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Seeds of a Movement

Early credit for this new way of thinking about food goes to Alice Waters, organic food guru and founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, Calif.

“She above all others had a major influence on American food from the early 1980s on,” says Rosalind Creasy, author of The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping. “Alice’s main message for 25 years has been to eat locally, organically and in season. She was one of the first enthusiastic purchasers of organic produce for a restaurant, and she has trained a multitude of chefs who have moved on to promote seasonal, organic foods across the United States.”

Deborah Madison is another chef and well-known advocate for local, seasonal and organic foods. Madison started the Greens Restaurant in 1979 in San Francisco and has authored several cookbooks, including Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers Markets and the recently published Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen.

“I choose organic food when I can because it’s not just about us, it’s about the health of the environment,” Madison says. “Organics is about the health of life systems, pollution, wildlife. It has a huge effect. But I will also choose local food. Water rights in the Southwest [where Madison now lives] is a big issue, and I want to help keep our local farmers in business.”

Over the last two decades, through her involvement in different projects relating to Real Food, Madison says she has noticed a change in the way Americans view the food they eat. “The heart of the movement is that our food is existing in a place … you are eating food that you can trace to a person, place or tradition, and make a connection,” she says.

Madison credits the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) — a nonprofit group based in Decorah, Iowa, that works to preserve heirloom fruit and vegetable varieties — for fueling the Real Food movement. Many traditional varieties have been replaced by high-yield hybrids with long shelf lives — qualities necessary for produce shipped long distances, but often developed at the expense of nutrition and taste. “I admire the SSE,” Madison says. “Now they are maintaining 26,000 varieties.” By selling many of these heirloom varieties in an annual catalog, SSE circulates them to a growing population of gardeners and farmers across the country, who in turn introduce the produce to their various local food markets.

Many other groups are working to preserve rare foods, including endangered fish species and livestock breeds, as well as other heirloom fruits and vegetables. One such working alliance is RAFT, Renewing America’s Food Traditions (www.en

vironment.nau.edu/raft). Formed as a coalition in 2004 by the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, RAFT includes the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, Chefs Collaborative, Cultural Conservancy, Native Seed/SEARCH, Slow Food USA and SSE. RAFT’s mission is to identify endangered foods and to put them back on American dinner tables. The coalition published a 90-page book, Renewing America’s Food Traditions, which includes a “redlist” of endangered foods.

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