Taste and See

The rise, fall, and enduring impact of the Slow Food movement in Louisiana

by

It was a Saturday morning on Magazine Street in the year 2000, and a thin, bearded Italian man was ringing a bell as loudly as he could, announcing the beginning of the weekly Crescent City Farmers Market. 

Likely, most of the farmers and urban growers poised at their vendor stands had no idea who Carlo Petrini was, had never heard of his “Slow Food” movement. But internationally, Petrini was recognized as a revolutionary, challenging the global shift towards mass-produced food systems. In 1986, he and other activists launched the movement by protesting the opening of Italy’s first McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Piazza di Spagna, ultimately publishing the “Slow Food Manifesto,” which declared: “Speed became our shackles. We fell prey to the same virus: ‘the fast life’ that fractures our customs and assails us even in our own homes, forcing us to ingest ‘fast-food’ . . . we propose the vaccine of an adequate portion of sensual gourmandise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment.” 

When, around 1999, leaders working in New Orleans’s farm-to-table movement learned about the principles of Slow Food—this defense of culinary and agricultural tradition as meaningful parts of the human experience—they were energized. 

“For those of us working in the Deep South, where we were always slow, but we were embarrassed about it, Slow Food was this exciting international movement that kind of captured the ethos of what we knew in our hearts was right,” said Richard McCarthy, the founder of the Crescent City Farmers Market. “It provided a counterweight to the kind of industrial default that farms should be larger and taste should be homogenized. 

“And if there’s anything that really runs counter to the Louisiana frame of mind, it’s that taste should be homogenous.” 

Slow Food’s Arrival in America, and in New Orleans

After a little more than a decade as a European phenomenon, Slow Food made its way to America, the “home of fast food,” at the start of the millennium. Petrini visited New Orleans in 2000 as part of his tour of the United States, marking the official establishment of Slow Food USA. The movement  would join hands with the American champions of the still-somewhat-novel-at-the-time “farm-to-table” revolution pioneered by Chef Alice Waters in California. 

Though quieter, perhaps, than the activities on the West Coast, Louisiana—a place whose history is intrinsically tied to its foodways—was already on its own journey of re-establishing connections between regional food and its origins, connections that had been fractured, if not altogether lost, through the industrialization of the food system. 

“It would be quite easy to argue that New Orleans is the capital of slow food in America,” wrote restaurant columnist S.M. Hahn in The Times-Picayune in August 1999. “Change doesn’t happen easily here, and that’s why the local cuisine has preserved such strong ties to the past. Still, however much resisted, every tide eventually turns.” Louisianans weren’t immune to the ease and allure of the supermarket, where the origins of the mass-produced, processed foods are far away and promptly forgotten. And increasingly, local producers were being pushed out, to the point of becoming a rarity. 

“When I look at all the archival images from the past, we had this abundance of fruits, vegetables, and seafood,” said Zella Palmer, a culinary historian and the director of the Dillard University Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture. “There was so much coming into our ports, and so much that we grew. The disparity to what we have today, as far as fresh Louisiana food, is striking.” 

At the same time, movements toward cultural culinary appreciation were underway in the early twenty-first century. Chef John Folse was spreading the gospel of Louisiana’s indigenous foods across the globe, writing books and opening restaurants centered on local ingredients and old school recipes. Chef Paul Prudhomme’s prairie Cajun cuisine was making headlines. And across the region, home gardeners and cooks without major platforms remained committed to their grandparents’ heirloom varieties of produce, to their recipes. 

[Read this story, which features more perspectives from Professor Zella Palmer: "When Pecans Became French: Exploring French influence in Louisiana cuisine"]

“We have lost so much biodiversity, and we’ve lost so much traditional knowledge,” said McCarthy. “But compared to a lot of places, in Louisiana we’ve held on to more of it.” 

In hopes of connecting local foods, and appreciation of their place in our culture, back to the average consumer—in 1995, McCarthy founded the organization Market Umbrella, dedicated to cultivating open-air markets for local growers to sell their products. The first of these was the Crescent City Farmers Market. 

“For those of us working in the Deep South, where we were always slow, but we were embarrassed about it, Slow Food was this exciting international movement that kind of captured the ethos of what we knew in our hearts was right. It provided a counterweight to the kind of industrial default that farms should be larger and taste should be homogenized. 

“And if there’s anything that really runs counter to the Louisiana frame of mind, it’s that taste should be homogenous.” 

