Zombie seeds and foodies

Slow food movement gets political

By FRITZ MAYER

CALLICOON CENTER, NY — The 30 or so people who turned out to the slow food event paused after munching on a wide variety of home grown and homemade appetizers to listen to remarks by Joseph Lennon before digging into dinner.

Lennon is one of the founders of the Slow Food Upper Delaware River Valley, the local chapter of Slow Food USA, whose mission, among other things, is to champion, celebrate and preserve local food traditions around the globe, and try to change the unsustainable practices of big agriculture. Slow Food also seeks to serve as a counterbalance to the fast-food culture that has taken over so much of the globe.

Lennon, a chef, told of his journey to the Slow Food exhibition in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend, which attracted some 50,000 slow food enthusiasts. Lennon said that the leaders of Slow Food USA were considering becoming more politically active and taking public stands against such things as zombie seeds.

Zombie seeds?

It seems European researchers are in the process of creating plants that produce sterile seeds, but the seeds can be made fertile if a specific chemical is applied to them. The research for zombie seeds was preceded by the creation of plants that produced “terminator seeds,” which are entirely sterile, and which can’t be brought back to life. Large seed companies, like Monsanto, pursued the terminators because they didn’t want any of the 1.4 billion small-scale farmers in the world to save seeds from their plants and use them the next season, rather than buying new seeds from the companies.

However, according to various news accounts, many governments objected to terminator seeds, fearing that the parent plants could cross pollinate into other plant varieties and wreck the global food supply. An informal global ban against planting terminators has been effectively in place for about eight years. With zombie seeds, which could be brought back to life, the companies believe they have a safeguard against the wrecking-the-food-supply scenario, but it’s not clear that governments are going to allow these seeds to be planted either.

In any case, it’s one of the things the folks at Slow Food USA were thinking about. Another was the elitist image that some associate with Slow Food (although this group looked less like an assemblage of elites than a group of farmers, gardeners and cooks). To counter the elitist image, said Lennon, Slow Food USA is changing the designations of local groups from “conviviums” to chapters, though groups can chose to retain the convivium label should they so desire.

After the dinner, guests saw a computer slide presentation from Challey Comer, the farm-to-market manager at the Watershed Agricultural Council in Walton. Comer had recently returned from the third convening of the Terra Madre in Turin, Italy, an event created by Slow Food International. This event brought 7,000 farmers, chefs and other food enthusiasts from around the world to a “meeting of the global food community.”

At one of the meetings, Josh Viertel, Slow Food USA’s new president, underscored the notion that the organization was moving forward with a new activist agenda. According to an account on the environmental web site www.grist.org, Viertel said, “Our food system disproportionately hurts poor people and people of color, and alternatives aren’t accessible to those groups.”

And the vision statement of Slow Food USA’s new five-year strategic plan says, “Food is a common language and universal right. Slow Food USA envisions a world in which all people can eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the planet.”

Go to www.slowfoodupderiva.org for more information on the local Slow Food chapter… or convivium.