Courtesy Save the BayListen up all you Gristers who live along the California coast: This Saturday is Coastal Cleanup Day.  Join your friends, neighbors, frenemies and complete strangers in a community-wide effort to get the plastic crap out of the ocean.

Plastic isn’t just a problem way out in the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. For example, the folks at Save the Bay have put together a pretty neat interactive to show you just how bad plastic pollution is in the Bay area.

Find out how you can join the Coastal Cleanup fun: S.F. Bay Area, San Diego, Los Angeles.

And if you’re not in California, not to worry, because this Saturday is International Coastal Cleanup Day. Here’s all you need to know about how to connect with cleanup efforts in your coastal community, courtesy of the Ocean Conservancy. (Another list here.)

What’s that? You don’t live anywhere near the ocean? Well, how about spending a few minutes on Saturday picking up trash in your community.  Better yet, stop using plastic bags altogether and pester your pals to join the reusable bag crusade.

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Seattle is the most sustainable big city in the nation, according to a list compiled by Smarter Cities, an NRDC project that looks at the progress American cities are making toward going green. Not surprisingly, San Francisco and Portland are the runners-up.

Using data from the EPA and the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as some voluntary survey responses from city governments, the project identified the top 15 large, medium, and small cities according to 10 different environmental criteria, from air quality to recycling to transportation.

Here's a look the top 15 large cities (population of 250,000 or more):

It's hard not to be environmentally minded in a city with views like this.Photo: Simonds1. Seattle
The Emerald City gets props for its brand-new light rail system, reliance on hydroelectricity (and the resulting good air quality), Mayor Greg Nickels' U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Agreement, and two global warming initiatives: Seattle Climate Action Now and Seattle Climate Partnership. Seattleites are described as "highly educated and environmentally minded." Think it's just a coincidence that Grist is headquartered here?

San Francisco is one of the most densely populated cities in the country.Photo: ATIS5472. San Francisco
San Francisco's dense population, walkability, plastic-bag ban, city-created carbon offset fund, solar power program, and booming local food movement propelled it to the No. 2 spot. (Read more about Mayor Gavin Newsom's green efforts.)

Portland has always been a leader in big-city sustainability.Photo: Ben Amstutz3. Portland
Seattle's neighbor to the south got its light rail up and running more than 20 years ago, and the city has always been ahead of the curve on controlling urban sprawl and suppressing greenhouse-gas emissions. Portland's residents also recycle more than half their waste.

Oakland is making a green comeback.Photo: satanslaundromat4. Oakland, Calif.
This once-struggling city has a Green Jobs Corps, a New Urbanist 10K Downtown Housing Initiative, a Zero Waste Plan, and a growing local food movement (as urban farmer Novella Carpenter explains). It also gets 17 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Sounds like there is a there there.

How green was my Silicon Valley?Photo: the_tahoe_guy5. San Jose, Calif.
Always on the cutting edge of the high-tech world, this capital of Silicon Valley is fast on its way to leading the green-jobs revolution. Its Green Vision includes plans for bringing 25,000 new clean-tech jobs to the area.

Austin's new smart grid will light up the night -- sustainably, of course.Photo: Visualist Images6. Austin, Texas
A liberal outpost in red Texas, this city owns its electric utility (meaning voters elect the utility's board) and plans to adopt a smart grid in the near future.

Sacramento aims to be green while it grows.Photo: kla40677. Sacramento, Calif.
The Golden State's capital, while suffering from the side effects of rapid population growth, has a progressive, publicly owned utility that, in addition to offering a 100 percent renewable power option, provides free trees to residents hoping to cool their homes with natural shade.

Boston stands out among less-green East Coast cities.Photo: werkunz18. Boston, Mass.
Boston's push toward wind and solar energy, its efforts to become more bike-friendly, and its LED traffic lights make it a leader on the environmentally lagging East Coast.

