Kari Moore, chapter president of Slow Food Northern Ohio, says there’s never been more going on in terms of local food than now. There has been an explosion of farmers markets in the area, and people are ever more curious about how the food they eat is produced. Moore is a co-chair of RIPE! Food & Garden Festival, which runs from 10 a.m. to sunset each day from September 24 to 26 and aims to nurture a slow food movement growing fast in northeastern Ohio.
“With every industrial food problem we have – and there have been quite a few lately, like e. coli in meat supplies and salmonella in eggs – people want to have a better understanding of how food is produced,” says Moore, who sells locally grown produce through her subscription service, farmshareohio.com. “I think they’re coming to this [slow food] for health, and people want something authentic; they want a connection, they want to look a farmer in the eye.”
They badly want food local, she says. “We go to the market every day, we buy stale bread, it’s not very fulfilling; you want something more flavorful, more nutritious, buying from a local farm and having that experience.
"We have great supermarkets here; I go to them, too. We need a local system as well. I think they can complement each other.”
Such couplings will figure at Ripe! “All of my vegetables and meats come from local farms,” says Moore. “We buy milk from a local dairy that we purchase at a locally owned grocery store. You’ll still find me at Whole Foods, because there’s a certain brand of yogurt from Pennsylvania that I can’t find anywhere else.”
“Local” means different things to different people. For Moore, “it’s about trying to buy everything I eat from someone who cares. We can have a much more fair, fruitful form of trade than we’ve had in the past.”
For her, slow food means “taking a little more time to think about what it is you’re eating and what it is you’re doing. It’s not blindly eating and blindly shopping, but thinking about the consequences.
"Upstream, you would have your farms and producers, and you think about how they’re treated. Downstream, you’re thinking about the environment and what happens to the trash. Can there be a slow food burger? That burger is made with a local bun, locally produced grass-fed beef, a tomato from your garden.
“It’s not either or, it’s something we can all be a little better at. Wanting to do it more becomes the way you look at life.”
