Politics vs. "Good Food" :: On How Politics is Part of Slow Food, Better & Worse

Over the weekend, it was dropped that Josh Viertel, the leader of Slow Food USA, was stepping down after three-odd years in his leadership position. While the release from the organization lists an amicable split, those of us watching the organization the last several years have noted in recent months the very public contention between members of the organization who have been involved with SFUSA since its inception, and their public disagreement with Mr. Viertel's methods, focus on food justice issues, and accusations of mismanagement from the Brooklyn-based national office. Issues of mismanagement (and the oddball accusations about boastful twitter numbers) aside, what has been particularly noted is the notion that Slow Food USA, under Mr. Viertel's leadership, has become a political organization.

For a bit of historical background: Slow Food International, which began in Italy, was started by a group of Italian Communist Party members dissatisfied with the fact that the national party was not particularly keen on convivial and tasty eating (something that stood in the face of Italian culture, and by their minds, a little too close to institutionally minded capitalism for their liking). The group itself culminated when McDonald's attempted to open its first location right in front of the Spanish Steps in Rome; the group organized a protest out front, using traditional Roman and Tuscan foods & ingredients, prepared by people whose kitchens were around the Steps, supplying free food and conversation to hundreds of passers by and participants. The organization has ben a combination of advocacy organization, educator, and marketing board, doing everything from promoting specific foods and regional tastes (Ark of Taste), advocating against and educating citizens about GMO's and corporate consolidation of agriculture, and using its local chapters to organize around foodstuffs particular to their foodshed and bringing those together (Tierra Madre). Chapters now exist across the world, with the American version of the organization having come to fruition in 2000, now having over 250,000 members in the United States and 255 active chapters across the country. 

To be clear, there's always been a distinction between the US and the European chapters of Slow Food; Italy, France, Spain all have government bodies dedicated to local food manufacture and methodology regulation, as well as bodies within the European Union that also document, regulate, and promote specific regional and local food products (as imperfect as they might be). The AOC system, the DOCG system, and the European Protected Designation of Origin registries all interact and precipitate a food culture that promotes regional and local food products. In France especially, the notion of the paysan is still a strong cultural norm that, if not outright glorifying the work of farmers, pays respect to it. Slow Food in these countries can be simply a promoting agency because of the fact that political institutions support still-existing cultural foodways. 

In the United States, no such equivalent exists. While the EU is not immune to issues of agricultural consolidation or the push of globalized food procurement, cultural foodways and the types of producers who support them have never had a long lineage in the United States. Those that have, over the course of the last 100 years, have been steadily undermined by national-level agricultural policy, regulations that give nods to larger-scale production models, and food & nutrition strategies that favor the development of calories or completely nonsensical qualitative standards over biodiversity, ecological or nutritive benefit, or cultural affinity. The regulatory environment as well as the supply chain are rigged against the type of food systems that allow for regional and local production to occur in a sustainable matter, be that economically, socially, or ecologically. And in most cases, up until very recently, the American public neither cared, nor gave much concern for those issues. 

It is in this case that the argument about the "politics" of Slow Food become somewhat pernicious, because in order to do the work that makes "good food", there has to be an element of politics, at least in the present. The concept of "voting with your dollar" falls short, because due to the expectations of consumers, the lacking education in the market, and the behind-the-scenes sorts of structural and institutional shortfalls that greet "good food", simply buying it does little for those who have little money to begin with. And as with paysans, most food culture that exists doesn't come from people with money -- it's been borne out of and created by necessity, geographic context, and individual agency. Slow Food International, and specifically its European counterparts, has had the luxury of variously supportive organizations and institutions that have facilitated and assisted its mission of bringing "the pleasures of food with the commitment to the environment and community" together; the US has no such institutions or advantages, and over the last 60 years specifically, an aggressive degradation of the institutional memory of the food cultures it does possess. 

By simple virtue of history, SFUSA was inevitably going to be a different organization, and hopefully, in time, it can be simply an organization dedicated to "just good food". But until such a time as the structural and institutional issues that suppress everyone in the food chain -- from farmers to eaters, processors and everyone in-between -- are rectified, SFUSA is better for being an advocacy organization that promotes good food, for everyone, not just those with the ability to afford the access to it*.

*A note: some have claimed this issue of food justice isn't workable with the type of promotion SFUSA was doing before, re: Ark of Taste. I call foul on these points. The point is that there are a multiplicity of ways that SFUSA can be involved with projects of food justice, biodiversity, and promoting economic viability and sustainability in agriculture. I think farmers can be paid a fair wage for producing spectacular, culturally-specific crops; I also think that lower-income communities should have a connection with them, either through growing it themselves, or initiatives that link the two. These are not incongruous goals, and neither prevents the enjoyment of good food. SFUSA, pushing forward, I hope to be able to do this, and empowering local chapters to be able to pursue the routes best for their particular places and memberships.