Straddling dual locations at Fort Mason and Civic Center over Labor Day weekend, Slow Food Nation promises to turn San Francisco into America’s shining city on a hill for locavores and gastronomes, lovers of bandage-wrapped cheddar and Monterey sardines. But look beyond the pristine edibles, and the sprawling event also promises to crystallize the tensions within the U.S. Slow Food movement itself. The festival’s geographic dichotomy is a telling sign of a serious split personality. Even as the 50,000 expected attendees dig into the tastiest street snacks ever to scent the air of a big American summer fest, Slow Food Nation has all the signs of being a two-faced colossus.

Fort Mason houses the festival’s 15-course tasting menu. For the $65 regular admission, the Taste Pavilions offer a walk through a rare­fied artisanal foodscape. Individual pavilions present goodies like olive oil, chocolate, and charcuterie, all curated by a pantheon of the Bay Area’s food elite, such as Cowgirl Creamery’s Sue Conley and Peggy Smith.

Across town at Civic Center—free for the strolling—the vibe skews street-fair populist, with a glorified farmers’ market and Slow on the Go, a multi-culti food court hawking Mexican masa snacks and Chinese hand-pulled noodles. Practically smack up against city hall, the centerpiece Victory Garden is an explicit link between the edible and the political—the same link fleshed out in the speaker series Food for Thought, which features marquee thinkers like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, among others.

The paradox of Slow Food lies somewhere between the Taste Pavilions’ high-ticket gastronomists swooning over bloomy-rind triple-crèmes, and the Victory Garden firebrands pushing for organic 2 percent milk for the masses. Stung by accusations of offering little more than epicurean thrills for the well fed, the organization is seeking new relevance at a time when the politics of the plate have moved center table. “Everyone else is organizing to try and save the world,” says the festival’s executive director, Anya Fernald, “but we’ve just been sitting around, talking about the cheese course.”

Food-policy concerns have reached critical mass, sparked by global food shortages, recent memories of the controversial Farm Bill passed by Congress in May, and even the steady proliferation of grade school garden-to-table initiatives like Alice Waters’ 14-year-old Edible Schoolyard. The zeitgeist is swirling, and organizers at the highest level of Slow Food Nation have sensed a whiff of opportunity. They have persuaded activists in urban agriculture, sustainable food systems, and other progressive movements—groups normally turned off by their perception of Slow Food members as rich whites jostling for $3 peaches at the Ferry Building—to pitch in for Slow Food Nation.

These activists are lending their ideas, their muscle, and their very credibility to the event. As such, Fernald and others think San Francisco’s four-day food fest just might be the national organization’s chance to wash off the stain of elitism and reveal a new and improved Slow Food: an agent of serious change, pushing policies that favor small farmers, regional production, saving the environment, and access for all—goals that had been trampled too often in the rush for the heirloom-tomato cart.

But before Slow Food could rise up and reclaim its soul, festival organizers first had to figure out how to hoist a behemoth food fest to its feet.

In May 2007, over a lunch of asparagus tarts at Greens restaurant, the press had its first exhilarating taste of Slow Food Nation. The lunch marked the starting line for a frantic year of planning and fundraising for an expo and conference devoted to Slow Food, slated for early May 2008. It was a project Alice Waters had lashed her reputation to, after years of talk. San Francisco was there to lend its blessing in the form of Gavin Newsom, nearing reelection and basking in the reflected glory of a festival with world-class sizzle. Even the state’s chief of protocol, Charlotte Shultz, showed up in a scratchy-looking apple-green suit to extend an official welcome to the star guest: the Slow Food movement’s Italian founder, Carlo Petrini.

Whiskery and clad in tweed, the guest of honor spoke smilingly (with Slow Food USA’s national director, Erika Lesser, as translator) of brotherhood and the French Revolution. Then, in a quiet voice that seemed at odds with the sheer scale of what she described, Waters ticked off some of the plans in progress for a festival centered at Fort Mason, with fingers stretching out across the city and beyond. They included a 24/7 conceptual restaurant in the Mission, a Slow boat trolling the coast, and a wholesale sustainable farmers’ market—permanent, if Waters could wrangle it—that would take over a city pier.

