Last weekend I spent a few minutes thinking enviously of all of you chowing down at Slow Food Nation. Then I got up and went outside to watch my bees.

Okay — they’re not really “my” bees, although they do drop by frequently for a bite to eat. In fact, they’re invited guests: welcome to dine any time on the butterfly bushes and lantana — micro-habitats for nectar lovers that I’ve nurtured this summer in front of my Brooklyn building.

It is probably not news to Slow Food Nation readers that in the United States, a still poorly-understood phenomenon called “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) has wiped out millions of commercial bee colonies in the past few years. Even worse, CCD comes after about thirty years of steep declines in feral honeybee populations. Bees have been vanishing in Brazil, India, and a host of European countries as well. Is CCD due to pesticides? Habitat loss? Climate disruption? Depletion of genetic diversity? Infiltration of hives by damaging mites? Clues suggest that some or all of these factors and others, alone and in combo, directly and indirectly, are responsible directly and indirectly for wiping out vast populations of bees.

If you are a foodie — slow, fast, or some speed in between — you have a stake in the fate of the bees, because these little pollinators are fundamental to the propagation of about one third of U.S. crops. So their disappearance is potentially a flat-out disaster for our food supply, whether it’s grown industrially or on a family farm.

As a city dweller, I’m typically encouraged to vote my values with my dollars — buy organic, buy local, buy artisan — and leave the wildlife preservation to the professionals working well and far away from my sinful urban center. And yet, it’s accelerating urbanization that accounts for a lot of the habitat lost to bees — and butterflies as well — meaning that even city dwellers can do a lot more for bees than just spinning our cogs in the consumer machine.

Feeling generalized alarm as I read one disturbing report after another about CCD, last fall I began researching how to create welcoming and nutritious gardens for nectar-lovers. Then I began strategizing my campaign to seize control of the four big planters in front of my Brooklyn building — the only home gardening space available to me. While I discussed internally how best to convince my neighbors to support the project, I also fought the peculiar complacency that comes with being an environmental journalist: knowing too well just how big problems like climate change, or disappearing animal habitat, need big solutions: laws and mandates and such. I was aware of just how small my scope as an individual was (outside of my writing assignments, at least) to made a dent in solving them.

Fortunately, this inertia was jostled by an essay in an April issue of The New York Times Magazine, by Michael “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” Pollan, who wrote in part:

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Okay, a challenge to get up off my passive tuchus and do something. I could work with that.

So I contacted my co-op board about revamping the container plantings. Anticipating resistance, I prepared a list of potential flowering plants, explained why they’d look great, and noted the amazing butterflies they’d attract while strategically omitting mention of bees (which are not a big sell for many urbanites, who typically experience bees only in cartoon form on the labels of our honey jars, or associate them with painful memories of summer camp stings). But my expectations happily off-base: the board members were thrilled that someone was actually volunteering to to uproot and replace the creepy, half-dead fir bushes that had failed to prosper in the planters for the past seven years. I was immediately given a budget to cover the cost of the plants, new dirt, and delivery. And by the end of May I was tending four new plantings of butterfly bushes, salvia, and lantana — all known magnets for bees and butterflies — with some ornamental trailing vines planted at the edges of the pots to round out the garden design.

Thinking solely of my higher calling to offer nectar to bugs, I didn’t anticipate that tending the plants — they need near-daily watering, and pruning of dead stems and flowers to keep them in bloom — would mean spending more time just hanging out in front of my building than ever before. And thus encountering my neighbors more than ever before. My private crusade to make a tiny difference turned into an opportunity to get better acquainted and maybe spread the word about wildlife gardening in the city: they stop and thank me for tending the flowers; I smile at their babies and if they seem interested, tell them a little about wildlife gardening.

And not just my immediate neighbors: Strangers pause to compliment me on the deep purple budlia blooms, or (it being New York City, after all) offer advice on watering and deadheading the bushes. Toddlers with their nannies halt in their teetering steps, transfixed by my bright yellow watering can, and volunteer to “help the flowers.”

Planting these bushes is the most tangible thing I’ve ever done to help save a wild creature — and even after three months have gone by, I’m thrilled every time I spy a bee or butterfly set down for a snack. Sometimes I take a pre-caffeinated stumble downstairs to find out who’s dining on my spikey butterfly bush blossoms and dainty lantana blooms during the first cool hours of the day. I’ve seen vivid orange-and-black Monarch butterflies, elegant black swallowtail butterflies, shimmering green dragonflies, and at least two or three different kinds of bees.