—Richard McCarthy, the founder of the Crescent City Farmers Market 

In fact, by the time Petrini visited New Orleans, Slow Food was already an active presence in the city. Poppy Tooker, who at the time had been promoting New Orleans culinary heritage around the country through cooking classes, led the charge. For a 2012 article in Grist, she recalled learning about the Slow Food movement in the late 1990s, and thinking, “This was what my life’s work had always been about, preserving foodways, valuing the food producers, closing the ties between chefs and farmers. And now there was an international organization out there ready to help me!” In New Orleans, she started one of the first ten Slow Food chapters in the United States, a year before Slow Food USA was even formed. 

[Read our interview with Poppy Tooker, the host of WWNO's Louisiana Eats, here.] 

“Poppy had a kind of religious fervor that was required to translate this rather obtuse concept at a time when most people weren’t talking like this about food and food traditions,” said McCarthy. “Many people were working on it, in their isolated ways.” But they hadn’t found the language to articulate why it was valuable, or to organize around it. Slow Food provided the infrastructure to do just that. 

Preserving Endangered Louisiana Foodways

During the 2000s, Tooker attracted Slow Food New Orleans memberships from foodies like McCarthy, as well as many of the city’s best-known chefs, including Frank Brigtsen and Susan Spicer. The chapter met regularly to host events like cookbook author signings, oyster tastings, cooking demos, film screenings, and canning seminars. The chapter advocated for healthier school lunch programs and was involved in the establishment of New Orleans’s Edible Schoolyard in local charter schools. The group’s biggest focus, though, was promoting and educating the public on endangered Louisiana foodways, work Tooker has described as her “great love.”

Slow Food’s mission culminates with the organization’s Ark of Taste, an international catalogue of food products—recipes, seeds, and heritage breeds of livestock—that possess cultural significance and are at risk of being lost because of the decline in agricultural biodiversity. 

Tooker advocated for many Louisiana foods to be added to the Ark—but perhaps no campaign was more successful than that of Creole Cream Cheese, a soft single-curd cheese once made by Louisianans from clabbered milk hung in a pillowcase from the branch of an oak tree. When more families began outsourcing their dairy products in the twentieth century, knowledge of how to make the cheese began to disappear. And when the rise of consolidated, industrial farming pushed small local dairies out of business, the store varieties were lost, too. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, this Louisiana tradition, once a commonplace household staple, had nearly been forgotten entirely. 

With support from Slow Food USA, Tooker began promoting the cheese as a Louisiana cultural treasure worth keeping, performing demonstrations on how to make it at the Crescent City Farmers Markets, encouraging local farms to produce it, local grocery stores to sell it, and local chefs to incorporate it into their dishes. Because of these efforts, the cheese remains, to this day, on the menu at Commander’s Palace, in the cheesecake. 

[Here's a recipe for Creole Cream Cheese, and a cheesecake with praline sauce.] 

Other Louisiana foods that have benefitted from Slow Food’s Ark of Taste status include Louisiana mirliton, filé, New Orleans French bread, tasso, cane syrup, and yellow Creole corn. 

“That was the focus [of Slow Food New Orleans], in the beginning,” said McCarthy. “Trying to recognize and legitimize our food traditions, not just as stumbling blocks that prevent us from being successful in this fast paced, homogenized world, but actually key ingredients that make our communities successful, because we know who we are.” 

An Identity Crisis 

The critiques of Slow Food in America began upon its arrival in the late 1990s—a polarizing launch one journalist for The New York Times described as an “awkward landing,” in which much of the messaging of food-as-pleasure got wrapped up in elitist pseudo-intellectualism and nostalgia around an idealized notion of rural life. Basically, “that first impression was that it was this fancy supper club for rich people,” said Tooker. “Which it wasn’t supposed to be, and it never really was.” 

“I was always puzzled by that tension, where if you talk about pleasure, then you’re elitist,” said McCarthy. “I think that America in general—where this kind of cultural Protestantism dominates the psyche—is very uncomfortable with the issue of pleasure. But in Louisiana, where we have this strange swampy mix of people, we tend to be much more comfortable with pleasure as an everyday thing,” regardless of where you sit in the class system. If Slow Food as a celebration of pleasure could work anywhere, it should work in Louisiana—especially in its biggest food city, New Orleans. 