In the months to come, some organizers at the local level privately braced themselves for a train wreck. Local Slow Food chapter leaders were used to organizing salumi tastings, not something on this scale. “Everybody was throwing out ideas that would take years to realize,” said one member present at an early brainstorming session, who asked not to be named for fear of backlash. “I thought, ‘How are you going to do that between now and May?’”

Logistics weren’t the only issue that would prove troubling that spring. While in town, Petrini found himself at the center of a prickly controversy that cast him as a critic of some of the very producers who’d taken his Slow Food message to heart. It was as if Petrini had taken one long, horrified look at the Ferry Building and lobbed the equivalent of the single most toxic word in the Slow Food lexicon: elitist.

In addition to launching Slow Food Nation, Petrini was here to plug the English translation of his book of essays and diary entries, also titled Slow Food Nation. CUESA (the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, the nonprofit manager of the Ferry Building’s farmers’ markets and producer of its educational programs)opened its arms to Petrini for a book signing at the Saturday market. But at least one vendor actually bothered to read Petrini’s book. The chapter he photocopied for circulation to his market mates, “Green California,” sparked a spasm of outrage.

Petrini’s diary entry sprays acid on the market. He describes his first Dantelike descent into the Saturday throng in 2003, with Waters as guide, through a hell ring of glamorous poseurs, “most of whom seemed to be actresses whose social status was pretty clear: either wealthy or very wealthy.” He saves his heftiest scorn for a few slacker sellers, “amiable ex-hippies and young dropouts turned farmers.” One grower gouges the rich buyers bagging up his squashes so he can “spend hours surfing on the beach.” Petrini hints at the invisible underclass of farm laborers who toil to pick this high-priced swag for their dude masters, and who themselves are forced to eat at fast-food joints. It’s a portrait of a place that had perverted the all-inclusive, worker-centric goals of the organization Petrini helped found 20 years earlier in Bra, a town in northwest Italy with the size and humble vibe of Benicia.

The activist’s impetus back in 1986 was when he and his allies in Arcigola—an intellectual commune devoted to preserving the cheap, simple food and wines of Italy as an act of political resistance—received word that McDonald’s was planning to open at the base of the Spanish Steps in Rome. They helped organize a protest, taking a radical (and probably uniquely Italian) approach: They hosted a potluck, setting up long tables in the Piazza di Spagna. Nonnas and others brought their favorite, most culturally resonant dishes, creating a kind of edible roster of traditions threatened with extinction by the McPink, a sandwich of Spamlike processed meat McDonald’s had unleashed on Italy.

Instead of lobbing Molotov cocktails, protestors flicked tubes of penne. They chanted, “We don’t want fast food, we want slow food!” In the end, McDonald’s still opened (though protestors succeeded in nixing the actual golden arches). But pasta wasn’t the only thing that stuck—Petrini had the makings of a movement.

He collaborated on a manifesto damning the “fast life” of uprooted traditions, later adopting a swirly-shelled snail as mascot. He blasted the shrink-wrapped industrial system of modern capitalism and called his resistance “eco-gastronomy,” urging eaters to think of themselves as “co-producers,” along with farmers and artisans like parmesan makers. He also floated the proposition that any meal worth eating is one that’s “good, clean, and fair”—good as in delicious, clean as in environmentally sustainable, and fair as in contributing to equitable social ends. He proposed paying farmers and their workers a living wage, supporting community merchants, and ensuring access to decent food for everyone. As manifestos go, it combined boilerplate material from Italy’s communist brain trust of the 1970s with the crucial addition of an idea that red lefties had always spurned as a bourgeois corruption: the importance of gastronomic pleasure.

When Petrini indulged a bit of carica­­­­­­ture in his book, however—thereby mak­ing a point about the Bay Area’s fetishizing of good and clean at the expense of fair—vendors like Steve Sando didn’t appreciate the lesson, even from the master. Sando owns Rancho Gordo, which sells dried heirloom beans, chilies, and spices that are a fixture at Bay Area markets. He’s a member of Napa’s Slow Food chapter and even attended the international organization’s Terra Madre conference in Italy in 2004. He’s still shocked that CUESA approved the book signing in the first place.

