Slow Food is for Life, Not Just for Labor Day

A day in the life of a non-conformist Slow Food kinda girl...
Featuring Alemany Farm
An Urban, Organic, Community Farm in San Francisco
One Slow Food Saturday For Me, One Slow Read For You
A newly planted Bean Bed at Alemany Farm (iphone photograph)
I had a wonderful and productive Sam-style "Slow Food Saturday". After waking up at around 7AM, I made some shopping lists, jumped on my bicycle and headed towards the Farmers' Market. Once there I was pleased to find it relatively quiet - none of the bike racks were taken and the usual crowds weren't yet thronging. I chatted with some favourite vendors and was encouraged by the 'Slow Food Fringe' contingent (deciding that's where I want in!). Fellow Brit June Taylor explained her theory: In the spirit of slow food ... it is important to show the process of making hand made foods as well as tasting them."

At the Balakian Farm stand, a couple overheard me talking about the Fatted Calf meal at Piccino and asked me about it. I enjoyed spending several minutes sharing my love of everything about those two local, slow-living food producers with the interested strangers. I hope I didn't over-gush and put them off? I had wondered if the market might be overrun with gastro-tourists, given that it is Slow Food Nation weekend in San Francisco, but the opposite seemed true. It was eerily quiet for a Summer Season Saturday and so I was extra glad that I had made the decision to support the farmers I regularly shop from on a day when much of their traffic seemed to be elsewhere.

Once home again I sprung into what Pim would call "Fast Slow Food" action, by quickly putting together some pot luck offerings. OK - perhaps not so fast, an hour soon rushed by as I covered both sweet and savoury options: A "Made Up Carrot Salad", using Mariquita Chantenay carrots, came together beautifully with some help from a Heidi Swanson recipe which suggests flash-frying carrot ribbons before adding them to a salad. Genius! In a diversion from Heidi's version, I paired my vibrant orange slivers with exquisite White Crane Springs chervil, Andante goat crottin, and a champagne vinaigrette. I toasted Lagier almonds for the salad, too, but later in my not-so-slow rush to leave on time, they somehow were forgotten and left at home.

The cookie making process was better thought out. I had remembered, the day before, to prepare some Alice Medrich 'wholewheat sable' dough and leave it overnight in the refrigerator to rest. In the morning I cut the log into cookies and baked them until just golden around the edges. Made with organic ingredients including local Full Belly Farm wholewheat flour and Straus butter, these later proved quite popular, probably only because I was one of the few people to have covered the dessert option.

Since I would be sharing my potluck at an official Slow Food event, I figured that other participants might be interested in the ingredient list for my contributions. I spent a few minutes writing them out by hand on re-used paper, including the names of any local farms where applicable. This would turn out to be a good talking point later at lunch. I stuck the labels to the glass canning jars that I was using to transport the food in, and packed them into my backpack, with ice and water, ready for the journey.

If nothing else, the Slow Food Nation [SFN] event has made me stop and think long and hard about what my personal 'slow values' are and what I could do to improve my contributions to the world by being more self sufficient? I am not perfect, and could never claim to be, but I give it my best shot most of the time, especially where food is concerned. It's a no-brainer for me to buy all of my fresh produce from local farmers' markets and I regularly cook meals up from scratch. I find the time, money and perhaps most importantly, the desire to do that. To celebrate this weekend's SFN efforts to start making people think a little differently I endeavoured to step outside of my own comfort zone a few strides and push myself to do something that was more of a challenge to me.

So I committed to riding my bike through Bayview. "Don't get shot", said Fred. The plan was to get to Alemany Farm, almost 4 miles from my house, without impacting the environment all. Using my own power. This meant riding my bike. Through Bayview. And past intimidating freeway entrances and exits. I not only survived, the journey made me feel a little more independent and strong. It is so liberating to journey under your own steam. Try it again sometime, if you haven't in a while!

I must backpedal for just a second here. I zoomed past a little piece of my slow food jigsaw puzzle for the day. I'd heard word that Mariquita were having an Emergency Tomato Day caused by a glut of the fruit at their Farm. Because my trip to Alemany meant I wouldn't be there at the allotted hour of the pick up from Piccino, I arranged with the cafe's owner to drop off the cash early in return for the flat of San Marzanos I could collect later in the day. Supporting a local farmer who has too much produce to sell and then canning it to last through the Winter months, is a pro-active and positive slow-food-style act and I was more than happy to commit to a little canning action on the very weekend dedicated to the celebration of Slow Food.

