Food Chain Goes Global
Slow Food Northern Ohio has 200-plus paid members and about 500 people on its mailing list. Membership fees support the national office. Meanwhile, the parent organization claims more than 100,000 members in 132 countries. It was founded in 1989 in Turin, Italy, to protest plans to open a McDonald’s near Rome’s Spanish Steps. Every two years, Slow Food stages Terra Madre, a gathering of producers, cooks and others involved in the process. It aims to foster global sustainability in food.
Karen Small (pictured, center, with Doug Katz, chef/owner fire food & drink, and Kari Moore), owner of the Flying Fig on West 25th Street, is one of three local sustainable food enthusiasts going to Terra Madre October 21 to 25 in Turin. She considers her restaurant a slow food venue. “For us, it entails how we approach food seasonally, which has become a little bit of a cliché recently, but in the long run is a good thing,” she says. “We certainly approach food locally: over 90 percent of our menu is sourced from local farms, local dairies, and local cheese makers. We subscribe to a sustainable philosophy – not necessarily organic, (but) organic when possible. I’d rather eat something sustainable down the road than organic Dole spinach. If people are farming with a purpose and minimally use sprays, I’d rather eat that food than mass produced organic food.”
The slow food movement is “very strong” for a city Cleveland’s size, Small says. “In downtown neighborhoods, there are so many people raising their own chickens, the urban garden has just exploded. There’s a new one on Woodland close to Martin Luther King, we have several in Tremont, there’s the Kentucky Gardens in Ohio City, there are gardens in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. Cleveland Botanical Garden has a huge program for urban kids in schools where they learn gardening and grow in different spots around the city and then take the stuff they grow to the farmers’ market.” The latter will be among the featured vendors at RIPE!
Eating slow food may “appear more expensive” than consuming fast – okay, faster – food, but the health benefits are undeniable, she says. “If we start raising our children at an early age on good, wholesome food, not McDonald’s or cafeteria food, problems like obesity are going to diminish."
For more information about this year's RIPE! Food & Garden Festival, click here.