Dave Stockdale, CUESA’s executive director, has referred to the incident as Petrinigate. These days, he’d rather not talk about it. When it was happening, Stockdale canceled the book signing and arranged a calm-the-waters meeting with Petrini, Sando, and other sellers.

Sando thinks the meeting smoothed nothing—he walked out before it ended. It irked him that instead of voicing solidarity with vendors and farmers working brutal hours for less than hefty profits, Petrini splashed them with a contempt that Sando thinks would be better deployed against a corporation from the dark side. “He should be sitting across a table from Monsanto,” Sando says.

The whole incident left Sando thinking in ecclesiastical terms, in which Petrini is the pope and the American Slow Food movement stands in for the U.S. Catholic church, a body with a fierce streak of independence. By Sando’s reckoning, the pope can lay down edicts, but the homegrown faithful will end up finding their own way to salvation. The lesson of Petrinigate, then, was this: Although the patriarch’s credo was still powerful, it was up to the American movement to find its own way into the notion of fair.

At the time, Erika Lesser tried to slam the door on Petrinigate by blaming a botched translation, and the discombobulated planning for the expo stumbled forward. But the episode revealed Slow Food’s uncomfortable fit in the Bay Area and the country at large. How should a movement that coalesced in a Roman piazza survive its jump to the States with its original manifesto intact? Throughout the run-up to the Labor Day weekend event, debate has simmered.

Katrina Heron, chair of Slow Food Nation’s governing board, sees cultural disconnect as inevitable. “Slow Food was an Italian movement that spoke to every Italian, no matter the socioeconomic level,” she says, “and then it came to America with the best intentions, but it’s not consistent with American culture. In this country, it was taken up by people who had a lot of wonderful feelings about food, probably related to their own cultural aspirations.” In a consumerist society, these aspirations force us all to decide whether we’re Prada people or Burberry people, and, in that spirit, wheeling out a $100 bottle of boutique cabernet at a dinner party becomes a declaration of social identity, not solidarity with the winemaker and his itinerant pickers—a fact that makes Petrini’s concept of co-producer about as abstract as a snapshot of life in some postapocalyptic utopia. Though nothing more than a hunk of cured pork fat, a slab of lardo can probably never seem as populist, or as inherently democratic, as a pick from the Dollar Menu.

Still, Heron thinks that American eco-gastronomy is merely in the early stages of finding itself, like an alternately hysterical and peevish teenager. Sustainability champion Michael Pollan agrees—we should just give Slow Food plenty of time to chill. “Talk to me in 20 years,” he says. “If it still seems elitist then, the movement’s in trouble.”

America’s first taste of Slow Food didn’t exactly help. Earlier in this decade, the phenomenon Petrini wrought simmered its way into our consciousness via glossy coverage like Atlantic Monthly senior editor Corby Kummer’s The Pleasures of Slow Food. Despite Kummer’s best intentions, his book hypes the gourmet lifestyle: a world of luscious artisanal goodies and time-intensive recipes culled from restaurant chefs, with an aura of reverence for the rarefied. Though it contains a brawny foreword by Schlosser and a meticulous history of Petrini’s movement, Kummer tempers any political critique with a soft-focus vision of what Slow Food might look like in a romanticized Italy. Paul Bertolli’s menu of veal carpaccio with aged balsamico and spelt tagliatelle looks gorgeous but doesn’t suggest easy adoption, as Slow meatloaf might have. It all seems tailored for the two audiences that Petrini himself attributed to the Ferry Building: the wealthy and the very wealthy.

Though talking heads inside—and in favor of—the organization have grown tired of the knee-jerk charge of elitism, a nuanced critic like Raj Patel, a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, is hard to ignore. As he describes in his book Stuffed and Starved, Slow Food in the States has chosen mostly to ignore the social-justice component of Petrini’s message, essentially becoming an exclusive dining club—at the same time protesting that it’s anything but. High-profile events like the Golden Glass (an annual wine-tasting event in San Fran­cisco that’s an important fundraiser for the city’s 700-­member Slow Food convivium, or chapter) only reinforce the notion of an organization content to speak the language of high-ticket pursuits. At the very least, the event’s organizers seem deaf to the irony of floating the word golden to promote a group sensitive to the charge that it exists primarily for the gilded class. The fundraiser might as well be called the Jewel-Encrusted Chalice.

