Wrote a travel article for the
SM Observer on the Good Food Festival!
The
Good Food Festival and Little Bit of Everything While Focusing on the Big
Picture
For
its second year the Good Food Festival
& Conference returned to Los Angeles. Produced by FamilyFarmed.org in
cooperation with the Santa Monica Farmers Markets, the conference’s mission is
to be a connection point for the NGOs, businesses and individuals who are
driving the Good Food Movement.
The festival’s focus on regional and national issues that are integral
to building local and sustainable food systems and educating people about the
Good Food Movement.
On
Saturday, November 3rd, LACMA co-hosted a series of panel discussions on
building organic and sustainable food systems. Topics include: Building
Community with Good Food, Good Food=Good Jobs, Is GMO Labeling Coming to
California? On Sunday, November 4th
the Good Food Festival &
Conference culminated with the fundraising event: Localicious. Held at the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica,
guests savored the freshest and best of the season with signature dishes
prepared by 30 of LA’s leading chefs paired with 30 farmers from the
Santa Monica Farmers Markets. The
event was a great way to meet some of the new players of the L.A. food
world.
One
such player is the new restaurant Feed. Opening in early 2013 on Abbot Kinney
Blvd., Feed will feature seasonally inspired menu of forward thinking
California style dishes that are nourishing for the body and the soul. Full of both consciousness and craft
the dishes served at Localious included: Vegan German Butterball Potato, Pumpkin Seed and Blackened
Escarole Soup with Cashew Crème and Roasted Blue Hubbard Squash Salad with Baby
Torpedo Onions, Red Kale, and a Labneh (which
is a soft Middle Eastern cheese made from yogurt), Tahini & Preserved Lemon Dressing. With Chef Matthew Dickson formerly hailing from Grace, Malo,
Rockenwagner & Vida, menu
items will be sourced from local farmers markets focused on sustainable and
organic ingredients. Feed will
also offer an all-organic beverage program to include wine, beer, and spirits
and feature locally sourced organic ingredients, homemade organic syrups and
mixers.
Another
new kid on the L.A. food block is nano brewery Smog City Brewing, which celebrated its one-year anniversary in
October. In the beginning Smog
City was described as the “little brewery that could,” and they’ve definitely
delivered. Last month in Boulder,
CO their Groundwork Coffee Porter
took home of the gold at the Great American Beer Festival, the Oscars of the
beer world. With a taste that
screams chocolate covered espresso bean, this robust Porter is aged on freshly
roasted, freshly ground Groundwork coffee, which enhances the flavors of
chocolate, roasted malt, and coffee (Of Course!) already present in the beer.
The fun table at
Localious (and there’s always a fun table at these events) was the new Hermosa
Beach restaurant Abigaile. Serving toasted Crostini with sautéed
mushrooms from Shiitake Happens Mushrooms Abigaile paired these tidbits with
their house-brewed craft beers created by Brewmaster Brian Brewer. Brian’s philosophy on beer making is
simple: bring
only the freshest, high quality ingredients to the process. And with beer names like Orange Blossom Blonde Ale, Misfit Pale Ale,
and Bourbon Vanilla Porter, it seems like fun is also part of the
equation. This coolness also
translates to their space, as the location has been a church, an
artists’ co-op, a rehearsal space for Black Flag over the years before becoming
Abigaile, a place where their philosophy is that one of life’s greatest sources
of joy is what happens when people come together to share a meal.
While dining and
drinking under the stars is all fun, the panel discussions at the Good Food
Festival on Saturday focused more on the numerous food issues at hand. Unfortunately the featured guest
speaker, MacArthur Genius Will Allen of Growing Power, was unable to attend due
to sickness. Instead the
conference opened with a segment from a new PBS documentary titled Food Forward
(not to be confused with the SoCal non-profit Food Forward) which featured Milwaukee’s
Sweet Water Farm and their sustainable aquaponics system was inspired by Allen. This was followed afterwards by a Skype
talk by Allen’s daughter Erika Allen, Projects Manager for Growing
Power. Based out of Chicago, Erika
Allen focuses on urban agriculture that is rooted in social justice focusing on
food security (a household's physical and economic access to
sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that fulfills their dietary needs)
and food sovereignty (having control over the food that is consumed in your
location through local growing systems).
“Urban Agriculture has an opportunity to impact and transform the entire
world through engaging people in their environments,” noted Allen, “allowing
them the opportunity to be safe, affordable, and healthy, regardless of their
income.” Allen introduced the
audience to the urban Chicago farm, Iron Street. Previously an old truck depot once completely up and running
(right now they only use a third of their 7 acre space) Iron Street Farm could
grown up to 20,000 tons of a food a year in the middle of Chicago (and that’s
year round!). Allen also that to
work small you need to also work big, “to be involved in Urban Agriculture you
need to be involved in food policy.