Denver conserves water like nobody's business.Photo: kla40679. Denver, Colo.
The Mile High City is already way ahead of its goals for reducing water consumption. Its new bike-sharing and composting programs and extensive system of city parks also helped it make the top 15.

Chicago's city hall has its own green roof.Photo: Smarter Cities10. Chicago
Always famous for its architecture, today Chicago has more LEED-certified buildings than any other U.S. city and boasts 300 green roofs. (Read more about Mayor Richard Daley's green efforts.)

San Diego is growing smart.Photo: Smarter Cities11. San Diego
Parks and open spaces make up almost a quarter of this city's land area, and its smart growth program has led to impressive developments.

The Big (Green) Apple.Photo: mikeleeorg12. New York City
What it lacks in air quality and renewable energy it makes up for in density, walkability, and Mayor Bloomberg's commitment to reducing the city's carbon footprint. (Read more about Bloomberg's green efforts.)

L.A. works to clear a path through the smog.Photo: Storm Crypt13. Los Angeles
Infamous for its smog and clogged freeways, L.A. is making admirable efforts to switch to renewable energy and conserve its water supply.

Big D: Greener than you'd think.Photo: dherrera_9614. Dallas
Dallas gets 40 percent of its electricity from wind, has seen a huge spike in public transit usage in recent years, and cracks down on lengthy truck idling during the "ozone season" from April to October.

Columbus hopes for an urban resurgence.Photo: jpmueller9915. Columbus, Ohio
A perhaps unexpected entry on the list, flat Columbus lends itself to bike-friendliness. The city has also been working hard to revitalize its downtown core and combat sprawl.

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Last July, the City and County of San Francisco launched the first local solar energy incentive program in the nation. The results are in, and the program is an unequivocal success.

In the year since our solar energy incentive program GoSolarSF launched, we have seen a 450% increase in applications for solar installations in San Francisco over the previous year, from 200 to 850. And despite the current recession, 56 applicants met our low-income standards and will receive incentive payments.

And nonprofit and affordable housing organizations are going solar too. Just last week, I joined a local affordable housing developer, our San Francisco Housing Authority and our San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to announce three new solar installations at Hayes Valley North and South and Plaza East public housing in San Francisco.

The dramatic increase in solar installations in San Francisco over the last year, coupled with the City's aggressive plans to deploy large-scale solar on municipal properties like the mammoth Sunset Reservoir, have helped catapult San Francisco to state leadership in solar power and renewable energy. A report issued last week by Environment California ranks San Francisco third, just behind much larger and much sunnier Los Angeles and San Diego, in number of rooftop solar installations in California. On a per-capita basis, San Francisco leads the state's large cities for rooftop solar.

The good work to create this program started with our local Solar Energy Task Force, chaired by our Assessor Phil Ting, who joined me and many others in thinking creatively about how to incentivize and accelerate solar power and renewable energy in San Francisco.

This year, we've managed to fund GoSolarSF at an even higher level despite a very tough budget year. That's because making clean energy and the environment a priority is also good for San Francisco's economy. Every solar installation incentivized creates good green jobs. The GoSolarSF program alone has created dozens of green jobs for low-income City residents who graduate from our workforce development programs.

By any measure, our solar energy incentive program has been a stellar success after just one year. If we continue making smart investments guided by the right priorities, imagine what we can do for our economy and our environment this year and in years to come.

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Freeing the grid

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is running for governor in California, and boy oh boy is he thumping on the green platform. Here’s your chance to determine and shape the environmental issues that our political leaders discuss with the media.

Here’s how it works

1. Submit your questions to Gavin Newsom about his green platform and run for governor on the by Monday, 5pm PST

2. Vote. Often. The six questions that make it to the top of the list are going to be asked by Current Green. Last chance to vote is 5pm PST, Tuesday.

3. Come back and see what additional 5 questions the editors of Treehugger, Huffington Post Green, Good Magazine, Grist, and Chelsea Green select.

3. Watch and banter during the live stream and chat on Thursday, 12pm PST, at www.current/green.

P.S. Want more info on Gavin Newsom’s platform on the environment? HAVE more info to share? Check it and clip it.

