Slow Food Nation's Victory Garden

The central lawn in Civic Center Plaza was being bulldozed on Thursday morning much to everyone's bewilderment.



Signage advised that this was part of Slow Food Nation's "Come To The Table" event scheduled for this Labor Day Weekend.



There is an extensive website (click here) with a list of events, which includes a July 12th planting of a "victory garden" and tickets for expensive "Slow Food" feasts at various restaurants during the Labor Day Weekend, from Acme Steakhouse to the Hayes Street Grill. There are also offerings of "slow hikes" and "slow journeys" and a "slow food" rock concert, along with "Taste" pavilions down at Fort Mason.



My favorite event is the titular "Come To The Table" on Thursday, August 28th, which is "invitation only." Here's the website's description:

"For Slow Food leaders to celebrate the conclusion of the National Congress and initiation of Slow Food Nation, Come to the Table is an open-air dinner for 500 people seated around the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in Civic Center. The meal, celebrating the urban-rural partnerships and dedicated leaders that make the event possible, is casual and served family-style at long tables."

I wonder if they will be inviting me.

Slow Food Nation 2: Politics

After the morning planting by the volunteers at the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in Civic Center, the celebrities arrived, including Mayor Gavin Newsom and his fiance Jennifer Siebel along with the doyenne of the Slow Food movement in the United States, Alice Waters (all pictured above).



Alice Waters joined the mayor and his fiance in a ceremonial planting...



...where they all got their hands dirty, which seemed to make Ms. Siebel somewhat discomfited.



The founder of Berkeley's Chez Panisse restaurant, Miss Alice looked exuberant over having called Mayor Newsom's bluff at a meeting earlier in the year where she talked him into installing the "Victory Garden" as part of the huge Slow Food Nation confab taking place this Labor Day weekend.



Security was tight for the event to keep out the great unwashed...



...so they wouldn't bother dignitaries such as Wade Crowfoot (above), Newsom's so-called Director of Climate Protection Initiatives.



There were speeches by Anya Fernald and John Bela, the Victory Gardens "Program Manager" (above in the hat) that were long on rhetoric and short on inspiration...



...and they were followed by Willow Rosenthal (above) who founded City Slicker Farms in West Oakland (click here for their website), which has been creating neighborhood produce gardens in that blighted neighborhood over the last decade.



She was followed by Mayor Newsom who babbled on about his accomplishments in the realm of the environment and how much more he was going to accomplish with his super-duper initiatives, taking personal credit for just about everything besides the creation of the geodesic dome.



I would feel a bit more credulous if his own municipal government didn't do everything in their power to shut down and destroy every communal neighborhood garden that arises spontaneously on unused land in San Francisco, or if he made a peep about the disgraceful parking garage going up a block away at Hastings College, but I suppose a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Clean Energy Victory Garden

The Slow Food Nation "Victory Garden" in Civic Center Plaza has started to blossom...



...and the public was invited for a tour of the gardens on Saturday...



...as part of a celebration of the Clean Energy Act Proposition 7 which is on San Francisco's ballot this November.



Various politicos were in attendance and giving speeches, such as State Senator Mark Leno and San Francisco School Board President Mark Sanchez above.



Bob Brigham, who is volunteering for the proposition, was pedaling on the bike-powered P.A. system...



...which was being used by the dancer Krissy Keefer...



...and her entourage of Taiko drumming dancers...



...who couldn't have been any prettier.



Greg Dewar, a local political consultant, thinks that Proposition H is a bait-and-switch attempt at enacting public power and throwing out the PG&E utility monopoly, while Bob Brigham has promised a list of how the proposition will be helpful and why it's going to win. We shall see.

Slow Food Nation 3: Pupusas de Dios

The legendary Alice Waters was the last of the speakers at the Civic Center Victory Garden planting. She started with a charming story about being a four-year-old in New Jersey during World War Two when her parents had a "Victory Garden" and she got to play "Queen of the Strawberry Patch" but she confessed that she really was never a gardener, but always an eater, a chef, a combiner, and she had the utmost respect for people who grew food.



In a surreal bit of scheduling, the annual revival tent meeting of Central American evangelicals was also slated for the Civic Center Plaza the same weekend (click here for my take on "El Santo de Israel" two years previous)...



...and though an agreement had beeen worked out which allowed for some quiet time during the Slow Food Nation's hour of speeches...



...the other orators had taken too long and Alice Waters was interrupted almost immediately by the powerful sound system and religious fervor of those testifying on the lawn next door.



To her great credit, Alice was amused rather than irritated and said, "Well, they're having a religious revolution over there, and we're having a food revolution over here," implying it was a variation on the same theme.



She didn't bother competing with the loudspeakers and graciously told people they should go for lunch, which the volunteers did behind their chain-link fence.



In a piece of perfect irony, the really delicious smells were all coming from a tent set up to feed the religious fanatics, and they were Salvadaron Hispanics who were selling insanely delicious chicken stew pupusas.



Even though the preachers were going on about the horror of "los homosexuales" over their microphones, the food people at the event were extremely sweet and their food exquisite. When I paraded my sandwich in front of the volunteers who had just finished their fancy lunch, I saw a slight twinge of envy.