You can’t have an thriving urban agriculture without dealing with
politics of food production.”
After Allen’s
presentation the first panel of the Good Food Festival, BUILDING COMMUNITY WITH GOOD FOOD, focused on the force of
community building. “It’s about
people just showing up,” noted Moderator Evan Kleiman and host of the KCRW
weekly radio program Good Food, “it’s about making a decision as simple as
showing up at a famer market, gleaning, exposing yourself to something you’d
never thought about before.”
On this panel Laura
Avery, supervisor of Santa Monica's
Farmers Markets, repped the distribution side of the conversation. Her market, which brings farm fresh
produce to almost 1,000,000 customers each year, just received LA Weekly’s Best
Farmers Market in LA. As LA Weekly
stated, “the market that takes over the Santa Monica Promenade on Wednesday
mornings is in a category of its own. Decades before markets started popping up
in every neighborhood in town, the Santa
Monica Certified Farmers Market defined the genre.” 1996 Avery introduced a Salad Bar
Program in Santa Monica Schools that now includes Santa Monica Farmers Markets
Greens at all Santa Monica public schools. Avery noted that we have an organic garden at the White
House but the USDA and FDA don’t allow us to know whether our food has been
genetically modified. “Food is
community; sharing ideas about food is as compelling as a recipe. We want to know what’s going on, the
government isn’t getting it done, so we get it done by meeting into
groups.”
Also speaking
was Meg Glasser from Food Forward,
SoCal’s largest gleaning organization who noted that by the end of this year they
will have gleaned 1.3 million pounds in the three and a half years they had
been around. Food Forward began in
a grass roots way in 2009 when Rich Nahmias saw Tangerines on the ground in his
neighborhood, so with the help of 3 of his friends he gleaned 800 pounds of
Tangerines that day for SOVA food bank.
Food Forward’s backyard harvesting now spans the gamut: from one tree at
one home to 800 trees at Cal. State Northridge where they collected 18,000 lbs
in 4 hours. Food Forward now has
50 receiving agencies, 4,000 volunteers, and is located in 4 different
counties.
One other panel
member was D’Artagnan Scorza the Executive Director of the Social Justice Learning Institute. The Social Justice Learning Institute is dedicated to
improving the education, health, and well being of youth and communities of
color by empowering them to enact social change through research, training, and
community mobilization. From the
SJLI emerged the food program "100 Seeds of Change" Food System Initiative. 100 Seeds of Change is a
comprehensive, city-wide plan to create urban gardens at homes, local
schools, city parks and other locations with city youth & community members
in the city of Inglewood. The goal
of this initiative is to transform Inglewood into a healthy living community by
empowering residents to collaboratively be active in growing their own food in
a local network. In the end, the
food grown within this network will create Inglewood’s first complete local
food system that is sustainable from the ground to the plate. “We don’t give ourselves enough credit
for the impact we’re making in creating these food communities. Seeing a child who’s never tried Chard
before, that’s what feeds me,” noted Scorza.
Nowhere did food
issue seem most controversial than in the last panel of the Good Food Festival
& Conference: IS GMO LABELING COMING
TO CALIFRONIA? Just days away
from narrowly losing the election emotions were high for those all those
involved in the GMO discussion.
Although viewpoints varied on the place of GMOs in our food system
everyone on the panel agreed that labeling was a need that has yet to be met in
the State of California. As
Ann Gentry of Real Food Daily noted,
“My motto is: if you tell people what it is the product you are selling them
they will be loyal for you forever.”
Although
the United States does not require the labeling of Genetically Modified
Organisms (GMOs), 61 countries around the globe do (including the entire
European Union, Brazil, and China).
Those who advocated for labeling in the state of California were
definitely the underdogs as the world’s leading
pesticide and processed food companies outspent “Yes on 37” by more than 5 to
1, and beginning on October 1, spent about a million dollars a day on
anti-labeling advertising.
As California Right to Know
Campaign stated in a press release the day after losing the election, “today is
not the end of our campaign to secure our fundamental right to know what’s in
our food. It is a strong
beginning, and we thank the millions of Californians who stood with us. We are
proud of our grassroots movement, our 10,000 hardworking volunteers, and the
diverse coalition of health, faith, labor and consumer groups that stood with
us. We will keep fighting for consumer choice, fairness and transparency in our
food system. And we will prevail.”
And in a nutshell that is
what the Good Food Festival & Conference was all about: choice, fairness,
transparency, and education in all the varied elements, big and small,
surrounding what we eat.
Kat Thomas is a Santa Monica food writer and foodie. You can check out more of her writings
at edibleskinny.com
