Slow Food USA: Social Justice on the Menu

By Tom Philpott, Editor of The Grist

“If you haven’t noticed yet, Slow Food is about to get political!” announced Erika Lesser, executive director of Slow Food USA. She was addressing the Slow Food USA chapter — for one day, Terra Madre had broken into meetings of regional and national contingents.

Few could have missed the political turn. Unlike many Slow Food USA events I’ve been to, there were few or no odes to the transformative power of a perfect peach. Here, speakers focused on how to broaden access to healthy, ecologically raised food.

Josh Viertel, Slow Food USA’s new president, set the tone. He announced that the organization would from now forward pursue two main priorities: youth organizing and social justice. “Our food system disproportionately hurts poor people and people of color, and alternatives aren’t accessible to those groups,” he said.

He said that in the past, the group had focused its rhetoric on values: commitment to “good, clean, and fair food,” for example. From now on, it would emphasize rights. “Access to good, clean, and fair food is not a privilege,” he declared. “It’s a right, and we have to make that clear.” That message, he insisted, was the most important one that delegates could bring back to their communities.

He also vowed that Slow Food USA would work to avoid doing something it has been accused of doing in the past: suck the air out the sustainable-food movement by hoarding resources and media attention at the expense of social-justice activists.

As if to demonstrate Viertel’s vision, an impressive array of U.S. farmers and food-justice activists took the floor. Representatives of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers gave a brief, hard-hitting take on the dire state of labor conditions in industrial-vegetable farm fields (and increasingly, large-scale organic fields). Ian Marvy, founder and executive director of Added Value (here’s a feature I did on them a couple of years ago), also spoke inspiringly. His group operates a variety of youth-oriented food programs in a Brooklyn neighborhood whose median wage lies well below the poverty line, including a CSA and farmers market fed by a three-acre neighborhood farm.

But Will Allen and his daughter Erika of Growing Power stole the show. Growing Power brings healthy food, much of it grown on inner-city farms and garden plots, into low-income neighborhoods in Chicago and Milwaukee. The Allens are widely hailed for their highly productive farming techniques, which range from worm-based composting to aquaculture, as well as for creating skilled, responsible jobs for inner-city youth. Still basking in the glow of his recently announced MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, Will Allen pointed out that economic collapse in inner-city areas had left behind food deserts and exposed people “to the worst kind of food possible and a level of everyday violence that few of you have ever experienced.”

Joining the effort to rebuild healthy food economies in such areas is a responsibility for more-privileged people, he said. He added: “I’m glad to see that Slow Food is beginning to accept that responsibility.”

Erika Allen wrapped up with a challenge: “How are you fighting racism in your food community?”

–Photo and editorial courtesy of The Grist

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