When Slow Food Doesn't Really Mean Fair or Sustainable Food

The recent food issue of the New York Times Magazine featured all things sustainable food. From community incubator kitchens to portraits of small-scale producers and processors, the Magazine covered local, sustainable food in such a way as to capture the growing sense of unique community that has been building around food. One article, written by none other than Michael Pollan, champion of the local food movement. But while the article, which presents a definitive example of "slow food" in action, does fit with the community-oriented theme of the issue, it doesn't present a very strong case for making slow, local food more accessible, and thereby more sustainable, in a way, to the public.

The article documents Pollan's meal by meal account of his " The 36-Hour Dinner Party," which included a cob oven, a whole goat, and a handful of the Bay Area's finest foodies and locally sourced everything. From a crate of olive oil to artisan bread, goat crudo and sabayon with saffron, to hand-cranked goat's milk frozen yogurt with roasted bing cherries, it all sounds lovely, and hyper-local. But spending a full weekend tending fire and food and participating in the full process of preparing real, slow food isn't exactly a realistic way to broadcast sustainable food to a wider audience. The slow food movement hinges on the preservation and cultivation of local, artisanal, traditional food ways. And as important as that movement is to creating a sustainable food system based on real food, Pollan's article and characterization of "sustainable" food reinforces what food justice advocates have complained about in the past: this sort of sustainable food is great, but for most people it is so impractical and simply out of reach.

Pollan's article presents sustainable food as something that is reserved for those with money--money to build a custom oven in a suburban backyard, to buy a crate of local olive oil that is used up over the course of a weekend feast, and all the other ingredients that go into four rustic but unabashedly gourmet meals--and those with time and a significant amount of collective food expertise. Perhaps this has something to do with his audience, assuming that the sort of people that read the New York Times Magazine are those who could afford to spend money and time getting back to slow food.

But a more worthwhile and important message would be this: that slow, sustainable food doesn't have to mean food cooked over a 36-hour fire, nor does it have to mean the cream of the crop in rare and expensive local product. Sustainable food IS accessible. It is lettuce and tomatoes grown in a bucket on your balcony. It is a row of beets and peas in the patchwork community garden springing up in an abandoned lot. It can be affordable, it can be easy, and it should be made more so. Sustainable food doesn't have to be so slow or so luxurious, and we should be taking steps to make it even more within reach of everyone in every socio-economic class, rather than casting it, yet again, as a privilege.