Slow Food USA: The message is the movement

Willamette Valley CSA farmer Derek Brandow introduces a
potential customer to his flock.

On the surface, the Slow Food message is simple: Everyone deserves access to “good, clean, and fair food.” Convincing U.S. consumers to buy into that message, however, is a herculean task.

Consider that agribusiness conglomerates, which receive the lion’s share of the $10 billion annual U.S. agriculture subsidy, pour an estimated $32 billion annually into advertising. What are they selling? The highly processed, sugar and fat dense prepackaged foods  that make up the average American diet.

Yet over the past two decades, organic food sales have skyrocketed while Consumer Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms and thousands of farmers markets have sprung up across the country. Why is that? Has the Slow Food movement successfully countered the dominant American food narrative, which says the best food, even if not nutritious, is quick, cheap and convenient? 

To learn more about Slow Food USA’s communications strategies, I recently dug into Ashli Quesinberry Stokes’ academic study on efforts to brand the movement, recruit supporters and combat the agribusiness advertising blitz. 

Part-time farmers

This article first appeared in the November/December 2012 edition of In Good Tilth, the magazine of Oregon Tilth. In the interest of full disclosure, when I began researching this article, my wife Leeann was considering subscribing to Lonesome Whistle's CSA program in order to get whole grains to mill at home. After interviewing Jeff and Kasey, the decision was an easy one. The couple's passion for what they do is infectious. The pictures below show them in the midst of harvesting heirloom  Indian Woman Yellow Beans.

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As the sun climbs the sky south of Junction City, Oregon, Jeff Broadie and Kasey White finish a simple breakfast on the porch of their modest, sky-blue two story house. A weathered Allis Chalmers All-Crop 60 combine sits hitched to a red-orange tractor a stone’s throw away. Soon, the Sunday sun will have driven the last moisture from Indian Woman yellow bean plants piled for drying in the field beyond. Forgoing a day of rest, the couple will feed the rare, heirloom beans through the combine, harvesting a crop popular with local consumers eager for regionally produced food.

White, from Idaho, met Broadie, a Colorado native, while both attended college in Fort Collins, Colorado. Neither came from a farming background. “We didn’t even know we wanted to farm,” says Broadie, relating how a food-politics course awakened him to food security and sustainability issues and inspired the couple to head to Oregon after graduation, to take advantage of the Willamette Valley’s climate and farming community.

The plight of the modern farmer is well known: an aging population cultivating a shrinking amount of acreage, a younger generation abandoning the farm for work elsewhere, corporations consolidating their control over the food supply. Broadie and White exemplify a more encouraging agricultural trend–young people moving into farming from other industries or straight out of college while working off the farm to supplement their income or build towards a full-time farming career. Though many do not come from an agricultural background, these new farmers bring a strong work ethic, an enthusiasm for environmentally friendly growing practices, innovative ideas and an interest in building community as well as in producing good food.

Community Supported Agriculture: Good growing on so many levels

This article first appeared in the 2012/2013 edition of the Natural Choice Directory for the Willamette Valley. When  publisher Larry Fried asked me if I wanted to write an article for the NCD about CSA agriculture, the timing could not have been better. I had just signed up with a local raw-dairy herdshare and was planning to visit a local chicken farmer to determine if our family wanted to subscribe to his CSA program. I was inspired to use my own experiences with CSAs as the narrative structure for the article.

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You’ll forgive me if I didn’t put too much thought into my first experience with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). When my college housemate suggested that we split a share in a local CSA farm, I thought a farm share might be a convenient way to cut down on shopping while getting a box of fresh produce every week. I liked the fact that the box contained a newsletter detailing events on the farm and recipes for the vegetables and root crops inside. The recipes came in handy. I had never even heard of some of those crops, much less cooked them before.

It was much later, when my family began to make a concerted effort to eat as sustainably and as close to home as possible, that I began to really understand the full impact of CSA participation on local food webs. A share in a CSA farm connects a consumer in a meaningful way to the local agricultural community. CSAs support small farmers, ensuring that diverse crops and heirloom varieties are available locally. Perhaps more importantly, they play a vital role in regional food security in an era where climate change and economic instability appear set to transform global food availability.

My daughter Lily inspects the chicks at Our Family Farm before we joined the CSA program.