“It’s all well and good to have heirloom tomatoes and the finest olive oil, and I think these are amazing things,” Patel says. “The challenge is for everyone to be able to eat them—and that means making sure people have a living wage to be able to afford decent food in the first place.” In the U.S., Australia, and other places, he adds, the movement emphasizes high gastronomy, not fairness, access, and equality.

“If Slow Food wants to turn itself into a gastronomic museum, that’s a very different project,” says Patel, referring to the Ark of Taste, Slow Food’s species-preservation initiative, which seeks to keep alive foods at risk of virtual extinction. American heritage turkey breeds like the Narragansett and the Bourbon Red are two foods enjoying a successful revival of commercial interest, thanks to Slow Food’s efforts to enlist chefs and food journalists in the cause. Pollan is the most prominent among them. “Slow Food is demonstrating how global trade and mass communication can be turned into powerful tools for rescuing cultural and biological diversity,” he wrote in Mother Jones in 2003. Nothing wrong with that, says Patel, but connecting the American movement with Slow Food’s ori­ginal impetus in radical social equality could make the mission of walking turkeys back from the brink seem, by comparison, like a parade of pets.

It’s not just that poor families are priced out of the occasional restaurant splurge. It’s also that quotidian groceries are held out as eco-gastronomic exemplars of good and clean. Patel recently took a documentary film crew to the Ferry Building. He wanted to see what he could buy for $21, the weekly allowance for someone on welfare. “We man­aged to get six eggs, a loaf of bread, a bit of cheese, and six tomatoes, and that was it,” he says.

From a high-gastronomy point of view, Patel’s haul might have made a stunning Italian bread–and-tomato soup, with those eggs gently poached, of course. But, with one week’s allotment already spent, that would leave 83 more meals to cook before the EBT card’s balance was replenished the next month.

In any case, Petrini’s original Slow Food mission never included feeding the hun­gry. And a little-noticed stumble in 2005 revealed the perils of Slow Food trying to effect social change in uncharted territory, albeit one familiar to America’s tradition of philanthropy.

In October of that year, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story headlined “Slow Food to Feed Homeless,” a proposal for Slow Food to help the Next Door homeless shelter in the Tenderloin begin incorporating good, clean, and fair foods into its menu. The shelter feeds two meals a day to as many as 280 clients. It was Mayor Newsom who described the plan to the Chronicle, as an idea hatched over a lunch of lamb and champagne gran­ita at Chez Panisse with Petrini and Waters, among others. Slow Food would “provide expertise and resources to both feed people better and teach them about eating well,” Newsom said, calling the idea “a great opportunity for Slow Food to substantively and symbolically make the case that this is not an elitist endeavor, and to fill a need.” Slow Food would be consultants, in other words, in overseeing access to decent food by some of the poorest of the city’s poor. The mayor didn’t stop at Next Door—no reason the same arrangement couldn’t also be rolled out at San Francisco General and Laguna Honda.

It never happened. Not at Next Door, not at S.F. General, not anywhere. Ken Reggio, executive director of Episcopal Community Services, which administers Next Door, said Petrini actually met with his staff. There was a lot of excitement about the idea, Reggio recalls. However, when the city (which partially funds the shelter) saw the cost of upgrading to Slow Food, it balked and the notion died. No one—not the mayor, not Slow Food at the national or local level—marshaled the resources and the will to make it happen. The San Francisco Department of Public Health did adopt a policy in 2006 to source local, healthy food for its events, and it required S.F. General and Laguna Honda to draft blueprints for incorporating sustainables.

Next Door is still waiting. “We would have loved to have had good local produce,” Reggio says, “[and] loved to have had a salad bar every day. I can tell you we’d still like to have those things.”