By 2006, Slow Food International had already begun to expand its stated mission, incorporating social justice into its manifesto and declaring its slogan: “Good, clean, and fair food for all.” In the United States, membership was growing, and there were up to 160 chapters in the country by 2007, by which time the national office was actively working to address its messaging issues. The Slow Food Nation Festival in San Francisco was held in 2008 as a concerted effort to showcase the organization as an inclusive one interested in food justice, and featured panel discussions on the intersections of food, race, and poverty. Over the next few years, under the leadership of Josh Viertel, food access advocacy would rise as the foremost priority at Slow Food USA. However, with this shift in focus, fewer resources were devoted to cultural and biodiversity projects like the Ark of Taste. 

This shift, in turn, had its critics—Tooker, one of the organization’s longstanding local leaders, was one of the most outspoken. Quoting Petrini’s declaration that the organization’s work was in the kitchen, not the streets, she argued that leaders at Slow Food USA were working so hard to prove they weren’t elitist that they had abandoned their original mission to support farmers and artisan food producers, and to preserve cultural foodways. A battle of philosophies ensued between critics like Tooker and food justice advocates, the heart of it being the question: Who is Slow Food for? 

In an editorial for The Atlantic, Viertel responded to the turmoil, writing: “Should we be a movement that meets the interests of those who are naturally drawn to us and who can afford to take part [by paying farmers the premium prices required to produce specialty, intentionally-grown food], or should we be a movement that meets the needs of those who are most dependent on our being successful, and who are the most vulnerable if we fail?” 

A New Era for Slow Food New Orleans

The dispute within Slow Food USA ultimately led to both Tooker and Viertel stepping away from the organization. The New Orleans chapter of Slow Food dissolved, ironically around the same time that the national organization tapped a New Orleanian as its new leader: Richard McCarthy. 

McCarthy stepped in as Executive Director of Slow Food USA as a somewhat neutral party—a longtime collaborator of Tooker’s who understood the value of cultural foodways, but also a footsoldier with a history of working to expand access to local foods for public housing residents and families on public assistance. His vision for mending the rifts within Slow Food USA was encompassed by a mantra to restore a sense of “joy with justice” to the organization. During his six years as the Executive Director (2013–2019), McCarthy re-articulated the mission of Slow Food as one of food sovereignty—fighting for the rights of individuals to access healthy, locally-produced, culturally-significant food.

“It was a balance, between addressing the reality that people live and the place where we want them to discover the joys of community,” he said. “Now, did I succeed? I don’t know.” 

Back in New Orleans, local nutritionist and farmer Gary Granata took up Tooker’s mantle and began working to revive Slow Food in the city. “I had the support of a lot of people that wanted to see it go in a different direction,” said Granata, whose approach placed a greater emphasis on the people behind the city’s food traditions. “We’re trying to preserve foods and stuff like that, but what about the land and the people who produce these amazing food traditions that have influenced the entire world, that are disappearing?” he asked. “If we’re going to represent our food, we’ve got to have the history of our foods. We’re going to include Indigenous people and Africans, we’re going to have Vietnamese people. And we’re going to have cocktails.” 

[Read this: "The Banh Mi and The Poboy: Two sandwiches strengthen their bonds in New Orleans"] 

During his stint, from around 2012–2016, the chapter hosted boucheries, worked with local organizations like SproutNOLA—an organization supporting small-scale farmers in Louisiana—and with students at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). Granata and his collaborators launched the Vanishing Foodways project—which explored the intersections of Louisiana and Vietnam’s culinary traditions and ecological challenges, and they hosted the first Slow Fish International gathering held in North America. 

Ultimately, though, Granata didn’t feel he had the administrative support from the national office, nor the local enthusiasm that he needed to keep the New Orleans chapter alive. After years of fits and starts, in 2022 he shifted gears and started drawing in students at Dillard University—ultimately leaving the organization in their hands. “I couldn’t really find anyone to take over the work I was doing,” he said, expressing frustration at the bureaucracy of the organization’s administrative limitations. “Perhaps these problems in our food system are just better addressed outside of the nonprofit sector.” 

Today, the city of New Orleans no longer has an active Slow Foods chapter. “It’s strange,” said Mina Seck, a chef and community food director at Sprout NOLA who was a member of Slow Food New Orleans during the 2010s. “It’s funny that of all the places in the world where Slow Food isn’t working, it would be New Orleans.” 

[Read this our 2023 interview with Mina Seck, here.]

