The Fast Track to Slow Food

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via CommonDreams:



Published on Friday, August 22, 2008 by The Huffington Post
The Fast Track to Slow Food
by Kerry Trueman


Look, I hate the military-industrial complex as much as the next hemp-seed snacking, kombucha-brewing, raw-milk swigging real food revolutionary. After all, they're the ones who saturated our soil with their surplus nitrogen in the wake of World War II, reversing generations of careful land stewardship in the name of moving forward. They declared corn King, and turned our supermarkets into minefields littered with fat, salt and sugar bombs. Our blown-up kids? Just collateral damage in the eternal battle to boost Big Food's bottom line.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Agribiz ascendancy; the same military-industrial complex that locked us into this fuel-ish food chain also gave us the key to free ourselves--the Internet. Presumably, the Department of Defense didn't develop this technology in order to empower citizen activists, but isn't it nice to finally have an unintended consequence we can cheer about? Unlike, say, cross-contamination from genetically modified crops, or E. coli-tainted produce, or fertilizer-fed algae blooms or--oh, nevermind.

The Internet has proved to be extremely fertile ground for the good food movement, nurturing a virtual community of sustainably minded farmers, foodies, and activists. Websites championing the agrarian agenda are sprouting up everywhere, like Roundup-resistant super weeds, ready to take on the unsustainable status quo.

The challenge, now, is how to keep track of them all. And that's where the Eat Well Guide's new booklet Cultivating The Web: High Tech Tools For The Sustainable Food Movement comes in handy. This nifty free guide is available now, in its entirety, on the Eat Well Guide website, and a print edition will make its debut later this month at Slow Food Nation (full disclosure compels me to admit that I was a consultant to this project, which turned out wonderfully nonetheless.)

Cultivating The Web gives a terrific overview of the many ways that such digital tools as social networking, YouTube, and wikis have helped promote an alternative food system, one that aims to give all Americans access to what the Slow Food folks like to call "good, clean, and fair" food. That's good as in delicious, clean as in sustainably produced, and fair, meaning the workers who grow it are not exploited, and the fruits of their labor are not just for an elite few. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/22-5