San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newson sat down with chef, food activist, and Slow Food International vice president Alice Waterso to help publicize Slow Food Nation, a giant celebration of food, farming, and culture that is coming to San Francisco on Labor Day weekend in late August.

The first people to eat takenoko, or young bamboo shoots, must have been really, really hungry.

Could native foods be the next big thing in eating? Some people, Gary Nabhan in particular, are working to push things in that direction.

Posts by bloggers at both personal and nonprofit sites that you won’t want to miss.

This week was Noshette’s birthday, and among the many things we did to celebrate was to have dinner at Les Jardins Sauvages, which in English means "the wild gardens", a woodland table restaurant in St.Roch de l’Achigan. (Since I no longer go by the name "Nosher", Noshette will now be known as "Megan".) The 30 […]

Come August, I’m usually knee deep in tomatoes, and there’s no escape but to fire up the stove and start canning… again and again.

I’m in Tunis, and I’ve finally yanked out the DSL plug fused directly into my brain, in order to enjoy the last few days of serious R&R while Marc so ably keeps the Ethicurean home fires burning. (Pelosi, how could you?)

The Digest trawls the Web for tasty news, features, op-eds and blog posts — from Farm Bill updates to backyard chickens, transgenic foods, E. coli recalls, and sustainable fish. No extra charge for the puns.

Tana at I (Heart) Small Farms has the latest in the face-off between Slow Food leader Carlo Petrini and Ferry Plaza farmers who felt insulted by his description of the market, its clientele, and their prices.

NEWSFEATURES & COMMENTARYUCcandy bars off-limits to strict vegetarians: Masterfoods has begun using whey containing rennet, an animal product, in famous chocolate bars such as the Mars Bar, Bounty, Snickers, Twix, and Milky Way. Since we know very few junkfood-eating vegetarians, as opposed to vegans, who actually avoid products made with gelatin or cochineal, we’re guessing this is not going to hurt sales.

The sun was not yet warm enough when, in the company of my chef friend Alice Waters, I entered an elegantly refurbished area of the docks; pretty little coffee shops were serving warm mugs of excellent organic fairtrade coffee; sumptuous bakeries were putting out all sorts of good things, spreading the fragrant aroma of some wonderful kinds of bread…. The former, with long hair and a plaid flannel shirt, held his lovely little blond-haired daughter in his arms and told me, in a conspiratorial tone, that he had to drive two hundred miles to come and sell in that market: he charged incredibly high prices for his squashes, it was “a cinch,” and in just two monthly visits he could earn more than enough to maintain his family and spend hours surfing on the beach…. He replied: There are many cases of organic farming that are not sustainable, because they create a vast monoculture, one that relies on the use of integrated pesticides which greatly reduce the surrounding biodiversity: vast stretches of vineyards in Chile and in Italy, huge plantations of vegetables in California, hectares and hectares of olive groves in Spain…. Social sustainability can be achieved through public intervention, through politics: in Brazil, in those regions where the Workers’ Party con-trols the local government, all food served in public cafeterias must by law be organic and must be produced by small local producers at fair but accessible prices. Agroecology has a scientific basis, but it also has profound political implications, because it is badly in need of public intervention: before an agroecological approach can be established in Latin America, there must be agrarian reform and public intervention in the market to protect small farmers or to guarantee fair prices for producers and consumers.

On May 10 Dairy Queen and I went to a lecture by Slow Food International founder Carlo Petrini, who’s on the road to promote the English-language release of his book “Slow Food Nation.” The book, which we have not yet read, is about the future of food, and what we must do to prevent […]

People who enjoy sausage and respect the law should not watch either being made.
That curt assessment is usually attributed to 19th-century statesman Otto von Bismarck, and I can certainly agree with him about the second part. For example, it’s hard to see how all the maneuvering and wheeling-and-dealing and horse trading going on around the […]

I used to make fun of the Dairy Queen Mother for talking to strangers everywhere she went — in elevators, grocery stores, even movie-theater bathrooms. Actually, she still does it, and I still tease her about it, partly because she has no “psychodar” (sorry, Mom).
But when the subject is SOLE food, I’m finding it […]

There’s a benefit for Slow Food tonight from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Admission to “Food from the Heart” is free, and the marketplace’s merchants and restaurateurs will be offering seasonal hors d’oeuvres for $2 each, while Slow Food will pour interesting wines to taste for $5 per […]