Where Slow Food Lives On 

Today, Louisiana has two active chapters of Slow Food USA. One is Granata’s legacy, the student chapter at Dillard. Overseen by Palmer as part of the Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture—which has an emphasis on Southern foodways—the organization, open only to university students, is alive and well, making a lasting impression on some of the South's youngest up-and-coming food leaders. In addition to the planting and gardening experiences available on Dillard’s increasingly “edible” campus (in Palmer’s words)—students take part in hands-on cooking and canning classes, connecting them directly to their food, and learning about its cultural significance. 

A main focus for the chapter is addressing the specific needs of its students; Dillard University is located in a food desert, and most of the students who live on or near campus don’t have easy access to fresh, local food. 

While acting as president of Dillard’s Slow Food chapter over the past year, Breyunha Smith has focused on educating her fellow students on how to overcome those limitations—using a three-pronged mission of gardening, cooking, and travel. 

“Once people learn how to garden, then they can start preparing meals without being dependent on the grocery store,” she said. “And once they can start cooking these meals, they can share them wherever they go via travel and expose them to other people—even if that’s just traveling to their family’s home and sharing what they’ve learned.” Currently, the chapter is working to publish a cookbook that teaches other college students how to eat healthy, fresh meals on a budget. 

Kevell Byrd, a photography student at Dillard University, joined the school's Slow Food chapter after attending the international Slow Food festival in Italy, Terre Madre. She was then inspired to document produce in her local supermarkets, as well as at the Crescent City Farmers Market, in a project she called, “Beyond the Bite.” 

“When I created my project Beyond the Bite it was to encourage the audience to view food as more than just a necessity for consumption. Like food is memories, connection, it’s emotion, it’s identity. I wanted to redefine conventional ideas about food and transforming it into a realm of cultural appreciation for not only the fine arts, but also the memory that’s associated with food.” —Kevell Byrd

Palmer has even taken a selection of students to Terre Madre Salone del Gusto, Slow Food International’s biannual festival in Italy. She got emotional recalling the impact it has had on the students, some of whom had never left the country before, to witness the vast diversity of other cultures’ food traditions. “You don’t realize what a seed can do at such a young age,” she said. 

“That trip is what inspired me to pursue the movement on our campus,” said Smith, who had never traveled outside of the country before going to Terre Madre. That spark led her to study in Chile for a semester, and to travel to Cuba and Paris to learn about other food cultures and philosophies around food justice. “I truly appreciate what Slow Food has done at Dillard, and [its principles are] something I’ll continue to integrate into my life in the future.” 

Slow Food’s main public presence in Louisiana today, though, is thriving miles away from the state’s most famed food city—in North Louisiana. “You just wouldn’t have guessed that twenty years ago,” said McCarthy. 

The Slow Food North Louisiana chapter has been active since 2007, and Angie White has been involved from the beginning, serving as chapter chair since 2010. Not a food professional per se, White grew up inspired by farming, cooking grandparents in Caddo Parish. When she discovered Slow Food while living in Washington, D.C., she was already part of a cooking club, taking classes for fun. “In Slow Food I found this way to celebrate the food in my local community, which was helping people understand that the closer you can get your food to where you live, the better it’s going to taste, with ingredients well-suited for your region, and you’re going to support your regional economy,” she said. 

Over the last twenty years, the chapter’s objectives have evolved with Slow Food USA's, moving from a focus on eating—hosting elaborate farm-to-table dinners—to a more balanced approach that draws together pleasure alongside education and access initiatives. In North Louisiana, where there are no year-round farmers markets, Slow Food aims to fill the gaps of awareness and access when it comes to where to find local food, as well as to provide affordable (often free) education opportunities on how to grow and cook your own food. White said that the chapter has made conscious efforts to ensure that North Louisiana’s many diverse cultures and communities are represented on their board, and it spotlights farmers who are finding flexible solutions that make even specialty, sustainably grown products more accessible. “Mahaffey Farms, for instance, has created a color code for their meat,” she said. “Red label is fully sustainable—grass fed only. And the blue label, they are raised in pasture and finished on a high-quality grain, with no GMOs. It’s better than the grocery store, but more affordable than the red label.”  

Part of Slow Food North Louisiana’s effectiveness is due to the partnership-based system that White has built, in which Slow Food acts as a central place of support for the farmers, chefs, and organizations/businesses already doing work to better our food systems. The organization has funded the donation of heirloom seeds to local gardeners and farmers, stipends to send people interested in sustainable farming to conferences, or—for example—to send a local chef to a writer’s workshop to finish her cookbook. 