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Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

It's all yours.iStockI recently committed a subversive act: I sold my car, and I'm not buying a new one.

I'd thought that I'd feel virtuous and free -- and I do -- but it's turned out to be a bit more complicated than that.

Never too attached to my particular car, I considered it transportation, not a reflection of who I am. My job as an environmental reporter has taught me about the hazards of car ownership, from pollution and materials waste to sprawling, disconnected communities to oil politics -- even obesity. Yet in spite of living for 14 years in San Francisco, a compact city with good public transit, I'd held onto my car.

In fact, I did walk and bus many places. Plus the city has two car-share businesses, one with a lot around the corner from my house. Why did I need a car? I am the target market for these companies, yet the notion of selling my car still generated paranoia of being trapped in a lawless city after an apocalyptic event.

Finally, I realized that my 1997 Saturn SL2 wasn't getting any younger; it would be best to cut ties before it really cost me money. I considered buying another, but a quick look at used prices put me off that idea.

Doing the math -- insurance, registration, gas, maintenance, depreciation -- I was surprised to find that I would likely come out ahead by busing and car sharing. My plan to rent out my parking space was gravy. I joined the car-share company on trial and borrowed a car once to see how it worked. It was easy and kind of fun. Yet despite all this progress, I still resisted putting my car up for sale until my insurance came due again.

Because suddenly, instead of a rattletrap responsibility, my car felt like a security blanket. It could take me wherever I wanted to go, whenever I wanted! My depth of feeling for this vehicle, which I'd never really liked and sometimes felt guilty for using, caught me off guard. In spite of my values, I clearly wasn't immune to the way cars are embedded into our infrastructure and culture.

Finally, the time came. The morning of the sale, I drove to meet the buyer. On this, our last trip together, I looked around the car's interior and considered it with new eyes. Cleaner than usual, it felt cozy, almost homey. I thought to it, "Say goodbye to the neighborhood," simultaneously feeling verklempt and a bit ridiculous.

After the sale, I walked past where I'd last seen the car and instinctively veered to reunite with it. Laughing, I ruminated over my expected savings and the maintenance hassles I'd avoid, feeling a real sense of liberation.

In the weeks that I've been car-free, the story of Why I Sold My Car, And How I Will Travel Now has been a subject of intense interest from family, friends, neighbors, insurance agents. As I am one who enjoys challenging assumptions, these talks have been mostly fun.

Still, living differently has a learning curve. Frustration hit when I encountered a line at a car rental company (used for longer trips) and when I researched a bus route improperly and ended up late. But other lessons have been exciting, like when I realized a bus a block from the house takes me directly to three popular neighborhoods across the city.

I'm saving money, getting exercise by walking, and becoming more familiar with my city on the street level. If that's subversive, I'm for it.

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The more you talk to Shai Agassi, the more the Steve Jobs comparison seems apt.

Shai AgassiCourtesy Better PlaceLike his fellow Silicon Valley impresario, Agassi, the founder of electric car infrastructure startup Better Place, is as much a green-tech visionary as entrepreneur bent on cashing in on the "Next Big Thing." Just as Jobs elegantly married hardware and software to create the iPod and iPhone and disrupted the telecommunication-entertainment industrial complex, Agassi aims to do the same with transportation.

In case you missed the spate of national magazine stories on the former software executive and his company, Better Place has signed deals with governments in Israel, Denmark, Australia, California, Hawaii and Canada to build a web of electric car charging spots and battery-swapping stations.

Agassi aims to crack the chicken-and-egg electric vehicle dilemma by deploying the infrastructure that will give automakers the confidence to make carbon-free cars by the tens of millions while allaying drivers' "range anxiety" that they'll run out of juice on the way to grandma's house. Better Place will own your car's battery and sell you electricity by the mile (or kilometer) like your mobile phone company sells you minutes.

Better Place is not the only company pushing that model, but no competitor has raised as much money -- more than $200 million so far -- or signed deals with national governments to electrify their roadways.

