Slow Foods New Leadership

After the departure of Josh Viertel from the leadership of Slow Food USA six months ago, a new leadership has taken up house in the national organizations Brooklyn offices. Richard McCarthy, who previously headed the Crescent City Farmers Market and related organizations in New Orleans has now taken up the leadership role in heading up SFUSA. 

To his credit, Mr. McCarthy seems to have some pretty good accolades: as the co-founder of the CCFM, his leadership has expanded its footprint and influence, especially in the post-Katrina landscape of New Orleans and the surrounding agricultural district. Through its organiztion, Market Umbrella, the CCFM has acted as a mentor for up and coming farmers markets authorities, built coalitions with regional (such as the Oxford Food Symposium) and national organizations (such as the Project for Public Spaces), they have been able to both raise awareness, and helped raise both consumer and political awareness of the food system in New Orleans, if not the South as a general category. He certainly speaks well; in both his above interview with Julia Moskin above as well as this Oxford American interview in May 2010, the man can talk the talk, and seems to understand some of the more complex underpinnings of how marketsplaces act. Money quote: 

The question of market impact is where we have invested much of our energy, especially over the past decade. Integral to our belief that public markets can serve as strategic levers for social change is that to use them you need not change your idea about the world upon entering the market. There is no admission. There is no ideological litmus test, other than, when on-site, everyone treats one another with dignity and mutual respect. In fact, this is largely what our job—as market managers—is: to create an environment where this social contract is maintained. Both vendor and shopper should feel welcome, regardless of their beliefs. This social contract is perhaps as valuable—if not more so—to a community as the exchange of food. 

This is a good mark; especially as I wrote in my paper on farmers markets in June of last year, there is a need for markets to conduct themselves in such ways as to make sure the population of those accessing and utilizing markets grows. And at this point I can only wish the man well and hope that this proves to be a good development for the organization; as he himself has pointed out, his first order of business is making sure that members and supporting organizations know that there is a secure leadership, which is a good step, though I know I'll be looking for more concrete initiatives in the near future. 

I will also indicate, however, that at this point, the political story here that has unfolded has proven a very interesting one; it is telling that Mr. McCarthy is from New Orleans, also home to Poppy Tooker, the Slow Food leader who led the seemingly one-woman campaign against Viertel last year. While there were a number of issues at play at Mr. Viertel's departure (institutional culture at the Brooklyn office, the relationship and operations between Brooklyn and convivia, the goals and aspirations of the convivia during the administration prior to Mr. Viertel and upon his arrival, the status of the Ark of Taste project, among others), the placement of Mr. McCarthy at the head of the organization, given where the seeming core of Mr. Viertel's "opposition" came from, should be noted.

And I use "opposition" in quotes because I think, at the end of the day, the issue really being played out prior to the departure -- is Slow Food about food justice or about food culture -- was a false dichotomy. Projects like the $5 Dollar a Day challenge were not to undermine paying farmers a fair wage, in the same way relegating the Ark of Taste to a convivia-based project was not an attempt to ignore biodiversity. Contrary to the claims about Carlo Petrini bemoaning the "politicization" of Slow Food in the US, unlike its European counterparts, the American food system -- from agricultural production to crop biodiversity, food justice to culinary history -- has had disruption at a lot of levels, and needed to be rectified and revived at a number of levels. None of these are atomistic -- they are all very interconneted. And unlike in Europe, where Slow Food came out of a response from within the Italian Communist Party, in a country with a long culinary history as well as a given civic response to food culture (as well as political institutions that supported and defended those norms), this is one of those instances where the American iteration was bound to stand apart, and in a way that does matter if SFUSA wants to remain relevant.

My thesis work is currently leaning towards the income double bind in the American food system: namely, that most farmers need to be able to charge more to shore up the financial and economic sustainability of their operations, while most communities across the board -- from the supposed middle class able to afford "good food" to lower income communities that have a desire to access such food -- need jobs that actually provide them the financial means to access such food. That is the question of "good food" in a just, equitable food system: income. And it is this particular conundrum that SFUSA must take leadership on in its near future. The convivia cannot only be dinner clubs that cater $80-100 events once a month; they also shouldn't exclusively do programming that deals in food justice and curious challenges. But it has to be more than it has been, something Mr. Viertel attempted to do, perhaps clumsily, within the organization. SFUSA, like the organization Mr. McCarthy comes from, must act as an umbrella for all the stakeholders and members of the good food community, and not be a reified version of itself. If his past is any indicator, Mr. McCarthy will hopefully be the mind for such a mission.  

