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Good food matters

I’ve just returned from Slow Food International’s Terra Madre/Salone del Gusto conference and I’d like to ask you a question: Are you as sick as I am of hearing about how a good, clean, fair food system is just a frivolous preoccupation of the rich?

In the Salone I was being jostled by grannies with wheelie shopping bags and mums with prams, having my toes trodden on by average guys trying to impress their girlfriends with their knowledge of food and wine, being bumped into by kids darting around my legs and generally having to elbow my way to every stall in what amounted to three football-field-sized arenas full of stalls groaning with fresh produce.

In the fourth football-field-sized arena was the Terra Madre – a meeting of producers and innovators from around the world, were everyone gathered to connect, share knowledge and support one another in what can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle to change the world one meal at a time.

I promise you these were not millionaires with private jets and retinues of personal chefs and trainers following them around. These were average people who understood how important a clean, sustainable, secure food supply is to all of us.

A lot of food campaigning groups struggle under the weight of this notion of sustainable food as trifling hobby for the wealthy – as if the rest of us don’t have to eat. And as if the health of the rest of us isn’t affected, sometimes more so, by the quality of the food we eat.

Believing in this notion allows us to take a sometimes satisfying swipe at silly celebrities. But in reality, if you accept this belief you are also accepting the agenda of those who want to maintain the status quo – the increasing gap between haves and have nots and the eternal dissatisfaction of the consumer that keeps us all buying and eating junk – whatever the cost.

Acquiescing to the idea that good food is an elitist preoccupation is the same as acquiescing to those who portray climate change campaigners as doom and gloom merchants, or the rent-a-quote ‘scientists’ who say that people who are against GM are ‘anti-science’, or those who say that people who want to live in harmony with nature are just a bunch of hair-shirt wearing, tree huggers.

This kind of cynical profiling is designed to distract us from what we know is right. And it is ‘designed’ in the sense that it is a deliberate marketing tactic – if you don’t believe this check out how much the biotech companies have spent on propaganda against Proposition 37, the mandatory labelling of GM food – in California.

Good food matters. The people of California know it. The students whom I met at Terra Madre who are fighting unforgivable food waste know it.  Food producers in poverty and drought ridden countries know it. Academics with the facts at their fingertips know it. Campaigners like myself know it.

If you know it too, ensure your choices and actions are a clear reflection of that.

Pat Thomas, Editor