Then there's the Agassi factor.

If Steve Jobs is a distant, "cult of personality" figure, making semi-annual pronouncements before the party faithful in a never-changing uniform of running shoes, jeans and turtleneck, Agassi is the Gen X enviro-evangelist in a sharply cut black suit, appearing before audiences large and small to sell the story of making the world a better place through electric transportation.

I sat down with Agassi recently to get an update on Better Place's progress and delve into just how the company plans to make money off a capital-intensive venture that will depend on an emerging EV ecosystem of carmakers, battery manufacturers and utilities, not to mention government policymakers.

Slight and dark-haired with a penetrating gaze, Agassi possesses Jobs' supreme charismatic self-confidence -- "The internal combustion engine is dead," he tells me matter-of-factly -- and parries every question with a ready set of facts and figures. We met at Fortune Magazine's Brainstorm Green conference in Southern California a few weeks before the scheduled May 13 unveiling of Better Place's prototype battery switching station in Japan. (Why Japan? "They paid for it," he says. "Japan is the most robust manufacturing and they fear being wrong" on electric cars.)

Think of Better Place's battery switching station as the electric version of gas station. Most of the time Better Place subscribers will top off their batteries at home or at battery charging posts -- about the size of a parking meter -- scattered around cities and suburbs. For trips that exceed a car's range, they'll pull into a switching station where a robot will unlatch a panel underneath the vehicle and remove the battery pack, install a fresh battery and close and lock the panel. Total time: About 40 seconds. The depleted battery is then recharged so it's ready for the next customer. Each Better Place station will cost about half million dollars and will maintain a store of 10 batteries.

"We've done tests where we've swapped the battery 200 times a day on a car," Agassi says. "It feels like a car wash more than anything else."

For $25 million, according to Agassi, Better Place could electrify the West Coast's Interstate 5 corridor.

So far, Renault-Nissan is the only automaker that has pledged to manufacture an electric car with a battery pack configuration compatible with the Better Place switching station. No worries, says Agassi, noting that in Israel -- the first country that will deploy a nationwide Better Place network -- the company has already taken more than 20,000 orders for electric Renaults. He says that's enough to break even on Better Place's initial $200 million investment in 100 switching stations and 100,000 charging posts. At somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 cars, Better Place turns a profit, according to Agassi, who notes that there are about 2 million cars on the road in Israeli and that about 200,000 cars were sold there in 2008.

Israel, a relatively tiny country, is one thing. But the suburbanized and continent-wide United States will require a much bigger investment in infrastructure. Agassi estimates that to do the initial build out of the San Francisco Bay Area, he'll need Northern Californians to buy between 40,000 and 50,000 electric vehicles -- no small number. When Better Place announced the $1 billion Bay Area deal with the mayors of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland last year, no automaker had committed to providing the electric cars, though Renault-Nissan has pledged to begin putting EVs in mass production by 2012.

A demonstration of what a Better Place charging station looks like. Watch the video at the bottom of this article for a demonstration of the company's battery-swapping stations.Courtesy Better PlaceAgassi says he expects Better Place to earn between $4,000 and $5,000 in annual battery subscription fees per car. That would be the equivalent of buying $76 to $100 worth of gasoline a week, which seems on the high side for even a suburban commuter given current gasoline prices. That's also far more than what Better Place's initial urban customers likely pay for gas. Of course, the wild card is the price of gas. If it goes back up to $4 or more per gallon, Better Place's numbers start to look more reasonable.

There are plenty of critics who question whether Better Place can raise the billions needed to build just the infrastructure for the deals the company has signed so far. Others doubt that automakers and battery manufacturers will adopt standardized technology to enable, for instance, the widespread use of Better Place switching stations.

None of which, of course, fazes Agassi. He says Better Place has the cash to build the Israel network and Denmark -- next up with a 2011 roll out -- is financed as well. He's hoping to tap stimulus package funds to help pay for Hawaii's network.

"Somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of cars, electric vehicles are cheaper to make than gas-powered cars," he said earlier in the day, pacing the Brainstorm Green conference stage Oprah-like. "Somewhere between now and then we get to [the equivalent of] zero dollars a barrel of oil."

--

Below, a Better Place promotional video:

Watch another promotional video on the Better Place website.

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San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom said something that caught my ear: San Francisco is going to adopt Berkeley's innovative financing program to fund not only rooftop solar (as Berkeley does) but other distributed generation and energy efficiency projects.

That is excellent stuff. Hopefully SF can pull it off successfully and influence other cities to follow suit.

UPDATE: Newsom says SF's program will expand Berkeley's "exponentially." Instead of a couple million, $20-$30 million will be available. A huge list of energy generation and efficiency projects, everything from geothermal to boiler replacement. Says the program will kick off April 5.

UPDATE2: Correction to the above: the program does not kick off April 5. Banks will have final proposals in to the city on April 1, and the city will have a better idea of the scope of the program by April 5. The program itself will start, presumably, shortly thereafter. Here's the press release.

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I have a foolproof plan to fight spam: if the government gave out Viagra for free, then most spammers would quickly go out of business as their market would be undercut. Foolproof.

Our friends at ForestEthics are trying to do the same for junk mail, except they have an even better plan: a Do Not Mail Registry, modeled on the effective Do Not Call Registry. And on Monday, March 23, the city of San Francisco will hold a hearing on whether to be the first municipality in California to pass a resolution (PDF) in support. If you are in town, come on down to City Hall at 1 pm.

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California's Bay Area will enjoy an electric-car infrastructure by 2012, startup Better Place announced Thursday. The mayors of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose signed on for the plan, which will cover the region with charging and battery-exchange stations at an estimated cost of $1 billion.

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For the fourth year in a row, Portland, Ore., has been named the most sustainable of the 50 largest U.S. cities. The rankings by green org SustainLane, which take 16 economic and quality-of-life factors into consideration, "reveal which cities are increasingly self-sufficient, prepared for the unexpected, and taking steps toward preserving and enhancing their quality of life," says the group. After Portland, this year's top 10 include San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Oakland, and Baltimore. The bottom 10: Nashville, Arlington (Tex.), Long Beach, Colorado Springs, Indianapolis, Virginia Beach, Memphis, Las Vegas, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Mesa. Columbus made the biggest improvement over SustainLane's last list, jumping from No. 50 to No. 30; Las Vegas saw the biggest freefall, from No. 27 to No. 47. Unsurprisingly -- but still unfortunately -- the most affordable cities tended to score the worst on public transit, bike-friendliness, and walkability.

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All college students know the feeling -- that squeaky little hamster wheel of doubt about life post-diploma. What if I can't find a job? What if I can't find a job I like? What if I can't find a job that aligns with my values?

Ditch that hamster wheel and climb on two wheels that can take you places, Maya Donelson would tell you. A 2006 graduate of New York's Syracuse University, Donelson knew she wanted to do something green in her life. But it took a random adventure -- a cross-country cycling-trip fundraiser for Greenpeace -- to help show her the winding path to a fulfilling career.

Maya Donelson
Age: 24
School: Syracuse University '06

The pedaling raised $1,654 ("not much, but still exciting," she says) and ended in a visit to San Francisco, where Donelson realized she wanted to live. She moved there a number of months later and found an internship working on green, edible roofs. That led her to apply for and ultimately win a grant that helped her launch a dream program: growing organic food on the rooftop of one of San Francisco's most progressive forces, Glide Church, in the needy Tenderloin District. With her $10,000 Project Slingshot award [PDF] -- given by the youth-focused climate-action group Focus the Nation in partnership with Clif Bar -- Donelson started Graze the Roof, a project that will produce hundreds of pounds of food in an oasis above the streets.

This summer, through Donelson's program, some 200 homeless and low-income children and teens planted green things, held their first red wriggler, caught aphids, and learned how tasty it can be to eat your veggies.