My plans to volunteer at Alemany Farm this Saturday had been made before it became an event on the Slow Food Nation calendar. I had long since come to the conclusion that I wanted to show some sort of willing to celebrate the notion of 'slow' without being part of the official Slow Food Organisation, which for several reasons unfortunately irritates me. And irritated is not a productive state of mind to be in when trying to share a positive message about the politics of food with your readership.

Slow Food Nation's admirable, ambitious goal for their Labor Weekend Extravaganza is to create an event that would catalyze a huge shift in how a wider Americans perceive and prioritize food. For me, this didn't mean gourmet tasting halls or attending lectures where the speakers find themselves preaching to the already-converted. To me it meant volunteering at a farm where, at a grass-roots level, the volunteers are already living something along the lines of the SFN mission statement every day: Alemany Farm

Alemany Farm empowers San Francisco residents to grow their own food, and through that process encourages people to become more engaged with their communities. They grow organic food and green jobs for low-income communities, while sowing the seeds for economic and environmental justice. Read the full Alemany Farm Mission Statement here.

The Slow Journey to Alemany Farm was something from the SFN I found I could buy into wholeheartedly and I was glad that it aligned so exactly with my own personal plans for the day. I also loved the way this event truly engaged community by requiring participants to bring a pot luck lunch and encouraging them to remain and volunteer. This was an event where people could be involved with the process and move beyond consumerism.

It happens I have actually volunteered at Alemany Farm before [see my Flickr set here], and done the tour before, but I wanted to do it again, not only to see what had changed in the past year but because I had persuaded a friend from the Peninsula to come up and join me for the day. At the start I did a quick count and estimated about 40 SFN people had probably turned up, but this number may have increased due to late-comers tagging on as the tour progressed. What a great turn-out! I was so excited that all these new people would learn about the farm and then maybe go out and spread the word about its existence.

After an hour long tour around the grounds, headed by Jason Mark, the Farm's Manager, in which he shared future plans for the greenhouse, laying hens and an urban garden demonstration, we gathered some produce for a farm fresh salad and then stepped under the shade of the Farm's beautiful weeping willow to socialize and share our food. This was an eye opener. Many people had gone out of their way to make fantastic salads. One with green beans, another with a medley of melons spiked with hot pepper and a glorious panzanella beautifully presented on a pretty earthenware platter were just some of the delectables that caught the attention of my taste buds. By comparison, it would appear that Slow Food Nation still has a way to go in educating some of its participants to the values of slow food living. I hope that those who brought the shrink-wrapped slices of cheese and the bag of supermarket baby-cut carrots had their eyes opened to the notion of making better food choices by attending this communal feast.

No sooner was the breaking of bread complete, the Farm cleared out. Zap! Most of the tourists were gone. I was a little disappointed that less than a handful remained to volunteer. Their loss was my gain, however, as Penny and I set about implementing some crop rotation for one of the beds. With the help of a charming couple and their baby daughter, regular volunteers, we pulled out all the onions, weeded the bed, fertilized it, dug it over, laid down the water hoses and planted it with beans. The feeling of achievement I gained from being part of the farming process by doing something proactive really made my day.

For the remainder of the afternoon I helped with harvesting some cherry tomatoes and clearing up the space under the willow tree, in particular sorting the trash from the lunch into compostable and non-compostable piles. Before I knew it, 5.30 had come around and it was sadly time to leave. Volunteers are welcome to help themselves to a portion of the harvest and so I packed my backpack with a small helping of quinces, cherry tomatoes, onions and strawberries before setting off on my bicycle, happy that I had helped contribute to the Slow Food Nation weekend in a small but important way.

At the beginning of this post I stated that Slow Food is for life, not just for Labor day weekend. To that I have taught my own self something. Yes, I do live a fairly slow food life already. But in truth I could do even more. And I will. If I leave it more than a year, again, before I return to help out at Alemany Farm, I will be a lesser person than the one I aspire to be.

You, too, can volunteer at Alemany Farm. Everyone is welcome. Find their workday schedule here. Perhaps I'll see you there one day..?





?How did you Celebrate 'Slow Food' this Labor Day Weekend?

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© 2008 Sam Breach

Slow Food is for Life, Not Just for Labor Day