AVI SPIEGEL, a student at Harvard Divinity School, is a big believer in Slow Food. He and his girlfriend, both 26, even spent last summer close to its Italian headquarters, just outside Bra. After a stint in the Peace Corps in Morocco, where he volunteered in the community by farming bananas and capers after a devastating drought, Spiegel found Slow Food particularly compelling. When he arrived in Boston at the beginning of last semester, he headed to the movement’s Web site to find out about activities in the area. "I remember seeing some sort of $60 tasting and sampling and thinking, ‘I can’t afford that,’" he recalls. While the Yankee Feast and previous Slow Food events at area restaurants may be on the low-cost end for haute cuisine, they’re still prohibitively expensive for Spiegel, a graduate student living on a stipend.
A vegetarian who searches out organic produce, Spiegel is undeniably enchanted by the Slow Food movement; he literally shifts to the edge of his seat upon hearing that the Boston chapter is quite active. In Italy he noticed that the movement drew all kinds; he can only surmise that here "it’s just not available to the average person." After continually being priced out of events, Spiegel poses a question to Slow Food’s organizers: "Where’s there space for people like me?"
Spiegel is not alone. Asked if he was going to attend the Yankee Feast, an original member of the Boston chapter who prefers to remain anonymous says he feels excluded by the direction in which Slow Food is moving, and responds indignantly, "Hell, no; I don’t have 65 bones."
Though Slow Food is a nonprofit organization supported mostly through membership fees and the occasional grant, organizers tout membership growth but are then oddly disinclined to follow up with financial information about where fees go. (When asked, Martins barks out, "What do you want? Our year-end audit?")
An oft-heard criticism of Slow Food USA is that the organization is exclusive, accessible only to those with money. At the Yankee Feast, which cost each guest more than Slow’s $60 annual membership, three friendly suburban Carlisle couples convene at a table and engage in conversation typical for a certain class: there’s talk of a recent trip to St. Martin, the angst of kitchen remodeling, and how tiring it can be staying at home with the kids.
One of Slow Food’s detractors is a most unlikely critic — someone the movement touts as a philosophical leader. George Ritzer’s McDonaldization of Society, an academic text, traces the roots of the chain’s homogeneous strategy across much of American culture and institutions. "The book got adopted by the Slow Food people in Italy as a sort of bible in a sense that I was critiquing the same kinds of things that they were critical of," he says. But Ritzer remains skeptical that the movement can transcend its exclusivity: "At the level of consumption, clearly it’s appealing to the people who can afford the sophisticated kind of food."
Slow Food member Ruth Tobias, a graduate student at Boston University and a food writer who contributes to the Boston Phoenix, agrees. "The thing about Slow Food is that it tends to attract people who admittedly have the time and luxury to do things like volunteer and attend events like [the Yankee Feast]," she says.
Before questions about such claims are even asked, Slow Food organizers bat the ball back. "We’re not just about events and fine food," says Erika Lesser, Slow Food USA’s director of programming. "We are not an elitist supper club," asserts Patrick Martins at the Yankee Feast, as attendees dip their spoons into a first course of lobster broth.
"I hope you’ve seen by now it’s not elitist," says Kummer, the day after the Yankee Feast. "It has to work very hard to counteract that image that all gourmet societies have sticking to them, most of them aptly. Slow Food is least like that because it goes after rural artisans, people having trouble keeping alive on very small production quantities and methods."
Like any gourmet movement, Kummer notes, the first followers are naturally going to be those already converted. However, he says, while it’s "reaching the avant-garde foodies that care what’s new in food groups and food activities, the people it needs to reach are the ones that care about the environment and farmers — and helping really small producers of vegetables and animal raisers survive."
Looking back, one can see the roots of Slow, and the paradigm into which it neatly fits. Following the opening of the famous French culinary institute Le Cordon Bleu in 1895, the doors began to open for the development of American foodie popular culture. By 1940, James Beard had published his first cookbook, Hors d’Oeuvre and CanapŽs (Running Press). Craig Claiborne became the first male food editor at the New York Times in 1957. Julia Child’s first episode of The French Chef aired on WGBH in 1963. And M.F.K. Fisher’s first food essay was published in the New Yorker in 1966. Indeed, after tracing the infiltration of food as a social trend into popular culture, it appears Slow is a sub-movement of what these icons started 60 years ago.
