By Jack Schtuff:
If you’ll be in or near the city on Labor Day weekend, consider marking your calendars for the Slow Food Nation Festival at City Hall. They call it the “Victory Garden”, and it’s a deep-rooted concept that brings fresh food to urban people. Sure we have our Whole Foods and other “fresh” markets…but there’s something about picking greens, carrots, and a radish bouquet from rich, organic soil, and chopping it up in your salad. Agree?
From the AP:
Snap peas, broccoli, leeks, eggplant, pumpkins and peppers are flourishing in City Hall’s front yard, a bounty meant to peak for the festival. After the last speech, it will be harvested and donated to the San Francisco Food Bank for distribution to the needy. Touchy about his image as one of “these nutty mayors,” as he put it, Mayor Gavin Newsom denies there is any hippie plantation outside his office. “Not everyone gets it yet. There have been some folks who criticize this as if we are building some farm out in City Hall,” he said.
“This whole movement,” it turns out, includes a whole buffet of issues, from protecting workers’ and growers’ rights; to banishing pesticides and other chemicals; to ensuring rich and poor have equal access to good food.
So all you green, sustainable, fair trade, and farmer’s market types of people should try to check out the Mayor’s new view. It’s fresh, urban living at it’s finest and I think this group is on to something…educational and beautifully positive.
Slow Food Nation [website]
In SF City Hall front yard, a bounty of produce [AP]
Filed under: Food, Jack Schtuff, events , events, Food, jackson robertson
