Slow Food, Real People

It rained over the weekend, or I would have attempted to get some veggies into the dirt in my backyard. I've been procrastinating -- even Michelle Obama beat me to it this year! I finally got a chance to watch the 60 minutes piece from last week featuring Alice Waters and the Slow Food Movement. While I'm sure Waters deserves all the credit she gets for moving sustainable food from the fringes to at least the mainstream media, a slow burn was growing in me as I watched the piece.

What irks me is the mindless association of fresh, local, sustainable food with the notion of being elitist. Yes, I want to cheer when I hear Waters say: "I feel that good food should be a right and not a privilege and it needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. And everybody deserves this food. And that's not elitist." Absolutely. Amen and amen.

But then she goes on to purchase grapes for $4 a pound and cook Stahl a lovely breakfast that no one that has to get children to school or themselves to work could afford to labor over for so long (not to mention the gazillion-dollar kitchen in which it was cooked). And like a compliant dope, Stahl asks "probing" questions about whether schools can afford to teach kids to grow and cook their own food. As opposed to training them to take multiple-choice tests till the cows come home? As opposed to feeding them fast food and candy bars in the cafeteria? But the whole exercise demonstrates nothing better than the inability of the major media outlets to hold an intelligent converstation. If Stahl had been doing her job, she might have left Waters in her dream world and asked some of the other folks shopping at the Farmer's Market how they balance their food budgets and juggle dinner prep. Here's a clue -- look for the women with kids grabbing samples off the tables.

What the sustainable food movement needs is not a gourmet chef explaining how to roast an egg over an open fire, but a real Mom explaining how fresh and local can be affordable, and how real food can make its way to the table via a few simple techniques before the kids melt down. Thanks, Alice Waters for launching the food revolution. But please, go back to your kitchen, and let some regular folks take it from here.