WHETHER OR NOT the US Slow Food community can move from rhetoric to action, from the city dinner party to the country farm, is still at issue. "Once the party’s over and you get down to work, the hope is that there can be some kind of bridge — you want to reach out to people who actually grow this stuff and preserve these old ways, but you don’t want to be condescending," notes Tobias. "You want to help without alienating." She pauses, adding, "I actually think it would be great to have a few events on farms and be taught something by farmers. Maybe they could teach us something, other than have them cater our events."
Sure enough, the psychological sensibility around Slow seems to be a little conflicted. Much of the organization’s ideals have to do with nostalgia, romanticizing the rural, getting out to the country, chilling with farmers. Boston Slow Food co-founder Erin Hunt identifies herself as a city girl with a farmer’s heart. One of her favorite Slow Food projects is City Sprouts, a program at public elementary schools in Cambridge that introduces students to gardening.
Matt Rubiner, who started Slow’s Boston chapter and who recently moved to the Berkshires to open an upscale country store, notes that community outreach on the part of Slow Food chapters, which are mostly based in cities, has been a weak point thus far. "It is much less producers and salt of the earth and much more dabblers," he says.
Sam Hayward, owner of the acclaimed restaurant Fore Street in Portland, Maine, attests that because he’s located in a smaller city, closer to the country, his access to farmers is unrivaled. "[Farmers] are all around me," he explains. "Last week I was visiting with a couple of friends of mine with restaurants in Boston — they made it sound like it was inconvenient to build up relationships with farmers because it’s far away."
The city/country divide applies to members’ mentalities as well, a distinction that’s clearly illustrated by watching Sandy Oliver and Karyl Bannister circulate at the Yankee Feast. A table full of attendees excitedly introduce themselves as foodies. They talk of cookbook collections and the latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated, and drop chefs’ monikers like those of celebrities — first names only. "I only shop at farm stands in the summer; I go every single day," says a blonde named Susan. "It’s so much better than what you can get at Bread & Circus."
They’ve just finished discussing a particularly lovely vintage when Bannister stops by to discuss her newsletter, which champions the "un-pedigreed, G-rated kind of food that steps up to the plate." When asked whether she also thinks of herself as a foodie, Bannister’s face crinkles up for a moment, and she looks off. "That’s what people call me, I guess," she says. Then she comes up with a clarification: "Slow Food is a sneakers-and-jeansy kind of thing."
An insider lingo has developed that seems to further entrench the divide. Eating Slow, thinking Slow, buying Slow, living Slow: these are all phrases that come up over the course of talking with organizers and members. In some cases, the word is appropriated to such a degree that it becomes nonsense. On the phone a few days before the Yankee Feast, Boston co-leader Rob McKeown presses for an in-person rendezvous by citing the Slow "mentality." "Talking on the phone is against what the movement stands for," he says. "I love to actualize the movement."
THE THREE couples from Carlisle clean their plates. Only two of the folks at the table, Francine and Ethan, are Slow Food members. He’s in the food business, creating products for chain restaurants, including a breakfast item for Starbucks. "It’s the opposite of Slow," Ethan says. "But it allows us to participate in such Slow events as this," Francine is quick to add.
Along with the other two couples, Francine and Ethan have been to a few other Slow Food dinners — at Bomboa, Oleana, No. 9 Park. It’s been a chance for them to get into the city, have a fabulous meal, get together.
Leslie, a friend across the table who’s wearing a pair of silver utensil earrings (fork on the left, spoon on the right), whips out a Slow Food membership form in between the smoked haddock and the pot roast. By the end of the night, they’ve all signed up. "We’ve been a little slloooow to join," jokes one. "Now do we find out about the secret handshake?"
Nina Willdorf can be reached at nwilldorf[a]phx.com