Victory Garden Community Day

The Slow Food Nation people have decided to put on a trio of "Community Days" at the Victory Garden in Civic Center Plaza (click here) which on Saturday included entertainment.



Not many people showed up for the event...



...and my favorite sight was the little boy who much preferred playing with the water cans and gardening tools than watching what looked to be a very dreary puppet show.

Slow Food Nation 1: Gardening

The Slow Food Nation '08 "Victory Garden" was planted in Civic Center Plaza on Saturday morning...



...by a small army of volunteers...



...most of them sustainable food environmentalists from the East Bay...



...who seemed to be enjoying their field trip to San Francisco immensely.



The garden is the centerpiece of a large event over Labor Day Weekend that includes food pavilions at Fort Mason along with a two-day music concert on the Great Meadow there...



...and a fancy "Marketplace" in Civic Center Plaza that's going to feature ethnic food stands, plus a series of speakers at Herbst Theater and Milton Marks Auditorium in the State building (click here for their website).



Though the volunteers all seemed to be smart and have their hearts and hands in the right place...



...there was a whiff of elitism about the entire affair, especially with local denizens looking in through the chain-link fence and not being allowed into the garden.



Thankfully, the public was invited in after the dignitaries had spoken and the volunteers had been fed a fancy lunch provided by Bon Apetit Catering, and above all, the garden itself is beautiful.

Let Our Garden Grow

The Slow Food Nation extravaganza has come and gone over the recent Labor Day Weekend, and it seemed to provoke quite a bit of ambivalence among "foodies."



My friend Samantha Breach wrote an interesting essay on the subject at her excellent "Becks and Posh" site (click here). She also directed me to a fascinating account at "The Inadvertent Gardener" (click here) by a Slow Nation volunteer who found herself horrified at the rampant consumerism in the midst of what is usually a place for the homeless.



The Mayor's office has announced that the "Victory Garden" in Civic Center Plaza will be allowed to live on through November, possibly around Thanksgiving.



This is splendid news because the garden has a very nice feeling these days now that the Slow Food circus has moved on, and one of the volunteers even directed me to a secret pumpkin in the middle of a planting bed.



The farmers' market at U.N. Plaza next door also continues to provide inexpensive, delicious produce on Wednesdays and Sundays to a part of town without many grocery stores. The market was started in 1981 by Quakers trying to get fresh produce to poor people in the Tenderloin, but of course Gavin Newsom's Real Estate Department has been making noises about taking over the operation and raising everyone's fees. (Click here for a recent article on the issue.) The hypocrisy of Newsom's administration really can be stunning.

Let Our Federal Rooftop Garden Grow

The Beaux Arts Federal building at 50 United Nations Plaza above is being newly rehabbed after standing empty for the better part of the last decade. The building used to house Health and Human Services offices, which is why there was an AIDS tent city in the early 1980s protesting the government's inaction on the epidemic. Its new incarnation will be as headquarters for the Pacific Rim region of the General Services Administration, which stretches from Arizona and Nevada to Guam, and there will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony this October.



As part of the redesign of the building, a "green roof" has been installed complete with sod, grass and wildflowers to capture stormwater...



...along with a large array of solar panels.



Last Wednesday a small group of journalists were invited for a press conference to spread the word of this new ecological wonder. From left to right above are SF Planning Director John Rahaim, GSA Regional Administrator Ruth Cox, Green Roofs for Healthy Cities President Steven Peck, and SFPUC Assistant Manager of External Affairs Juliet Ellis.



Ms. Cox was enthusiastic and lively in her advocacy for green roofs and walls, mentioning that huge projects had already been undertaken on federal buildings in Washington, D.C., among other locations. Peck is the founder of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a trade association based in Toronto, Canada. Their annual conference, CitiesAlive, will be held in San Francisco this year from October 23rd-26th at the Marriott Marquis, in partnership with the SF Planning Department and the SF Public Utilities Commission.



Peck brought up the example of World War Two Victory Gardens as a model for urban food production on rooftops, though he probably didn't realize that San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza already hosted a huge Victory Garden in 2008. It was installed by Chez Panisse's Alice Waters and then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, and it involved tearing out a perfectly lovely lawn which has never reappeared, replaced by hard packed dirt for the last five years.



Speaking of San Francisco municipal waywardness, SFPUC External Affairs Assistant Manager Juliet Ellis, above left, is the $195,000 per year bureaucrat who this spring was discovered funneling San Francisco taxpayer funds to a nonprofit in Oakland where she was a paid member of the Board. Her boss, Harlan Kelly, just announced that the $200,000 grant had been refunded and that Juliet's heart was in the right place, so that everyone should move on and not look at this train wreck. (Click here for a Matier & Ross post and here for the Ethics Alarms blog detailing her behavior.)

SF Planning Director John Rahaim, above right, has been involved in his own share of controversies (click here and here), but so far he hasn't been accused of enriching himself personally through his job. Rahaim's presentation on Wednesday was refreshingly honest about how San Francisco is behind the curve when it comes to the green roof and walls movement, with our only real example being the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.



The rooftop at 50 United Nations Plaza will unfortunately be off limits to both the public and government workers in the building, but it will make for some lovely views for neighbors, and there is a huge, newly redesigned outdoor courtyard in the center of the building.



May a thousand rooftops bloom.