Barry Foy’s Recent Comments

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  Whose Mandate?

  I've been surprised, in the various print and online postmortems of SFN (which I attended), at the seeming reluctance on many people's part to simply profit from the massive amount of energy expended in planning and staging the event, from the mountain of goodwill it embodied and spread, from the powerfully democratic sentiments promulgated by its panelists, and from the historic convergence of minds and hands and ideas that it represented (not to mention some tasty bites of food).

  Instead, the focus is drawn back again and again to how much some people paid for their restaurant dinners and Taste Pavilion tickets, and whether too many white folks attended. In dispiriting contrast with Tom Philpott's more balanced outlook, I'm seeing a lot of self-congratulation among people who rate themselves as mighty shrewd for being able to discern certain ironies regarding race and class in SFN.

  But in fact those contradictions are the most obvious things in the world, and to obsess on them risks blurring the big picture. I mean, are we really implying that a panel featuring Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, and Mr. Schlosser, with Wes Jackson sitting in the audience, is there in service to elitism and privilege? It is both an absurdity and an insult.

  Slow Food Nation aimed to bring issues to the fore in a way, and with a degree of concentration, that is radical in our time and place. The fact that the event is being discussed so much afterwards provides proof that that goal was reached, at least in part. We have little to gain from conjuring up an imaginary checklist of standards the event was supposed to have met, standards that can vary considerably from one evaluator to the next. On the contrary, by not crediting Slow Food Nation for what it did manage to accomplish, and not taking advantage of all of that, we stand to lose much.      On Slow Food Nation was magnificent in many ways, but overshot its mandate posted 1 year, 2 months ago 17 Responses

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  Keep Up the Good Work

  Thanks for compiling this list. Although it's bound to be an abstract exercise in the end, it more than pays its way by sparking further discussion on the topic--I mean, if a "my chef's greener than your chef" debate doesn't represent progress, then I don't know what does. My only quibble is that the notion of food sustainability must ultimately boil down to what might be called "eating for keeps," so to focus on the pillars of the Culinary Irony-Fantasy-Preciosity Complex, i.e., the various molecular gastronomists, may be missing the point, regardless of how local and sustainable their ingredients are. Nothing personal.     On 15 Green Chefs posted 2 years, 4 months ago 25 Responses