What's next? We caught up with Donelson recently to get her take on college, environmental work, and life's surprising multiple choices.

You took all sorts of courses for your "environmental design-interiors" degree from Syracuse -- environmental, fine arts, architectural. Was that helpful?

That actually helped a lot. Because by the time I graduated, even though my degree labeled me as an interior designer, I knew I didn't want to pursue interior design. I wanted to look at the world from a more holistic perspective.

So school showed you what you didn't want?

My professors in my major didn't have the same passion for the environment that I did, so it taught me how to push myself -- and that was a good thing. Being out in the real world, you know you're going to have opposition: People aren't always going to believe in what you believe in 100 percent. And you have to keep pushing forward despite them.

Why did you go on the bike trip?

My friend Rose Devlin and I decided to do it on our last night at Syracuse, even though neither one of us knew anything about touring. The longest distance I'd ever cycled was about 5.5 miles. We left from Virginia and rode into Oregon two months later.

How did you find your first job?

I found Tullio Inglese and T.I.A. Architects on the web, when I'd returned home to Massachusetts. I called him almost immediately and two hours later I was in his office in Amherst, a church he'd purchased and renovated. I knew instantly it was the place for me. I spent six months on a paid internship learning about his 12 principles of ecological architecture, drinking tea, browsing his library, and learning about all the models and prototypes he's designed. I helped design a generic passive solar house and worked on a model eco-village and a project called Andromeda, a [proposed] sustainable city for China. I helped with the book he's writing on ecological architecture. And I also redesigned his website -- it was outdated and needed a makeover. Tullio leads a humble and modest life, and his work deserves more attention than it receives.

How did gardening and rooftops enter the picture?

My grandparents were farmers, and I grew up on a small farm in Western Massachusetts where we always had a huge garden to tend; I hold onto those memories very dearly. And then last summer [after moving to the Bay Area], I went to an opening at Green City Gallery in Berkeley -- a place that showcases environmental projects. And I met Ingrid Severson, who did a small living roof installation there, and it was fantastic. I talked to her about the project and two days later I emailed her and asked if there were opportunities to intern at her nonprofit, Bay Localize.

I started working on their rooftop resources project, which analyzed the potential for rainwater catchment and solar power and living roofs. And I got this idea about starting a rooftop garden. Then last spring Ingrid told me about [the Project Slingshot] grant and said, "You should go for it!" So I got all the pieces together: I had, like, three and a half weeks to prepare the grant proposal. I didn't even have a site for the garden yet. And that's when Glide came forward.

Kids get their hands dirty on the Glide roof.

What does the project look like?

The rooftop is about 4,500 square feet, but in this phase we're only developing 1,200 square feet. Glide serves the homeless and low-income population: It offers a huge array of services -- free meals every day, job training, and lots of others. It also has a summer youth program. So over the summer, I led an eight-week rooftop garden club for kids, from kindergarten to teens, and they all got to spend time on the roof. Right now I'm looking at funding options to help Glide maintain the program for the rest of the year. It's been the best job I ever could have imagined.

Any advice to the still-in-college?

Stay true to what you believe in, and you'll find your path. Anything is possible, and you can make anything happen. There is power in young people who feel they can change the world. Harness that energy and amazing things happen.

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Slow Food Nation -- that grand, sprawling culinary event that seemed to permeate San Francisco over Labor Day weekend -- has passed. Now we can ask: What was it? A brazen display of foodie elitism, as some critics charge? A transformative moment in an ongoing effort to overthrow the industrial food system, as its organizers sometimes hinted?

Slow Food Nation's Taste Pavilion.