Can I cook, or what?

Emily Gertz is a journalist and editor covering the environment and science. She has contributed to Dwell, Grist, Popular Mechanics, Worldchanging and other publications, and is the editor of globalwarming.change.org (set to launch in late September 2008).

Photo by: Emily Gertz

Every possible malady has a name and a pill. Your kids can’t focus, they now have Attention Deficit Disorder. Your leg moves while you sleep so you get a diagnosis of restless leg syndrome. I just found out that I have Eco Anxiety. I heard an editor from a magazine say that one of his writers covers so many doom and gloom environmental stories that he went screaming from an assignment and took to bed. It hit home for me. I read and write so many scary health and environment stories that I give myself the shakes.

Thunder can kill us, pesticides can kill us, juice can kill us. Spinach can kill us. Before I take a bite or a breath, I wonder if this will be the final straw that finishes me off. According to therapists who treat Eco Anxiety, we react to our fears in one of three ways. We freak out. We shut down. Or we take action. I am probably a shut down person these days. But at one point I was on the freak out trail. Every time I wrote a story about a malady or an environmental trigger, I would rush to the doctor and swear I had the symptoms. Killer mosquitos headed toward the Gulf of Mexico? I was sure I had been bitten by one. My doctor always asks me what I have been writing about before she asks me about my health. She saves a lot of time that way.

Clearly the point of all of these messages we get is to inform and educate us. But it is also a way of scaring us into some kind of public outcry and action. I see enough action. I just focus on the anxiety. Perhaps the advocates, the researchers, and the people who sell products that will save us from the ills of the world can take it down a notch. Remember the days when people told you that you should drink bottled water for your health? Well, this year we are told that if you drink bottled water you are going to wreck your health and the environment. It is always a situation of hope-nope.

I think most of us want to be educated about the world around us. It is important to know the impact of the foods we eat, the air we breathe, the bad habits we have. But it is also important to leverage it with what can happen that is positive. We have moved beyond the possibilities to the train wrecks.

We all care passionately about issues. I am very much in support of the availability of fresh, fair, and affordable foods for people living in urban areas. It is tied to the health of the community, the education of our children, our housing and our overall wellbeing. Others care about how our food is grown. Others care about the pesticides that help to make food look beautiful but have negative impacts on our health. All are important. And all can be informative without making me afraid to eat an apple or having to pay $10 for an organic one.

Whether the issue is health, race, poverty, air quality, or education, we need to be able to talk about them without turning them into a horror show. There is so much stress in the world. There are so many issues that push up against us. I can’t help but wonder if this anxiety that feeds us is also wearing away at us. As a colleague says, it might not be the environment that finishes us off, it could be the panic that does the deed. Let’s lighten up.

Andrea King Colllier is a freelance writer and a W.K. Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow. Her work appears in The Best Food Writing of 2007.

Photo by Brooks Elliott

Many of us think of wine and cheese as two great tastes that go great together (like pizza and beer, milk and cookies). At Saturday night’s Taste Workshop celebrating American Raw Milk Cheese, we were treated to a different kind of pairing—cheese and beer. Two cheese experts, Jeff Roberts (also a Slow Food USA Board Member and beer aficionado) and Laura Werlin, led us through the tasting of seven cheeses and six craft ales.

The cheeses and their makers hailed from Alabama, Indiana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Vermont, and California; several of the cheese makers were in the room with us and shared their processes, working with their sheep, Guernsey cows, Nubian dwarf goats, etc, to craft and shepherd (as it were) that milk into beautiful artisanal cheeses. Ever seen a cheese that’s been rubbed with paprika? Hillis Peak Cheese from Pholia Farm Creamery was a first for me and I fell in love with its spicy, rich, creamy flavor. (It goes really well with Dogfish’s Midas Touch Golde Elixir.

Most surprising were the ways in which the cheeses changed in combination with the beer, and vice versa. Six pieces of fantastic farmstead cheese + seven diverse and delicious craft ales meant several interesting and surprising flavor combinations.

If you are interested in reading more about American Raw Milk cheeses, check out Jeff’s Book The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese, and Laura’s book Cheese Essentials.

Jerusha Klemperer lives in New York City where she is a writer and the Program Manager for Terra Madre at Slow Food USA. She previously served there as Assistant to the Executive Director, and is the editor of Slow Food USA’s blog.

