slow food sellout

One of the best aspects of living in San Francisco is being surrounded by the amazing quality and selection of food around here.  Northern California provides the perfect soil and weather to grow a variety of succulent fruits and veggies, and slow food/organic/culinary visionaries have elevated clean, simple, tasty food preparation to a high art.

Organic food often gets a bad rap for being too expensive, and in cases like the $8 nectarine at Zuni, I agree.  But for the most part I'm happy to pay a premium price for premium food, because I'm ingesting it.  It's going inside my body!  Half the high-price complainers I hear are strutting around in $150 boots or driving $30,000 cars.  Sure, you could get conventionally-grown bananas for a lot cheaper, but at what price?  I see organic eating as a long term investment -- check back with me in a decade or so and we'll see how good I look and feel. 

But there's a short term payoff in eating organic fruits and veggies:  the taste.  Any time someone starts complaining about the uselessness of buying organic, I wish I had a portable taste-test station with me.  All I would need to do is have them taste a conventionally grown strawberry, followed by an organic strawberry.  I remember tasting my very first organic strawberry about 8 years ago at a farmers market in Manhattan's Upper West Side.  "This tastes like candy!!" I thought to myself, and ecstatically bought two basket to take home.  Later on, I realized why I'd compared it to "wild strawberry" candy -- because fruit is meant to taste that way.  Ever since conventional growers began cultivating the biggest (bigger is better, right?), brightest (it's all about looks in this country) and heartiest specimens (able to sustain traveling long distances) to meet the demands of the big box grocery stores, most of us have forgotten that fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste good.  You know how when you cut open your conventionally-grown strawberry it's mostly white inside?  Organic strawberries are a deep, tasty, dark red throughout, and the smallest ones are often the best.

This weekend San Francisco is hosting the inaugural Slow Food Nation event, billed as an opportunity to "celebrate, learn and act to build a food system that is sustainable, just and delicious."  My mouth was watering at the thought of strolling and sampling my way through the Taste Pavilions (coffee! chocolate! beer!) but the tasting tours are completely sold out.  And as much as I agree that Slow Food Rocks, I don't see the connection between great produce and Gnarls Barkley, especially not at 60 bucks a ticket.

In lieu of attending Slow Food Nation this weekend, I'll make my regular Saturday morning visit to the best Taste Pavilion in the US: the Ferry Building farmers market.  I get amazing produce, coffee, prepared foods and flowers there every week, and it's the main reason I eat so well.

All these thoughts were inspired by my breakfast this morning.  I ate candy stripe figs, black mission figs, golden raspberries and blackberries with granola and yogurt.  A typical beautiful breakfast for me.

* Special thanks to my iPhone for the distorted image.