Photo: Eater SF

First, the grandeur of the gathering -- organized by Slow Food USA -- has to be acknowledged. Slow Food Nation's Taste Pavilion, dramatically located at San Francisco's bay-side Fort Mason, deserves a place in the history of U.S. food and design. Ensconced in a vast airplane hangar-like space, the pavilion offered rigorously "curated" -- and stunning -- selections of cheese, pickles, charcuterie, coffee, olive oil, liquor, chocolate, beer, fish, and wine. The interior design matched the quality of the food, each station conjured up gorgeously out of reused and reusable materials like wooden pallets and burlap coffee-bean bags and representing the vision of some of the Bay Area's most creative architects. Meanwhile, the outdoor Slow on the Go market at the Civic Center presented a kind of perfect-world food court: huaraches as good as any I've had in Mexico City alongside fantastic coffee, terrific muffletas, killer ice cream, and much more.

The intellectual fodder on offer wasn't bad, either. The event's "Food for Thought" speaker series featured strictly A-list talent: Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Raj Patel, and more.

The free zone at Slow Food Nation.

Photo: dreamo

Further, more than any conference I've ever attended, the event exuded sheer ambition. In addition to the glories described above, Slow Food Nation included a lovingly designed and cultivated "Victory Garden," a farmers market that embodied the sheer abundance of San Francisco's celebrated foodshed, and, tucked into the teeming food court, a soapbox from which anyone who wanted could harangue the crowd. These features, I think, were meant to form a populist, accessible counterpoint to the pricy Taste Pavilion, food court, and star-studded panels.

Yet for all the activity and display of culinary, intellectual, and design skill, the question of what Slow Food Nation actually was hung over the event. At points, event leaders seemed to treat Slow Food itself, the international organization that formed in Italy in 1986 to protest a McDonald's in central Rome, as the embodiment of the movement to challenge industrial food. From there, it was a short jump to presenting Slow Food Nation as a kind of watershed moment in the U.S. food movement -- the point in time when public desire and political will for a new food system coalesced.

The olive oil station in the pavilion.

Photo: Andy Delcambre

Meanwhile, on the ground, Bay Area residents grumbled about marginalization and elitism. When I first glanced at the prices for various functions, I thought they seemed reasonable, given that typical conferences run upwards of several hundred bucks for blanket admission. But then again, as a journalist, I rarely have to pay for conferences I attend. If I were a local resident without a professional tie to the event, would I have balked at $65 for the Taste Pavilion, or $25 to attend the flagship panel featuring Berry, Shiva, Pollan, Schlosser, Carlo Petrini, Alice Waters, and Corby Kummer? I guess it would depend on how tight my finances were. And that's the point. While the public spaces at the Civic Center drew a reasonably diverse crowd, the for-pay events seemed uniformly white and well-off.

In the end, I think the vast ambition behind Slow Food Nation formed its weak point. By striving to embody and represent an entire movement -- from "artisinal" food culture to urban agriculture -- the event came off like a dreamer with his head in the clouds, disconnected from the struggle in the streets.

No one quite embodied that attitude like Alice Waters, doyenne of Slow Food USA, iconic figure of the sustainable-agriculture movement since she started her Chez Panisse restaurant in the early 1970s, and Slow Food Nation's intellectual author. I adore Waters' cooking style and respect her work as a pioneering restaurateur and school-lunch reformer; as a political spokesperson, she leaves me scratching my head. Asked at a pre-event press conference about the accessibility issue, Waters gave a riff about the Victory Garden and how it "represents our belief that good, clean, and fair food should be accessible to everyone all the time."

The Victory Garden.

Photo: In Praise of Sardines

Really? Beautiful as it is, the Victory Garden represents tremendous political, cultural, and financial resources. Slow Food Nation convinced the City of San Francisco to allow the garden to be installed on city land, got a prestigious landscape architecture firm involved in its design, and tapped a professional gardening company to help put it together. There's nothing at all wrong with any of this, but Waters seems blind to her own considerable power -- and unaware that other actors in the sustainable-food movement wield much less. And here's the kicker: The Victory Garden is due to be demolished in November; the arrangement with the city is only temporary. The Victory Garden serves as a mighty symbol for the potential of urban public space to be both beautiful and highly productive; as a symbol of accessibility to "good, clean, and fair food," it's a bit of a farce.

