress is set to reexamine the Child Nutrition Act and we want you to help. Every five years, Congress gets an opportunity to review and update the Act along with the related programs of the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Summer Food Service Program, the Afterschool Snack and Meal Program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program, and the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program. Although the list seems fairly comprehensive, when stacked against the statistics of children in need, it seems insufficient. The United States Department of Agriculture, responsible for administering these programs, reports that 12.6 million children live in households consistently struggling against hunger. That translates to almost 20% of all children under the age of 18 living in poverty and no doubt the numbers have risen under the current economic conditions. The most recent reauthorization sought to reach more children while updating nutritional standards for the meals administered. The Child Nutrition Act, since its inception in 1966, has fed 30 million kids a year. Certainly the Act has done a lot. But we think it can do more.

Before we get into that, take a breath and let those numbers sink in. The problem isn’t just our food policies of course, but food becomes a basic element to solving any poverty-related problem. Thirty million kids are able to get at least one meal a day. That meal helps them focus and succeed in school. Sometimes the connections between a school meal and a good history paper seem stretched but I challenge you to focus on your work after skipping breakfast and lunch. And that’s just one day; many children start the day without having had a complete dinner the night before. Now imagine a meal for every child that goes beyond a caloric count. Imagine a meal that comforts them, introduces them to real food, and connects them to local producers.

Because school cafeterias rely on a combination of federal funding and private income from things like vending machines, achieving such a meal is often difficult and government subsidies make it easy to serve highly processed foods. But the government has the potential to direct its money toward a more positive end, one that would see an increased awareness of food cultures and systems as well as increased health and social benefits for our children. The transformation of school cafeterias to a site of processed production and consumption has had serious impacts, including a hand in helping to triple childhood obesity rates since 1960. (French et al, 2006) The problems are well known but the benefits are less well recognized.

Anthropology scholars define food as one of several “culturally defined material substances used in the creation and maintenance of social relationships.” (Mintz et al, 2002) Food has the power not only to change our bodies but also our way of thinking and relating. Teaching children that eating is an agricultural act that connects to a larger system of producers can create a generation of thinkers able to connect seemingly disparate landscapes and anticipate consequences. That is why Slow Food San Francisco, along with the other U.S. chapters, is asking for this review and reauthorization to be a chance to affirm our commitment to healthy and informed children. We are asking for:

-Increased reimbursement rate for each lunch from $2.57 to a minimum of $3.57 to invest in quality ingredients with greater nutritional value. Though this means a rise in spending it would be significantly offset by cut costs through a decreased reliance on long-distance transportation, increased health of our children, and revitalization of local economies.

-Grants for Farm-to-School Programs and school gardens to help connect children directly to food production and producers. The Farm-to-School organization has already worked with Congress to provide an example of successful local farm networks supplying schools. Programs like farm-to-school or school gardens (check out the Edible Schoolyards at Sanchez, Miraloma and Paul Revere Elementary Schools in San Francisco or Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley for an example) have been shown to increase children’s knowledge of and preferences for vegetables. (French et al, 2006)

-Financial incentives to encourage schools to purchase locally grown goods.

-Opportunities for education and training of farmers, cooks, teachers, and administrators to participate in making the National School Lunch Program a success.

We know now that feeding is more than just about total calories. We know this after struggling with rising obesity and childhood diabetes. We know this after facing a problematic and growing health care bill. We know this after pausing to remember the nights we spent around the dinner table as children, overwhelmed with a feeling of being truly loved. We know this after calculating how much oil we ‘eat’ in every grocery-store product. But mostly we know it when we admit our own distance from the farmers-the hands-that care for the tomato we pick up at the store. Try asking someone working at that store about the conditions of the workers who grew those tomatoes. This Act can no longer be about just feeding or educating our children, we need it too. We need to remember what Wendell Berry felt as he said, “the community-in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures-is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.” We must learn, listening to the farmers like Steve, that community and wholeness is what sustains us and our meals must be a product of this understanding. And once we’ve digested this knowledge it’s imperative that we do our part by writing our local representatives, signing the national petition for the reauthorization or by merely just coming to one of the many Eat-In/Potlucks on September 7th to share a meal and be part of what could be quite a movement towards eating what we preach.