Rock stars of slow food

TURIN, Italy – The program said 3 p.m., room to accommodate until full. Sala Gialla (Yellow room). I made sure I went early and headed to the venue at 2 pm.

Edible Education. This was the topic of this most popular session, and I patiently waited for the room to fill up and for the time to pass.

Slowly, attendees troop to the huge hall, and fill up the room to capacity.

Alice Waters, Jamie Oliver and Carlo Petrini come out with moderator Corby Kummer, a journalist from Atlantic Monthly. The crowd roars, photographers are swept to the sides, and the powerful sharing starts.

Alice Waters, vice president of Slow Food, shared her stories about being invited to the San Francisco Jail, as they wanted to sell her the vegetables grown by the inmates. Even if at first she refused to visit but just agreed to buy their produce, she then realized what powerful connection they made when she knew who her producers were. She visited the convicts and softened them up by showing them how growing your own food can be good for you physically, and also good for the soul.

After such a different experience, she thought that one did not have to go to jail to learn about growing food. And that the last democratic institution is actually the public school. “Every child has a longing to reconnect to Nature,” she says.  The school system is the “egalitarian way” to feed kids REAL food.

She then started the Edible Schoolyards Project, giving children healthier food that they actually grow in school.

They learned to reconnect with what Nature has for them. And planting vegetables also showed the best example of the virtue called Patience. You had to wait to grow food. It is the complete opposite of the fast, cheap and easy, 24/7 popular culture enveloping US schools, and most of US society.

She also continued serving “farm to table” food in her Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. And this became the bastion of the slow food movement in America.

Jamie Oliver, now 40 years old, has been a food activist and chef for the last 10 years in his native England. He believes we should all come together and sing like a choir to better fight – yes, fight is his word – the big institutions that spend at least $4.5 billion a year in advertising and a total of $25 billion globally to sell “junk food” to our children. He also reminded the crowd that in 2013, more people died of obesity and other food-related illness than from hunger and famine.

He claims Alice Waters inspired him to get involved after he visited her place in Berkeley. “There are no standards for children’s food in schools in the UK, but there are standards for dog food!” he announces. 

Between the ages of 4-18 years, children are denied the right to education about food. For 190 days a year, they are exposed to bad food in the school system. And this is what the movement has changed recently, after 10 years. In the UK children under 7 years get school lunch. This is the group that can make the change in policy when they grow up.

So, he is positive that this generation can make the change in policies in government as soon as they arrive at positions of power. When the older politicians are retired, the new generation of policy makers can make the change, followed by the children who got exposed to the UK laws his movement helped to file and pass.

“Use the election issue,” he says. People want to know these issues during elections and this is also the time politicians seek votes. Because families are seduced by convenience, they forget the issues when elections are over. But because there was no let-up in his campaign for better food in schools, the government committed to provide 1 billion pounds to make documentaries about what “school food should look like,” pass laws to make children aware of their right to good food, among many other campaigns.

It is admirable that a young chef (when he started he was only 30) had the gumption to do these moves, which now his own children will experience, and on to the next generation. “But the fight goes on,” he says. “We should not be just one voice, but a whole choir” to make the bigger change in the world. And he believes technology will have a role in swaying where the vote goes, and where the dollar or pound of spend goes.

“A vegetable garden is a political act,” Jamie says. While 16 million tons of precious food are wasted everyday around the world, many children are hungry for “good, clean and fair food,” the slow food rockstar says.

And finally, Carlo Petrini speaks. He talks passionately about the Philosophy of Economics which is wrong and about Aristotle defining what happiness is. Which is not about making money, as many people think the goal of everyone should be. Rather, happiness is about having good food and being able to eat it.

Like Jamie, he reiterates that we can no longer work alone to make the world realize the need to change. And we now must join forces.

Their last words at this conference?

Alice Waters: Make a film about food and where it comes from.

Jamie Oliver: Use the election issue to drive home the point about food for children.

Carlo Petrini: Inform consumers about how food is produced. Because the present food system is criminal. It destroys biodiversity. It wins because it is based on ignorance.

If it is any indication of where the Slow Food movement is going, this year carbonated drinks and sugary sweets will be banned in all Italian schools.

In the UK, there are now laws for standards for children’s meals in schools.

And in the United States, the fight goes on but little wins are gained each day.

After all, it is also in the USA where the fast food craze and the culture of fast, cheap and easy started.

So they must do more and continue to do it in the White House and in every schoolyard in America.

“Every child has the right to good, clean and fair food.”

Are you now wondering what our kids are eating in Philippine public schools?