Preserving the regionally distinct foodways of North Louisiana, which are less celebrated and well-known than New Orleans’s, is also a central tenant of the chapter. One of Slow Food North Louisiana’s biggest annual events is in partnership with Shreveport Green, as well as the LSU AgCenter and the Red River Coalition of Community Gardeners. The family-friendly, free cook-off, called “Greens on the Red,” is a celebration of North Louisiana greens. This underdog on the plate is given the spotlight and served up in dozens of creative different ways—from callaloo, to gumbo z’herbes. “People really come out for that event,” said Lauren Jones, Executive Director of Shreveport Green, describing it as a day of pride and rediscovery around a dish everyone there has a relationship with. 

“People who grew up here—whether they lived in a rural area or spent time in a rural area with their grandparents or someone, the memories of meals we’ve had are very strong,” said White.  

[Read about the 'official meal of North Louisiana,' crafted by Chef Hardette Harris, here.] 

This sense of storytelling around food is one of the most powerful ways to draw people into the larger movement, she says. Which is part of why the Ark of Taste—which first drew Poppy Tooker’s heart to the cause all those years ago—remains so important to Slow Food in Louisiana. White actively works to source seeds from the Ark of Taste for local growers, especially with North Louisiana sitting on the border of the Southeast and Southwest regions of the Ark in the United States. 

“Working with these varieties has been such a beneficial movement in the right direction to get people excited about foods that are unfamiliar, but tie back to our roots when we look deep into the ancestry of our food, and it gives us a platform to have these conversations,” said Jones. “That’s honestly what the Ark of Taste has done for us, is give us these stories that connect people to the food we’re growing.” 

Slow Food, Beyond Itself 

“Most people, the average person, they don’t even know what those two words mean necessarily—‘slow food,’” said Tooker. “But so many of them are doing it now.” It’s been more than ten years since she stepped away from the organization, but still, Tooker sees slow food, as a concept, everywhere she looks—in the Mirliton.org Facebook community, in Brandon Pellerin’s rice calas at his Harvest Pop-up, in Bryant Terry’s book, Black Food. 

And then there’s Tooker herself—“My gosh, look at what she’s doing with Louisiana Eats,” said McCarthy of Tooker’s fifteen-year-old radio show on Louisiana foodways. “It’s 100% slow food. She doesn’t even have to say it, she’s put it in her own words, and that’s when these things start to really stick.” 

McCarthy, who now serves on the board of Slow Food International, acknowledged the difficulties of operating an organization like Slow Food from a local level. In theory, such an all-encompassing mantra of “good, clean, and fair food for all” might seem to represent a cohesive vision for an idealized food system in America. But in practice, it holds within it hundreds of pathways and ideas—many that sometimes function better outside of the institutional umbrella. People like Angie White have found a way to utilize the infrastructure of Slow Food as an energy source working for the many arms striving towards a better food system in North Louisiana. But that’s not possible in every community, in every age.  

Though he expressed disappointment that Slow Food no longer has a city-wide presence in New Orleans, McCarthy said, “if it gave birth to a movement that has its own words and name to describe how it continues to evolve . . . maybe it did its job.” 

In New Orleans alone, much like the rest of Louisiana, the desire for sustainably grown, culturally resonant, accessible food is alive and well. You can find it in agricultural organizations like New Orleans Food & Farm Network and Grow Dat Youth Farm, in policy initiatives like the New Orleans Food Policy Action Council, in restaurants like Mosquito Supper Club and Bellegarde Bakery, in farms like the VEGGI Co-op in New Orleans East and CRISP Farms. 

“The work I do today [with SproutNOLA] is slow food,” said Seck. “I don’t know why the organization didn’t stick here. But the ideas do. They were always here, just integrated into the fabric of Louisiana, of the South.” 

Whether working inside of an organization like Slow Food, or outside of it, the experts working on the ground within our food systems agree on two things: we’ve made progress, but we still have a long way to go. “We have to show up and do the work in our communities,” said Palmer. “And only from there can we make changes in our nation, in our world.”  

In addition to his frustration with the institution of Slow Food, Granata ended his stint as chair of the New Orleans chapter in part because he needed to move home to Alabama to care for his aging parents. He’s been there ever since, focusing on them and growing food on his family land. 

He told me, “And the truth is, I think that through doing this, farming here, I’m still making a difference.” 

slowfoodusa.org.