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The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

By Sandor Ellix Katz

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Slow Food Movement

The slow food movement started in Italy in 1986 as an opposition statement by Italian journalist Carlo Petrini, in response to a McDonalds opening at Rome's landmark Spanish Steps. It has grown since into a worldwide organization with over 80,000 members in 800 local chapters. Taste education is a major goal, and they are champions of local food production, with a focus on biodiversity and heirloom breeds, as well as concerns over the threat of homogenization, extinction, and against cultural diversity.

At their largest gathering, Tierra Madre (Mother Earth), a sign on the wall proclaims that:

  • Today, 30 plants feed 90 percent of the world's population
  • In the past 100 years, 250,000 plant varieties have gone extinct
  • One plant variety disappears every six hours
  • Since the beginning of the 20th century:
    • Europe lost over 75 percent of its cultural diversity
    • The U.S. has lost 93 percent of its crop diversity
    • A third of native cattle, sheep, and pig breeds have gone extinct or are on the way

The American Livestock Breed Conservancy is one of the groups working with Slow Food to reverse these trends, along with the Seed Savers Exchange and the Native Seeds/SEARCH group in a project called Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT). Together, they are aiming to bring America back to its native culture and foods by celebrating regional foods, determining what species are abundant, threatened, endangered, or extinct, and working to create "tangible tools of eco-gastronomic conservation."

Illegal Foods Today

"Free trade" and the guise of hygiene have turned a democratic, community-based economic system into a homogenized and pasteurized corporate stronghold. Heavy capitalization once again is presenting difficulties to the small farmer who cannot keep up with the regulations and certification processes:
  • Small scale farms can no longer use their kitchens to prepare food that will be sold publicly, including jams, jellies, ciders, and the like.
  • In Italy, the only thing that can be legally sold is fruit and vegetables, in the state in which they are picked. This means no wine or oil, unless the rigorous process of getting E.U. standard approval has been performed on each product, requiring much more capital than a small-time producer can put forth.
  • The government has become the deciding factor in what is sold, how, and where, taking away business from small producers as well as choices within their communities.

Large scale, centralized systems present a problem. Tommy Thompson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, who resigned in 2004, expressed surprise that this has not been the outlet of a terrorist attack, since it would be so easy to do and the effects would be so widespread. The National Academy of Science in 2005 published an exploration scenario of the effects of a botulism toxin in the U.S. milk supply, stating that it could effectively kill 50,000 people. This is only possible due to the large scale in which milk is mass produced.

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