Slow Food Sacramento Featured in the Sacramento Bee!
This story is taken from Sacbee / Food & Wine/Taste
Slow food picks up speed
Sacramento is in the thick of the movement focusing on what we eat and how it’s produced
By Gwen Schoen - gschoen@sacbee.com
Several years ago, when Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, visited the San Francisco chapter of his international organization, he gave them this advice: “Slow down. Pause and savor. Enjoy the bounty of the Earth. Wrap yourself around family, friends and your culinary heritage, and know the source of your food. Plant Utopia and harvest a new reality.”
Slow Food, in a simplified definition, is exactly the opposite of fast food. The concept began nearly 25 years ago when a McDonald’s restaurant opened on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Petrini, an Italian journalist, saw this event as an invasion and a threat to his heritage and culture. He organized a protest on the Spanish Steps. The idea grew, and a few years later, he founded Slow Food, now an international organization that supports the preservation of culinary heritage, ecological awareness and commitment to sustainable agriculture. The movement became viral, and today, members number more than 80,000 in 130 countries.
The Slow Food movement arrived in Sacramento in 2002 when Kira O’Donnell, then a communications director of the department of viticulture at the University of California, Davis, established a local chapter.
Chapters in Slow Food are called convivia, which means to live with, hence to feast with. There are 170 convivia in the United States, including the Sacramento chapter, which now has about 150 members.
Members of Slow Food include those who are enthusiastic about preserving the heritage foods identified by Slow Food as endangered, including things such as heirloom tomatoes, heritage turkeys, cheese made by Old World methods or wines made from heritage grapes. The Sacramento members, however, are more concerned about eating locally and seasonally.
A devotion to freshness
Most grammar-school kids who brown-bag their lunch take a bologna or PB&J sandwich. When James Triche, now 13, was in grammar school, his lunch was often pasta with homemade pesto. His parents are foodies. But not just foodies: Dr. Maga Jackson-Triche and David Triche are passionate about cooking from scratch and using fresh ingredients purchased at specialty stores and farmers markets.
Johnnie Beer, an attorney who lives in east Sacramento, spent Super Bowl Sunday seeding pomegranates while he watched the game. For Beer and his wife, Melinda, dinner is an event. They spend hours planning menus and wines and shopping for ingredients. Their backyard garden is packed with tomatillos, tomatoes and peppers.
For a living, Charity Kenyon, an attorney who lives in Galt, makes righteous prosecutors eat humble pie. At home, she and her husband, Mike Eaton, spend most of their time tending their 7-acre property. Six years ago, they moved from the Land Park neighborhood of Sacramento so they would have the space to grow all their own fruits and vegetables. Their expansive gardens provide ample produce to keep them, their friends and many neighbors well supplied.
These three families have, in their own way, embraced Petrini’s Slow Food mantra.
“For me, preparing food, planning a menu, gathering my friends around the table, serving fresh, seasonal and locally produced food, that is what Slow Food is all about,” says Johnnie Beer. “It’s about pausing to experience the flavors and appreciate the effort that the farmer has made to grow the food and how it was prepared.”
“It’s definitely about eating seasonally but also cooking from scratch rather than packages,” says David Triche, a teacher at Luther Burbank High School.
The Triche family relocated to Sacramento after losing their home in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Their midtown home doesn’t have space for a vegetable garden, so the family shops at farmers markets for locally grown produce. Other shopping trips include visits to ethnic markets.
“Here in Sacramento, we are very blessed to have so many farmers markets where we can meet the farmers, learn where the food was grown or produced. It’s important to preserve and support that resource,” Triche says.
“We have belonged to several convivia, and the Sacramento group is one of the most active, with a dedicated membership and wonderfully diverse meeting topics.”
Meetings at the local chapter range from chef demonstrations to visiting local farms, participating in an olive press or learning about regional wines.
“We are quite willing to wait until August to eat tomatoes,” says Melinda Beer. “Rather than buy tomatoes imported from Mexico, we wait until the season begins again. It’s also about cooking from scratch.”
A typical weeknight dinner at the Beers’ might be a traditional Thai dish, fresh fish from the fishmonger at the farmers market or an organic chicken from Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op. “That’s the slow food way,” says Melinda Beer.
We asked for a peek into her kitchen cabinets. Other than a few cans of chicken stock and breakfast cereal, all we found there were a few condiments and an impressive collection of spices organized by cuisine.
Their harvest is personal
Charity Kenyon and Mike Eaton completely embraced the slow food lifestyle when they left city life behind and moved to Galt.
Eaton is executive director of Resources Legacy Fund, which supports sustainable land use and conservation. Dressed in a T-shirt, old khakis and a well-worn hat, he happily grazes through his garden, picking tomatoes, nectarines and melons, slicing them and offering samples.
“Lunch,” he says with a grin as nectarine juice drips through his fingers. Chickens scamper as he walks down the long rows of vegetables.
“We grow 37 types of tomatoes, and we have several types of melons along with corn, apricots, peaches, apples, grapes, carrots, lettuce, rhubarb, strawberries, eggplant, broccoli, tangerines and a lot more. At one point this summer, we were harvesting 50 melons a day.”
How can one couple use all those melons?
“We carry them around in the trunk of the car offering them to people at the office, friends, family and neighbors. The extras go to a food closet,” he says.
Kenyon estimates they spend two long days a week tending to the garden. “When you grow what you eat, of course you eat seasonally,” she says. “And you learn to enjoy the change of seasons. When you have to wait for a tomato to ripen, the anticipation makes it worthwhile.
“Living like this is about so much more than the food,” says Kenyon. “We share skills with neighbors and we trade what we grow. We bring friends and family to our table and that’s what a convivium is all about.”
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Want to Help Support Corti Bros. Market?
There is a petition drive, and a press conference planned for Sept 3. The press conference will be attended by a growing list of well-known chefs and others to call for allowing Corti Bros. to remain in their current location at least until after the holidays this year. If they have to move at the end of September they won’t be able to open for several months and suffer such a financial blow it may be hard to reopen.
Mr. Corti is well known to the food community across the nation and the globe, and many of you know him personally, and am sure you would want to support him, something he would not want to ask you himself.
Corti Bros. store is an institution to both the Sacramento and gourmet communities. Unfortunately, this institution may no longer have a place to call home. A Web site has been set up to provide an outlet for the community to rally behind the Corti Bros., to demonstrate that Corti customers care about the market’s livelihood and do not want to see its business threatened. On the site, please feel free to leave comments, stories and well wishes for the Cortis to continue at their current location.
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