But none of this negates the achievements of Slow Food USA or its flagship event. To become the relevant organization that Slow Food USA leaders seem genuinely intent on creating, the group may merely need to (of all things) slow down. Across the county, people of all kinds are challenging industrial food and working to create a more sustainable, just, and, yes, delicious food system. Rather than striving to be the movement around food, Slow Food USA might do better to consider itself part of a much broader and diverse movement.

Brahm Ahmadi.

Brahm Ahmadi, executive director of People's Grocery in West Oakland, crystallized this idea in a recent (pre-event) post on his blog. Slow Food is "currently distracted by its own self-important belief that it should be a big tent for lots of people, rather than simply being an equal member of a much bigger movement or coalition in which the movement itself is the big tent," he wrote.

Instead, Ahmadi argued, the group should "form coalitions in which Slow Food acts as an ally" to groups seeking to create socially just and sustainable food systems in low-income areas. For Ahmadi, that means not trying to speak for such efforts, but rather "leveraging its political and social influence to open doors and generate resources that other groups do not have access to."

Slow Food Nation chose not to highlight the debate around the question of elitism and the food movement at its flagship Food for Thought series. But it did give Ahmadi a forum at its Changemaker Day forum -- weirdly, an invitation-only event. Uninvited, I essentially snuck into Ahmadi's panel on "Reframing the Slow Food Conversation to Support Food Justice."

There, Ahmadi gave a salient example of his problem with Slow Food. Grassroots groups working in the Bay Area's low-income sections like his own People's Grocery had watched in awe and astonishment as Slow Food Nation and its impressive physical footprint took shape, Ahmadi said. The Victory Garden and the Taste Pavilion would be erected and dismantled in the span of a few months, representing tremendous efforts of top designers and artisans, to speak nothing of political muscle and financial resources. Meanwhile, groups like People's Grocery struggle and wrangle for years to get a truck to deliver fresh food in West Oakland.

Josh Viertel.

Photo: Russ Walker

Joining Ahmadi on the panel was Josh Viertel, recently named president of Slow Food USA. I found Viertel's answer to Ahmadi extremely encouraging. Rather than react defensively, Viertel encouraged the audience to read Ahmadi's blog post. Then he admitted that Slow Food USA has a communication problem with low-income communities. He noted the group's well-publicized effort to save heritage turkeys from extinction -- a victory for biodiversity in our rapidly homogenizing food chain -- but acknowledged the absurdity of touting such a victory in low-income communities where people will soon be choosing between buying enough food and paying the heating bill. Viertel seemed determined that Slow Food USA not "suck all the air out of the room" as the sustainable-food movement goes forward.

Viertel may seem an odd choice to rescue Slow Food from its elitist reputation. The group plucked him out of the leafy confines of New Haven, Conn., where he lead the Yale Sustainable Food Project. But broadening Slow Food's focus is precisely his task. By any standard, "good, clean, and fair" food represents no more than 3 percent of food sold in the United States. To really challenge the status quo, the sustainable-food movement needs to expand its base dramatically -- and Slow Food USA, with its considerable cultural and political stature, can be a constructive force in that effort.

Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, a longtime Slow Food USA insider who was prominently featured at the Labor Day weekend event, is already providing an example. At forum after forum at Slow Food Nation, Schlosser drove home a key point: The millions of people who work at vegetable farms, meatpacking plants, and restaurants -- the largest group of employees in the United States -- are ruthlessly exploited and need to be included in any meaningful sustainable-food movement. And he stacked his own Food for Thought session not with celebrated authors, but rather with labor-movement leaders.

I heard Schlosser say off-stage that his single-minded focus on labor made him feel like a "turd in a punchbowl" at Slow Food Nation. In reality, such use of cultural capital is a torch lighting a path toward a truly just and sustainable food system.

Video interviews with Eric Schlosser, Brahm Ahmadi, and Josh Viertel will be coming to Gristmill soon.

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