Meat + Poultry - July 2005 - 73

SUSTAINABILIT Y

CATCHING
UP WITH

SLOW FOOD
Come back to the table.
That's the essential message of
the Slow Food movement. It started
in Italy in 1989, when a McDonald's
opened in Rome, deeply offending a
man named Carlos Petrini. He began
the Slow Food movement to oppose
the standardization of taste that
McDonald's represented and to
promote gastronomic culture, develop taste education, conserve agricultural biodiversity and protect the
growing and preparation of traditional foods.
Sara Firebaugh, assistant director of Slow Food USA, says that in
this country, Slow Food has two main
focuses. One is to preserve biodiversity in food. For example, the organization has worked with producers
growing heritage turkeys; those populations have increased as a
result, as has their marketability. It's
not only about the food itself,
though. "We also want to protect
cultures and peoples that surround
the foods," Firebaugh says.
The second thrust is taste education, which they pursue through
programs such as Slow Food in
Schools, growing school gardens and
offering cooking classes. "The goal
is to teach sustainability, taste,
health, the importance of eating
fresh, local food," Firebaugh says.

12 FSI

FOOD SYSTEMS

ınsıder

JULY 2005

GREG POSCHMAN

Only in Italy,
its birthplace, is the
Slow Food movement
more popular than
it is in the U.S.

Three friends pitch in at an Aspen Weed 'n' Feed. Community-supported
agriculture is one way Slow Food connects consumers with producers.
Education, not sales
Education is the focus of Slow Food,
which is a non-profit organization.
"We are not in the business of selling
food, but of promoting and protecting food producers," Firebaugh says.
"We let food producers make those
selling connections."
But having a relationship with
Slow Food does bring visibility to
their products, says Carol Mueller,
director of marketing and culinary
sales at Prairie Grove Farms in
Dekalb, Ill., where pork is produced
with no antibiotics or artificial
growth stimulants. "Slow Food has
the same mission we do. It's more of
a philosophy and a belief." They
want to be able to get these products into consumers' hands or give
them the knowledge that these
products exist.
Slow Food has several mechanisms for promoting biodiversity in
foods, the most well-known being
the Ark of Taste, a catalog of endan-

gered foods and methods of preparation. A recent addition to the Slow
Food movement, held for the first
time in October 2004, is the Terra
Madre. Five-thousand artisans and
sustainable farmers came together in
Turin, Italy, to begin building a network to support sustainable growers.
Five hundred participants were from
the United States.
"Huge agribusiness folks have
all sorts of structures underlying
them to support them," says Kurt
Michael Friese, chef and director of
Slow Food Iowa. "This is an attempt
to build our own global network."

Sustainability matters
Promoting regional, local food
producers also comes under the
biodiversity area for Slow Food USA.
Organic may be part of that, but not
necessarily. "Sustainability is a lot
closer to what we advocate," Firebaugh says. Local and traceable are
also important words, and knowing

Meat + Poultry - July 2005

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