Funds and motivation were precisely what Slow Food Nation was also struggling with while mounting its very public statement of principles. The biggest hurdle was money: Waters and her supporters weren’t raising enough. They failed to meet an initial goal of $300,000 by June 2007, according to a prominent local Slow Food member. Last September, Waters told the New York Times’ Kim Severson that she was originally tasked with raising $5 million—a job, Severson observed, that Waters was “not great at.”

By then, even those at Slow Food USA in New York were sour on the event. They urged Waters to push the date back to, oh, maybe sometime in 2009. That’s when Heron, the former editor-in-chief of Wired and later an editor-at-large for Dwell, entered the picture. Previously, she had served as director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, the Berkeley nonprofit behind the Edible Schoolyard. Heron is a relative newcomer to Slow Food, someone steeped in its philosophy but never active at the organization level. As Slow Food goes, she’s unorthodox, breezily copping to the charge of elitism.

Come fall 2007, the woman who ignited Berkeley’s Delicious Revolution three-plus decades ago was in full freakout mode. The event’s original executive director (Eric McDougall, president of a San Fran­cisco communications agency) resigned or was axed—it’s not clear. (McDougall didn’t respond to several attempts to reach him for comment.) Waters made numerous calls to Heron with a similar message: This thing is imploding. Help.

“Raising money and trying to create change through a foundation are very hard work, and it doesn’t matter how famous the visionary at the core is,” Heron says. “I think a lot of people imagine that [with] someone like Alice Waters, anything is possible, that doors will fly open, but it’s not true. It’s grueling work. So the whole thing started going off the rails.”

Somewhat reluctantly, Heron agreed to take on the task of shouldering the lumbering expo and getting it back on track—at least enough of it to satisfy Waters’ insistence that it take place by fall 2008, a display of the sustainable food community’s power before the presidential election in November.

“We all looked at each other and said, ‘Why don’t we just do a picnic?’” Waters told Severson. Scrambling a mess of other events already committed to city calendars was no picnic for Heron. She pushed the date back from spring to Labor Day. Farmers were never happy with May in the first place, a fact that could rationalize the rescheduling—and distract from embarrassing details about tepid fundraising. “The Slow Food Nation team changed the date in response to input from farmers who were eager to show their produce at its peak in late summer,” ran Slow Food USA’s press release.

One by one, the goodies were stripped away: the Slow boat, alfresco dinners at communal tables snaking through the city. Funding goals shrank from $5 million to a far more manageable $2 million, including ticket sales. But Heron wasn’t getting any love for her event-editing skills. “People at Slow Food USA—lots of people within our network of the Chez Panisse Foundation—were angry that this thing had failed,” she says. Heron took charge of the event’s governing board, and everybody was asked to resign. She and Waters set about finding a new executive director.

In the end, they may have scored the ideal candidate: a 33-year-old who favors hoop earrings and black leather boots, someone who had never spearheaded anything bigger than an educational seminar. In the wake of plans that proved too grandiose to fund, Slow Food Nation now had a director who understood Slow Food’s excesses and recognized how a new focus on the political might blunt them.

Born to American parents who escaped to a German farm in the 1960s, Anya Fernald likes to say that raw milk runs through her veins. She’s only half joking. After college in the States, she studied cheesemaking in the Mediterranean, slogging through dairies in Morocco and Tunisia before landing an EU-funded nonprofit gig looking at how to save Sicilian foodways. That led to a job in Bra with Slow Food; she visited reindeer ranchers in Lapland and women in Bosnia who preserve plums. Then Fernald moved to California to direct outreach for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, helping small growers enter the vast distribution stream that supplies insti­tutions like Kaiser Permanente. Such work wasn’t sexy, but those sustained pushes yield slight shifts in a system weighted in favor of corporate megagrowers.

These days, Fernald is aware of how much power she wields, even as the sheer scale of it scares her. “I’ve seen Slow Food do amazing things in food-insecure areas of the world,” she says. “I thought, ‘This could become an anchor for this movement to make bigger political change.’” In other words, a successful festival could begin to change perceptions of Slow Food USA as an organization of fancy-food aficionados—Fernald calls them “the wine-and-dining crowd”—to one of activists engaged at the policy level. That probably doesn’t mean converting Slow Food’s gastronomes into hell-raisers so much as it means bringing the hell-raisers to Slow Food. In fact, says Fernald, that will be one measure of the festival’s effectiveness.

