By Deborah Kane

The first local chapter of Slow Food USA was started in Portland in 1991. A non-profit educational organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating the food traditions of North America, Slow Food believes that pleasure in everyday life can be achieved by slowing down, respecting the convivial traditions of the table, and celebrating the diversity of the earth’s bounty.

There are now more than 200 chapters across the country, each advocating for food that is “good, clean and fair.”

Throngs of Slow Food devotees recently gathered in San Francisco for Slow Food Nation, billed as the largest celebration of American food in history, presumably not including Thanksgiving. Like a Pilgrim sitting down to a feast, I attended the event and ate myself silly for three days. Beyond eating, there was a lot of talking.

On the eve of a presidential election, the conversations were politically charged. Vandana Shiva, physicist, feminist, and philosopher of science, urged participants to be the “Rosa Parks of food.” Can you imagine it? Citizens across the country camped out at dinner tables declaring “I’m not getting up until you bring me the very best this country has to offer.”

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, pointed out, however, that the table we’ve set is too small, too exclusive, and therefore won’t accommodate enough people to make a difference. In an impassioned speech he implored the Slow Food leadership to expand their “good food” movement beyond those willing and able to pay $7 for a hotdog. The theme was echoed by Shiva, who cautioned that our “monoculture of the mind” lulls us into specializing movements—such as food, labor, and health care reform—precisely when we should be integrating the issues and the constituencies that care about them.

But it was Wendell Berry, essayist, poet and farmer, who stole the show. On the subject of politics and the fact that discussions of food and agriculture rarely make it into our national discourse, Berry was nonplussed. Noting that “there is so little we can reasonably expect of them,” Berry implored us to look past individual politicians and remember that the responsibility for change rests with each of us as individuals.

In this issue we reprint one of Berry’s most beloved essays, “The Pleasures of Eating.” His list of things that city people can do was written in 1990, yet remains as relevant today as the day it was first published.

As a college student the list was taped to my refrigerator; now the practices Berry promotes are firmly ingrained in my daily life. I suspect you, too, are well on your way. In fact, as he’s watched this country’s collective consciousness about food and agriculture continue to rise, Berry quipped that he’s taken to staring at himself in the mirror some mornings and chuckling with a hint of incredulity, “They’re doing exactly what you always wanted them to do!”

Here’s to you, Wendell Berry, a man who, like the Slow Food chapter in Portland, started it all in the first place.

Deborah Kane is the Vice President of Ecotrust Food & Farms, a Food & Society Policy Fellow, and the publisher of Edible Portland.