slow food
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Day two from the foodie blowout in Turin, Italy
Turin, Italy — Yesterday I left off at the Presidia section of the Salone del Gusto, having met up with my friend the fermentation scholar and teacher Sandor Katz, and his friend the food scholar Jeffrey Roberts, author of The Atlas of American Artisinal Cheese. By that point, I was overwhelmed by the variety on […]
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Day one at the foodie blowout in Italy
Turin, Italy — On the one hand, I’m exhausted and jetlagged after a day of meeting people, listening to speeches, walking the streets of Turin, and noshing on lots of cured meat, cheese, olives, and other pungent goodies. On the other hand, I’m sipping a glass of Barolo — a celebrated red wine named after […]
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I’ll be reporting from Slow Food’s Terra Madre conference in Turin, Italy
Yes, it’s a tough job, etc., etc. For the next week, starting Wednesday, I’ll be reporting from the ground in Turin, Italy, covering Slow Food’s biennial Terra Madre/Salone del Gusto event. Food activists and artisans from around the world will be there. It’s my first Terra Madre, so I don’t have a clear idea of […]
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Future of Food director on ‘making soil sexy’
Filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia burst onto the sustainable-food scene with her 2004 documentary the Future of Food, a biting, well-researched indictment of Monsanto and genetically modified food. I caught up with her at Slow Food Nation to discuss her current project, a documentary about a topic dear to my heart: soil.
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Why climate change may have more to do with your shopping cart than your car
Anna Lappé might be called a green-diaper baby. Her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, brought out the seminal Diet for a Small Planet back in 1971, and has been agitating forcefully for a just, sustainable food system ever since. Her father, the toxicologist Marc Lappé, was an early, important, and persistent critic of the agrichemical industry. […]
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The GMO industry has been scraping by on bad science
In 2002, a most unlikely book came out: an oversized, lushly produced, coffee-table tome on the ills of mass-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture. Grandly titled Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, the book contained stark photos of highly mechanized, monocrop farming, along with pungent, probing essays by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and other seminal thinkers of […]
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Fast Food Nation author says the sustainable food movement should consider labor
Few Grist readers need an introduction to Eric Schlosser. His 2001 book, Fast Food Nation, helped galvanize interest in the politics and ecology of food production. Since that time, he’s used his increasingly high profile to illuminate one of the most shadowy crannies of the food system — working conditions in the vast monocropped fields […]
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Stuffed and Starved author on the myth of consumer choice
Raj Patel, author of the searing book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, is one of the most trenchant critics of industrial food. According to Patel, one billion people in the world don’t have enough to eat, while another billion suffer from the consequences of too many low-quality calories. The […]
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Slow Food Nation was magnificent in many ways, but overshot its mandate
Photo: karmacamilleeon Slow Food Nation — that grand, sprawling culinary event that seemed to permeate San Francisco over Labor Day weekend — has passed. Now we can ask: What was it? A brazen display of foodie elitism, as some critics charge? A transformative moment in an ongoing effort to overthrow the industrial food system, as […]
