Topsy-Turkey

To get our Thanksgiving turkey, I pulled my car into an alley off Pico Boulevard one day last week, parked beside a dumpster, walked up to a couple of unmarked vans and rapped on the doors.

Great, I thought, I’ll either get a delicious, free-range kosher turkey or be kidnapped.

Inside were stacks of boxes that had arrived that morning from an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania. Each contained a kosher, free-roaming Heritage breed bird that had been slaughtered in as humane a fashion as the word “slaughter” allows, then frozen and shipped to a few dozen Los Angeles customers.

Millions of Americans can get their hormone-befouled, cage-confined, factory-farmed, genetically mutant turkeys for a few dollars at any supermarket, but to get one that tastes good and isn’t a self-basting environmental disaster, I had to make numerous e-mail and phone arrangements with Got Kosher? — KOL Foods’ Los Angeles distributor. I paid about $7 per pound and skulked around Pico-Robertson feeling both elitist and low-life.

Something is topsy-turvy in a food system that makes it easy to get food that is bad for you and your environment and hard to get the good stuff.

The idea that we, in our generation, could begin to change all this is what drove me to Turin, Italy, last month for Terra Madre, the biennial conference of the Slow Food International movement.

(Want to have a difficult conversation with your spouse? Try convincing her that you’re going to a food conference in Italy for four days for “work.”)

The Italian writer and intellectual Carlo Petrini founded Slow Food as a reaction to the McDonald’s-ization of his culture. But it has moved beyond just opposing fast food or fetishizing all that is local and artisanal, to supporting policies and cultures that ensure a food system that produces healthy, good food accessible to all.

The U.S. branch of the movement has grown to almost 250,000 people in all 50 states. It works on food legislation, promotes a national campaign for healthier school lunches, and has a network of local chapters helping food producers and marketers. Josh Viertel, all of 32 years old, is the stateside leader. I spoke with him in Turin. He is 6-foot-3, with a deep voice and a presence that manages to be both commanding and gentle. A Harvard grad, he developed and co-directed the groundbreaking Yale Sustainable Food Project and also spent time as a shepherd in Sicily. 

You might wonder, as I did, how this interest and activism blossomed in a Jewish kid raised on Beverly Glen.

“My parents weren’t farmers,” he said, as if he needed to. “But food was incredibly important to us.”

Earlier, in a speech to Slow Food USA’s 700 delegates, Viertel put it this way: “It was at the table I first learned to share. It was at the table I first learned to think critically. It was at the table I first learned to disagree with people and still really love them. At the table, it is hard not to see more about what you have in common.”

Viertel didn’t mention that he was Jewish, so I just asked him. The table he had described may sound generic, but to my ears, it sounded deeply familiar.

He nodded but didn’t have much more to say about it. The Slow Food movement, from Petrini on down, is much more comfortable in the language of academia, gastronomy and political engagement than in the realm of the spirit.

“Why doesn’t Petrini work through churches and synagogues?” I asked Viertel. Isn’t there a spiritual component to food, to feeding people, to stewardship, that would make religious institutions possible allies?

“I don’t know,” Viertel said. “You should ask Carlo that.”

I didn’t get that opportunity, but I did get to spend two more days at the conference. 

And what I took away, bottom line, is that the people at Terra Madre, the activists around the world involved in the Slow Food movement, are engaged in what is the most important social movement of our day.

It’s happening right before our eyes, but it’s easy to miss. Why? Unless there are police with batons and protesters in the streets, the press doesn’t see a social movement. But this is a big, radical movement, a grass-roots one, and if it succeeds, the fundamental structures of our society will change, from the way corporations do business, to the laws that govern food and land rights, to the very taste of the stuff we put in our mouths. 

I’m convinced that, even taking into account the law of unintended consequences, these changes will repair so much that is broken in the world: our environment, hunger, obesity, human rights, animal welfare, the taste of our food. 

Perhaps that is why the movement resonates among people for whom those are primary values. Slow Food is shot through with Jews, from Viertel, to Paula Shatkin, the former Angeleno working to save Gravenstein apple orchards in Sebastopol, Calif., to Sam Levin, the 15-year-old founder of a school garden movement in Massachusetts. Its principles are shared by other specifically Jewish groups like Hazon and Adamah.

“We have to stop thinking of real food as a privilege,” Viertel said. “We have to think of it as a universal right.”

And by focusing on food, the movement has found perhaps the most powerful lever for changing so much that is wrong in society. The production, distribution and consumption of food touches on every aspect of our lives, from topsoil maintenance to gender roles.

I believe it ultimately touches on the vitality of our own souls as well.

The seat of our soul is our flesh, wrote the talmudist Adin Steinsaltz, and our flesh is composed of food. What and how we eat is as much spiritual as physical.

In such a world, maybe buying your turkeys from a van in an alley constitutes, in its way, holiness.