“Success is if we get 10, 15, 20 commu­nity organizations involved,” she says. “Can we get the health clinics? And groups working on housing, can we get them? The feedback I get from some of the groups is, ‘Oh, we don’t do food. We’re not part of the Slow Food movement.’ But looking at what needs to change, there needs to be a much broader shift around food policy. It’s true that food isn’t always seen as being integral in community health and outreach. That’s the shift that we want to see happen.”

To do that, the festival needed a new geographic center, ideally one with plenty of sym­bolism. That meant moving its central location from the more exclusive Fort Mason (tricky to reach by public transit) to the wide-open and notoriously pee-stained Civic Center.

“The symbolic heart and center of the festival is in the Victory Garden,” asserts Katrina Heron. There, she says, on a former strip of patchy lawn, Slow Food can tell the city’s powerful that some among us have zero access to a decent meal. The thing is, despite Waters’ ability to realize an Edible Schoolyard–like farm plot on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in 2005, a Civic Center vegetable garden was never part of Slow Food Nation’s plans in the first place. But as Heron and Fernald were whit­tling down the festival into something manageable, the seed of the symbol they needed was already being planted.

Long before she heard of Slow Food Nation, artist Amy Franceschini launched a campaign to revive the city’s World War II–era victory gardens as a credo of faith in urban agriculture. “I found an image of the one in Civic Center in the ’40s,” says Franceschini, an assistant professor at USF and the founder of the art collec­tive Future­farmers. “I blew it up into a huge image and said, ‘We need to have this in front of city hall, to embellish and embrace a new San Francisco agricultural program.’”

It worked—sort of. In 2007, with support from city supervisor Aaron Peskin, Franceschini was awarded a $60,000 grant for a yearlong program to plant demonstration gardens in 15 backyards around San Francisco, intended to show low- and middle income residents how to start growing some of their own food. Alas, the city’s blessing for the centerpiece Civic Center Victory Garden wasn’t forthcoming—not until Franceschini joined forces with landscape designer John Bela.

Bela cofounded the art collective REBAR, which leads commando exer­cises in reclaiming public commons, like temporarily turning parking spaces into mini-parks, complete with roll-up sod and trees. It was Bela—enlisted by fest­ival organizers to design the doomed alfresco dining spaces—who had the idea to match Franceschini with Slow Food, with its elite connections stretching all the way to the mayor.

Franceschini was initially reluctant to throw her lot in with Slow Food. “They’re presenting food that not everyone can afford, a type of food that’s not that available,” she says. Signing over her vision of self-sufficiency for the city’s food-insecure to become a demonstration potagerie for the well-off to traipse through seemed at first like an obvious deal-breaker. But she credits the mayor’s office, and especially Newsom’s senior adviser Michael Farrah, for grasping both the practical and symbolic value of the project. “They’re challenging Slow Food Nation to get real,” she says.

As an added bonus, Franceschini’s victory-garden campaign allows her to get real before many thousands of festivalgoers. Who knows—some freshly enlightened Chez Panisse regular just might whip out his checkbook to fund Franceschini’s project beyond its scheduled kill date.

Willow Rosenthal, another activist involved with the Victory Garden, acknowledges that Slow Food may have kept itself at arm’s length from in-the-trenches organizations like hers, but she’s ready to forgive that distancing. Rosenthal is the founding director of City Slicker Farms, a West Oakland nonprofit that operates urban gardens to promote food security in one of the Bay Area’s poorest areas. She welcomes the chance to rub elbows with a whole new audience of potential supporters. “It’s been difficult to connect to the more affluent people in the movement,” she says. “All of us here said, ‘Hey, we want to be a part of Slow Food Nation and help them remember there are other people who need Slow Food, too.’” Besides, she adds, “I feel like a lot of times, the best new ideas come in from an elite.”

Michael Pollan couldn’t agree more. “There’s real strength in an organization that cares about food justice and has members in the food elite,” he says. “I think there’s great potential for alliances. I just hope the usual left-wing parochialism doesn’t get in the way.”

