Omnivore - Dispatch from the 13th annual Georgia Organics conference

The Georgia Organics conference brings up issues of advocacy, policy and elitism within the Slow Food Movement.

“I had a wonderful thing yesterday, something that I had never tasted before,” Carlo Petrini says through a translator. Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement, speaks in Italian in a deliberate, declarative tone, and he leans forward towards me, his eyes full of excitement for his new found gastronomic discovery. “A collard green! Bellissimo!”

Petrini and I were sitting in the lobby of the Indigo hotel in Athens a few hours prior to his delivering the keynote address for Georgia Organics’ 13th annual conference. I had just asked him whether he thought the South in particular had latched onto Slow Food so enthusiastically because our region has a distinct historical food culture, more so than the rest of the country. Petrini didn’t know much about Southern food culture, but he sure remembered that collard green. Which underlines a point made earlier that day during one of the conference sessions - a woman in the audience said, “We’re not going to win this argument with politics, we’re going to win it with flavor.”

It was the second time we’d met, the first being a North Carolina Slow Food picnic in 2007. In the intervening three years, Petrini has become more practical and nuanced in his answers about the challenges facing the movement. Back then, I asked him about the perceived elitism of a movement that was primarily occurring in the white tablecloth restaurants and upscale markets of the country, when the folks who are most at risk for diet-based disease - the poor - had barely been touched by Slow Food. His answer then basically came down to a platitude about how if we eat less, better food wouldn’t cost much more. Since then, the question of elitism is obviously one Petrini has come across repeatedly, and a large part of his keynote address that evening was devoted to addressing it.

At the day’s first education session in the “Slow Food culture” track, Slow Food: From Education to Activism, the question of elitism came up almost as soon as the session’s moderator, Julie Shaffer, opened the floor for questions. Participants worried that the politicizing of the movement would drive away the very people they most hoped to reach. A young man sitting in the front row asked how Slow Food could combat the perception of elitism. It occurred to me that it wasn’t so much a question of perception - apart from right wing pundits who label every progressive thought as elitist, there aren’t a whole lot of folks accusing the organics movement of shunning the working class. In fact, this is an accusation that comes mainly from within. Slow Foodists worry about elitism because they themselves see the limitations of the movement. There’s a lot of frustration that Slow Food hasn’t figured out how to reach  the people who need it most. Organic food, especially in a state like Georgia where demand vastly outweighs supply and the State is less than supportive of small farmers, is expensive. No one wants to suggest that these small farmers ought to devalue their merchandise - small-scale farming is hardly a recipe for wealth under the best circumstances. But it’s obvious that food is an issue that traverses so many serious societal issues, from environmentalism to health, there has to be a way for the Slow Food movement to have a positive impact, beyond wine tastings and gorgeous veggie plates at high end restaurants.