On the heels of last weekend’s successful Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco, participants will discuss where the Slow Food Movement should go from here, especially with regard to the world food crisis. This panel will feature food activist and Vice President of Slow Food International Dr. Vandana Shiva, author and Knight Professor of Journalism Michael Pollan, author and scholar Dr. Raj Patel, and farmer and scholar Dr. Frederick Kirschenmann, moderated by author and Professor of Geography Richard Walker.

September 3, 2008, 7pm, Wheeler Auditorium at UC Berkeley

Tickets: Tickets are available to the public for $10 at 510.642.9988, tickets.berkeley.edu, at the Ticket Office, which is located at the northeast corner of Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.

For more information: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/details.php?ID=529

See more at the Slow Food Nation flickr album (now almost 700 photos strong!). If you have your own photos to add, please put them in the SFN08 pool and consider giving them a Creative Commons license so they can be shared on blogs and among the community!

Sarah Rich is the managing editor of the Slow Food Nation blog and an editor at Dwell magazine.

All images: Sarah Rich.

As the sun sets on the fourth and final day of Slow Food Nation, we’re thrilled to announce that the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden will remain in place on the lawn of San Francisco City Hall until November. The garden, which has been producing substantial amounts of fresh produce and supplied some of the food for this weekend’s events, has received tremendous support from Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city. Most everyone who has come down to witness the beauty and bounty of the garden has voiced their desires to see this project become a permanent symbol of San Francisco’s progressive position on food, farming, and social justice.

“By all accounts, this has been a wonderful installation for the city and has been a highly visible demonstration of our commitment to the issues embodied in how our food system operates,” said Mayor Newsom. “From protecting the environment, to supporting our local and regional economy, to ensuring we can provide access to wholesome, nutritious food for all San Franciscans, the Victory Garden has given us a powerful platform from which to make the case for more good, clean and fair food in this country.”

If you haven’t visited the garden yet, please do! The corn is high, the squash are mature, and the California native wildflowers are in full bloom.

Images: jrodmanjr and Sarah Rich

After two days of inspiring talks, I personally feel ready to take some action. Three great panels were packed with the world’s most important food policy thinkers, including farmer and essayist Wendell Berry, who rarely gives public talks, but has been one of the primary thinkers influencing the Slow Food movement in the U.S.

In the first panel, Climate Change and Food, moderator Mark Hertsgaard reminded us that scientists have determined that we are locked in to the next 20-30 years of climate change, even if we miraculously quit emitting carbon tomorrow. Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, delivered some fierce words, including that our government officials don’t know anything about food. He went on to say that climate change was no longer questioned, instead these officials are in profound denial about food’s relationship to other problems. Aaron Bernstein, MD, co-author of Sustaining Life with Eric Chivian, MD, agreed, saying climate change isn’t a scientific problem, but a political one. He hoped that the power of change was with children, who are growing up with this knowledge close at hand. Wes Jackson, Ph.D., author and President and Founder of The Land Institute, brought in a visual aid: a prairie grass sample with a long root structure, which naturally sequesters carbon. These grasses are disappearing. Following that, he worried that increased rainfall in the coming years would have extremely disastrous results for soils in the grain belt. He also gave a scary statistic: 22 year olds have lived through the burning of 54% of the world’s oil supply. Patrick Holden, Director of the Soil Association, told the story of how he realized his dairy farm couldn’t survive without oil, and so he went on a quest that led him to the idea of transition towns in Bristol, England, an effort to re-build community using green energy proposed in Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook. Anna Lappé, author and co-leader of the Small Planet Institute, talked about her recent trip to South Korea to take part in a meeting with Via Campesina, an international food sovereignty group, and being impressed when she saw 100,000 people there marching against American beef. She said that the U.S. needs to set the example for the world to follow.

In the discussion about Edible Education, Alice Waters, founder of Slow Food Nation, international vice president of Slow Food, owner of Chez Panisse Restaurant and founder and president of the Chez Panisse Foundation, talked about including food in the curriculum, and how children feel compelled to be in nature. She urged politicians to say that food must be something we teach children, comparing the act to JFK’s move to include physical education in schools. Furthermore, she said, we must invest in schools so that they don’t have to make the choice between books and good food. Craig McNamara, President and Founder at Center for Land-Based Learning, spoke about the importance of re-establishing our relationship to nature, which he argued would affect the many other issues we face. Van Jones, Founder and President of Green For All, suggested that a green economy would “lift all boats” by its very nature. He went on to say that we can’t solve this by ourselves, that we need good governance. He also encouraged us to start with the most vulnerable populations, and that the rest of us would follow suit. Josh Viertel, Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, said that the sustainable food movement needs to tackle the structural barriers, like racism and class issues, that are necessary to consider going forward. He urged us to think of food as a universal right, not a privilege. Katrina Heron got a chuckle when she suggested that we bring together policy makers and feed them standard school lunch until the change policy. Anya Fernald, Executive Director of Slow Food Nation, talked about changing the context under which kids eat in the cafeteria, and rebuilding the human relationships surrounding food.