Farmers Markets as a Gateway Drug

So as mentioned yesterday, I participated two weeks back in the Global Gateways Conference put on by the American Association of Food Studies and the Department of Food Studies at both NYU and New School. A splendid good time, I sat in on sessions regarding supply chain problems, zines & food memorandia, and a particularly fun session about food and protest movements. I also presented on a panel with several other graduate students on the issues facing farmers markets and food regulations. 

My topic specifically was rooted in farmers markets as a civic institution and as a jumping off point for greater engagement with sustainability issues. When we compare coventional agriculture and buying practices, most alternatives are just that, alternative systems that exist in parallel to conventional markets and goods and contain differing value chains. The types of practices and values contained in these systems are not exactly "legible" to people whose behaviors are ingrained or entrenched from conventional systems of agricultural consumption; the social legibility of sustainable agriculture may be one of its greatest hurdles. When we talk about social legibility, we're referencing a concept from landscape architecture, that explains how, simply by looking at a given layout or geography, a person can "read" or intuit how the space is supposed to be approached (a key example is how we learn to utilize jungle gyms -- that's a form of legibility). Social legibility takes this concept and applies it to how we understand and interact with social norms and behaviors -- like how we learn or elect to shop in certain ways, or participate in more abstracted forms of values-based actions. 

Case in point: community-supported agriculture (CSA). While there are many ways they are executed, the fundamental idea of how a CSA operates -- paying for an entire season of products before you actually receive them, possibly losing out if the season goes poorly -- requires a way of rethinking how we engage with food procurement. You have to understand that it is not a classic transaction of payment for goods. That requires a degree of understanding -- both intellectual as well as emphatic -- of how the system works and why you choose to participate in it. 

Long story short: farmers markets act as an endlessly modifiable medium by which people can interact with, purchase, and learn from farmers directly and indirectly. They meet people within their communities. They are, by most margins, accessible in terms of placement, interactivity, and monetary access. They can be moved or placed in spaces where food access is an issue, and modified in terms of the types of programs on offer (like WIC/SNAP benefits, "double-benefit" programs like those offered by Wholesome Wave, or registration drives) unlike brick and mortar institutions or private markets. They are also the most legible of form of alternative agricultural consumption, short of growing your own (small or large scale), and by our reckoning, are the perfect space by which to introduce coventional consumers to alternative agricultural models (for the reasons listed above as much as the fact that farmers markets are as close to the conventional shopping practice). 

Our premise: farmers markets lead people into activities like gardening, CSA's, growshares, or other types of alternative agricultural consumption and assists with increasing peoples agency and values where alternative agriculture is concerned. We examined CSA members and their participaton in farmers markets, and gave them blank response sites to tell us in their minds what linked the two together. (We hoped to avoid leading answers that might've influenced their answers, or made for selecting every single answer). 

 The study is still ongoing but our research proved this much (with over 150 samples from across the country): farmers markets do act as stepping stones to deepening or initiating the values of alternative and sustainable agriculture, as well as deepening participation in them. Of the surveys, 2/3 actively & explicitly identified the farmers market as a place where they met and interacted with farmers, learned about their practices and day-to-day, and led them to take a leap in participating in CSA's. While farmers markets  were rarely the place people learned about their CSA (that happened largely by word of mouth at a number of different institutions), the values were put in place through peoples participating in the farmers market environment. There's more geekery to be found in the data -- like the regional and gender distinctions in the surveys -- but this is the core of the research question.

And the significance of this outcome: namely that in understanding this implicit role that farmers markets can occupy, we have a stepping stone for not only increasing the resilience of local agricultural systems (by educating through participation in farmers markets) but also because farmers markets can act as the nodes and conduits by which greater interactivity -- a dialogue -- between conventional and alternative agricultural systems can exist to the benefit of local agricultural systems. If bringing in people from across experiences, ethnicities and economic categories can increase participation in -- and more importantly, explicit understanding of -- alternative agricultural systems, then there is a strong policy recommendation to be made in supporting farmers markets writ large. And that has a number of implications for everyone.