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. 

FOOD for Lane County: Harvesting social media

For those of us who didn't grow up in the age of smartphones and constant online communication, social networking can present a professional dilemma. For every success story about a company making its mark online, there seem to be a dozen cautionary tales of public figures putting their virtual foot in their mouth in real time, or worse.

More importantly, from the perspective of a nonprofit organization, cultivating a social media following and

All images courtesy of FFLC.

maintaining multiple online profiles takes time and effort. Is the potential payoff worth it for an organization devoted to helping people in the community, not bolstering its bottom line?

Last week, I sat down with Dawn Marie Woodward to talk about adding social media to a nonprofit’s traditional communications toolkit. Woodward, the president of the Greater Oregon Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, serves as events and media relations coordinator for FOOD for Lane County (FFLC).

Critical Mass: It’s all about the bike community

The Eugene Weekly included this story in their Earth Day On Wheels special edition published April 18, 2013.
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We’re living in a golden age of cycling. And we might have a bunch of loud, traffic-stopping cycling activists with anarchistic tendencies — better known as Critical Mass — to thank for it.

For the uninitiated, Critical Mass (CM) is a quasi-organized monthly bike ride that takes place on the last Friday of the month in cities across the globe. Founded in San Francisco in September 1992, the ride is part-rolling street party, part-pro-cycling demonstration, often chaotic and a heck of a good time — minus the occasional arrest — but, hey, even those can have side benefits.

True, cyclists on CM rides have run red lights to stay with the pack to the ire of drivers stuck idling at green lights. And in some cities CM rides draw controversy and cops like magnets. But in the pre-Lance Armstrong era — before charity fundraising rides became popular and hipsters discovered single speeds — CM played a big role in raising public awareness of cycling as a sustainable community choice and part of a healthy lifestyle.

Critter Cruise at Kesey Square on April 4. Photo by Eugene Weekly 

In its heyday, Eugene’s CM made plenty of headlines due to an overly aggressive police crackdown in the summer of 2006. Since then, the local CM ride has petered out — replaced by less overtly political and confrontational group rides that local cycling enthusiasts organize via word of mouth and social media, such as the “Critter Cruise” that pedaled off from Kesey Square April 4.

In 1991, a year before the first Critical Mass, the federal government spent a measly $4 to $6 million annually on cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. By 2008 that figure had grown to $541 million, according to government data. Between 2001 and 2011 alone, national bike use rose by 39 percent.

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.

Loco for Locavorism...maybe someday?

During an interview today for my upcoming article on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in the Willamette Valley, Elin England, author of Eating Close to Home: A Guide to Local Seasonal Sustenance, asked me if I'd heard about the recent release of  The Strolling of the Heifers' new Locavore Index. "What's that," I said, my fingers busy tap-tap-tapping text into the Google search bar on my laptop. "A locavore index. How cool is that?"

Not as cool as you'd think, if you're a die hard Duck and loco about local food (I'll definitely cop to the second and, well, I do have two degrees from UO, so there's that...) Turns out, Oregon ranks 14th in the nation, in terms of CSAs and farmers markets per capita. My first response, in all honesty: REALLY?! Come on, Oregon, we can do better (or tweets to that effect). I guess Portlandia may have to move to Burlington, at least for its next food-based skit.

Community forests: Can a town save its nearby trees?

This follow-up story on the Williams Community Forest Project ran in the Eugene Weekly's Earth Day 2012 special edition, published on April 18, 2012.

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The idea of a community forest has been kicking around the Siskiyou Mountain hamlet of Williams, Ore., for a while. But it took an out-of-state landowner’s plan to slash forests safeguarding the town’s water supply to turn ideas into action.

This spring, loggers are razing diverse groves of second-growth trees on a 320-acre plot above Williams. Meanwhile locals are raising money to buy the land in hopes of establishing an economically productive, sustainably managed public forest.

Local kids Jade Butterfly and Asa Mountain play in a patch of BLM timberland while WCFP videographer Ben Day documents the ongoing clearcutting of the W320.

In 2000 locals first pressured then-owner Boise Cascade to shelve logging plans for the groves, known as the W320, a wildlife corridor that is home to the red tree vole, Pacific fisher, mariposa lily and northern spotted owl, as well as the site of a well-used hiking and horse riding trail. In February 2011, Idaho timberman Michael Riggs bought the W320 for $900,000, according to Williams Community Forest Project (WCFP) President Cheryl Bruner, whose group tried unsuccessfully to buy the land from Riggs before cutting started.

“It was well known that this property was of interest to the community,” says Bruner. “Riggs knew about the protest when he bought it.”

Buying a Forest to Save It

This news brief first appeared in the Eugene Weekly on March 15, 2012. I learned about the efforts of the Williams Community to protect its watershed and forests thanks to a social media outreach undertaken by local teenagers. I was able to publish a lengthier followup story in the EW's Earth Day special edition.

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A southern Oregon community’s effort to protect forestland has become a race against the chainsaw. The Williams Community Forest Project (WCFP) is working to purchase a locally vital 320-acre tract of forestland where clearcutting has started, in order to preserve it as a “community forest.”

As loggers raze a hillside forest shadowing the Siskiyou Mountain hamlet of Williams, community members have secured $116,000 in cash and pledges towards $500,000 they need to secure an estimated $1.5 million low-interest loan to purchase the land, know as the W320. According to the WCFP, logging plans call for 250 acres of clearcuts in buffered 120-acre blocks.

Concerned Williams residents taking a look at the damage to a popular hiking trail bordering the W320 logging project.

 WCFP wants to buy the tract as soon as possible or facilitate a benefactor’s purchase of the land under a conservation easement. Enterprise Cascadia of Portland has committed to lend 65 percent of the assessed value of the property, but that leaves much of fundraising to be done.