The final panel, Slow Food Nation, brought together the ideas presented throughout Food for Thought, and featured the leaders of the discussion surrounding food policy. Wendell Berry, farmer and essayist, said we’d been spared from local adaptation by our abundance of fossil fuels, but that it is necessary now to re-think that fact. He said that he feels hopeful that the cooperative spirit is coming back, and that community will have to be re-valued. He went on to say that he have lost faith in our political system, but that “if the right thing has a loud enough voice [the politicians] will do the right thing because they have to.” Eric Schlosser, journalist and author of Fast Food Nation, on the urging of moderator Corby Kummer, restated some of his thoughts on exploited workers in America, and summarized the insights from his panel the day before. He said that we must make changes here first, so that they can be followed by the rest of the world. Carlo Petrini, President of Slow Food, compared us to bees, which he reminded us are disappearing because of our pesticide usage, but said that like them, we need to “pollinate” through ideas. He connected this by talking about our interdependence with each other and with other species. He said that we must have respect for people who don’t have what we have, and that our food can’t be good if, for example, we disrespect Mexican workers in the U.S. Vandana Shiva, physicist, environmental activist and author, spoke about an Indian idea that “everything is food, everything else is something else’s food.” She called the situation we are in a “nutritional apartheid.” She said we have to integrate our issues, both ecological and social, and must extend our reach beyond the pursuit of pleasure with food. Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, reminded us that the era of cheap food is over. Now, climate change, the price of oil, and energy issues cannot be discussed without politicians discussing food. Alice Waters encouraged us to go out into the street and demand change. She reminded us that we are a political force that must be reckoned with.

If you missed any of these great talks, they will be available next week, at www.FORA.tv.

Paula Crossfield is a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio. She is a writer on food policy issues for the blog A Lucid Spoonful, and is currently working on a memoir about her journey beyond corn syrup.

The second day at Slow Food Nation was as sunny as the first, and even more people poured into Civic Center plaza to enjoy the Marketplace, Slow on the Go, the Soapbox, the Victory Garden, and the Food for Thought series nearby at the Herbst Theater. On the other side of the city, thousands of people filled the Taste Pavilions to get their fill of pickles, cheese, ice cream, bread, beer, and much more.

Here are some photos from Day 2 at Civic Center. You can see the entire Slow Food Nation photo album (which is growing larger by the hour) at flickr.

All images by Sarah Rich

Slow Food Nation is under way, and the panelists at Food for Thought have jumped right in to the discussion of the issues our food system faces, and how to bring about change. Today’s panels discussed the world food crisis, building a new food system, re-localizing food, and the rights of farm workers. Throughout the day, there were many ideas that crossed paths.

In the first panel, The World Food Crisis got a definition: the result of food moving out of the hands of communities and into the hands of corporations. Vandana Shiva, physicist, environmental activist and author, went on to say that we should remain aware that the idea of crisis could be used as spin for a launching of genetically modified food, which has been argued to curb hunger. But she begged to differ. She said there was a myth that industrial agriculture produces more food. She said that in fact, in Punjab, India, fertilizers and pesticides have decreased fertility by 50% and killed 10% of the land, and in the process have made individuals rely on monocrops of rice instead of diverse foods. Carlo Petrini, President of Slow Food International, offered insights like eliminating subsidies, and redirecting revenue to young farmers just getting started and virtuous farmers who practice stewardship and organic agriculture. Corby Kummer, journalist and author of The Pleasures of Slow Food, talked about “virtuous globalization,” which seeks to support locally-based, fair choices for food purchased from outside the community. He also talked about Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, which helps preserve and maintain native food traditions. Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, talked about food sovereignty, and reminded us that seed saving should be legal. When it fails to be, Vandana Shiva called for us all, in situations where the law prevents such freedoms in farming, to disobey bad laws in order to follow higher laws. “Everyone of us [should] be the Rosa Parks of food,” she said.