Taking a cue, perhaps, from the festival’s momentum, Slow Food’s national body shows every sign of affirming its enthusiasm for social justice. On August 28, the day before Slow Food Nation begins, a congress of Slow Food USA’s 200 chapter leaders will meet in San Francisco to vote on the organization’s five-year strategic plan. An April draft shows an organization ready to flex the muscle of its 16,000-strong membership. It states, “Slow Food USA’s primary purpose for the next five years is to stimulate and lead a movement that is changing the food system in the United States.” Says Lesser, “This is a new level of engagement on policy. The discussion of food and policy is at a tipping point right now.”

From October to December 2007, Allison Hayes-Conroy and her twin sister, Jes­sica, poked around in what Allison calls the Berkeley food fog. A graduate student at Clark University in Massachusetts, Hayes-Conroy was doing field research for her doctoral thesis on political geography. The idea was to use Slow Food members in the East Bay and Nova Scotia as case studies to understand how people in vastly different regions become inspired to join Slow Food. The studies also wrestled with what Hayes-Conroy calls “political foodism,” or the ways in which people address social and environmental problems with decisions they make about food. Food fog is Hayes-Conroy’s nickname for total immersion, an obsessiveness with food and eating—including the Slow Food movement—that she found had a particularly strong grip in Berkeley.

The graduate student made a point of interviewing a diverse group: Asians, whites, Latinos, African Americans, well-heeled hill dwellers, and those compara­tively less well off in the flatlands. Though the interviewees’ perceptions of Slow Food members skewed Caucasian and moneyed, Hayes-Conroy discovered that those who considered themselves priced out of the movement still felt admiration for it, not resentment. “Despite all these things in the news about Slow Food being quite elite and quite white,” Hayes-Conroy says, “it still seems to inspire a lot of people. I was expecting more animosity, and I didn’t really find that much.” This response suggests that Slow Food and its powerful political critique, grounded in pleasure, could have legs far beyond the narrow movement.

“Some of them said, ‘Slow Food isn’t reaching out to my crowd,’” Hayes-Conroy says, “but at the same time, they’re glad that Slow Food exists and is trying to change things, so they said, ‘I can take these ideas and go from there.’” This American movement may be ready to transcend its own dogmas and limitations.

With Slow Food Nation dangling the prom­ise of a new start—a narrative roughed out in a July New York Times article—Americans in the movement have inched away from Petrini and the dynamics of an international organization whose spirit has been lost in translation. At the same time, those at the highest levels of the organization in the U.S. are seeking a revival of its founder’s original radical impetus, a message they hope to shape further before next year’s second festival in San Francisco. Only a truly American incarnation of Slow Food can take the country where it has been reluctant to tread since the death of family farming: to again democratize a type of pleasure as basic as selecting a fragrant, jewel-like heirloom peach or a verdant bunch of mustard greens. That’s scary for a society that takes comfort in the sight of its politicians affirming their populism, burger in hand, hunched over a plastic tray in a fast food restaurant. Credit the sub­versive genius of projects like the Edible Schoolyard: In a world where cheap industrial food is not going away any­time soon, they plant the seeds of honest taste memories in every child, regardless of background.

It was a promising start for Slow Food Nation to not just court but actually listen to the activists it enlisted to lend the event a tang of legitimacy. It may also find new power in assert­­ing that the simple contents of an ordinary shopping cart can themselves be precious, rather than contributing to the consumerist canard that value lies solely in the precious. Now, the organization must convince not only the attendees of Slow Food Nation, but the entire nation, of something it has always known: Yes, the pursuit of happiness can start with carpaccio, but also with a carrot. Then they have to figure out how the hell to make sure everyone—including a family on welfare—can afford a bunch that’s both lovely and locally grown. Slow Food Nation’s slogan is “come to the table,” but the enduring legacy of the festival might be to show that leaving the table to work for—and with—the people who need Slow Food most is the only way to get the American food system anywhere close to fair.

---

JOHN BIRDSALL is an Oakland-based freelance writer, restaurant critic, and former chef.