Building a New Food System: Policy and Planning focused on the American food system. Andrew Kimbrell, founder and executive director of the Center for Food Safety, talked about organic as the beginning of change—not the “ceiling” but the foundation—on top of which we must consider building a humane, socially just, biodiverse and locally based framework. In building a better food system in America, it was important to consider breaking down the Farm Bill and working on its individual parts, said Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor, Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health, NYU. She also encouraged us to put endless pressure on public officials, and to be “paradigm warriors,” focusing on ecological truth and not just the will of the market in growing food. Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, AG Kawamura, said that getting it right in California could help get it right in the rest of the world, and Paula Jones, director of San Francisco Food Systems, talked about fighting pre-emption of locally effective laws, and creating an urban stake in the food system, through community gardens and backyard plots.

The panel on Re-localizing Food criticized efficiency as the sole means to consider in agricultural policy. Gary Nabhan, the founder of Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) Alliance, spoke of fossil food, and how we have no choice but to re-think our food pathways. Dan Barber, chef & co-owner of Blue Hill Restaurant and creative director of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, argued that though he often felt nostalgia for pre-industrial agriculture, there were ways to use technology virtuously. He described why he decided to build a slaughterhouse near his restaurant, saying that it encouraged transparency and that the meat was humanely gathered and tastes better than conventional options. Winona LaDuke, Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, author and founding director of White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP), feels that we’ve lost touch with nature and should decouple the food system from a cash economy. Author Michael Pollan proposed that one step could be encouraging government to re-regionalize local procurement for schools, military and other subsidized groups. In talking about the higher cost of local food, he added that it’s not that local food is expensive, but that industrial food is artificially cheap.

Part of the reason bad food is so cheap is because of worker exploitation. In the final panel today, A New, Fair Food System, moderator and author of Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser said that without worker justice, the food system will never be sustainable. “We must include the workers at the table in the sustainable food movement,” he said. Jose Padilla, executive director of California Rural Legal Assistance, spoke of the many injustices of farm workers, including cruel working conditions such as excessive heat and sexual harassment. Farm worker Lucas Benitez, and Greg Asbed, representing the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, spoke about unfair wages, and the Immokalee Workers’ struggles to push large corporations like Subway, Chipotle, McDonalds and Burger King to the table in order to support better pay for field workers. Agustin Ramirez, ILWU Northern California Lead Organizer, discussed the California almond handlers and packagers’ struggles to earn a living wage, and the irony of some of the healthier foods being tied to the worst labor practices. Finally, Maricela Morales, representing CAUSE, the Central Coast Alliance United for A Sustainable Economy, encouraged the audience to get involved, by talking fair, demanding immigration reform, and the end of free trade as it is actually “forced” trade. She urged us to remember the power of human solidarity.

There are still a few tickets available to tomorrow’s sessions, so come out and hear more great talks at Food for Thought!

Paula Crossfield is a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio. She is a writer on food policy issues for the blog A Lucid Spoonful, and is currently working on a memoir about her journey beyond corn syrup.

Today kicked off Slow Food Nation’s 4-day extravaganza of good, clean and fair food. We have ahead of us many hours of tasting, talking, learning, proposing new policies, and planning systems changes. It was a magnificent day and Civic Center plaza was absolutely electrified with the first batch of visitors who’ve come from far and wide to the bright and sunny (if a little hot) weather of late summer San Francisco. Fortunately the trees that line the garden offer plenty of shade.

The Victory Garden is bountiful and around it dozens of booths have been set up to sell produce, cheese, bread, artisanal specialty items, and an array of prepared foods from doughy tlacoyos made by Primavera to sizzling hot dogs from Let’s Be Frank.

The on-site cooking stations, where chefs are hard at work, are shaded by a beautiful orange canopy designed by the brilliant creative team at Albertson Design, who also came up with the Farm=Liberty design you see on the orange welcome pavilion (a salvaged cargo container!) by Jensen Architects, above.

On the Soapbox, a continuous parade of inspired speakers stood up and raised their voices on all sorts of issues (more on that later), while on the other side of the Victory Garden, an interactive compost station taught passersby about how to create “black gold” for growing good food.

We’ll have posts, videos, and photos going up on Slow Food Nation’s homepage all weekend. Check out our latest two short videos, featuring Daniel Bowman Simon of the White House Organic Farm Project, calling for an edible garden on the President’s lawn; and Thomas Odermatt, owner of Roli Roti, who tells us how to roast the perfect chicken.

Tomorrow: to the Taste Pavilions! Stay tuned.