“Come to the table,” Slow Food Nation invited. And come to San Francisco over Labor Day weekend they did—around 50,000 people, making it perhaps the largest food celebration in American history.

Tables and straw bales appeared in the heart of the city’s Civic Center around a victory garden on about a quarter of an acre that was formerly a lawn. It was surrounded by a huge marketplace, which was like an old-fashioned farmers’ market that gets food directly from the farm to the fork.

A couple of miles away by the Bay at Ft. Mason–inside an old military hangar stretching over the length of a couple of football field—people strolled down a long aisle to taste fresh seafood, chocolate, wine, olives, ice cream, Indian bread and other delightful options.

Meanwhile, inside rooms downtown people discussed the growing global food crisis and how to respond to it. The final panel included the following key voices in the growing world-wide sustainable agriculture movement: Italian Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food in l986, physicist Vandana Shiva from India, Kentucky poet and author Wendell Berry, UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse Restaurant, and “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schloesser.

Petrini emerged as a storytelling organizer, Shiva as an activist, Berry as an elder statesman, Pollan as a teacher with a broad theoretical frame, Waters as an inspiring chef, and Schloesser as a reporter from the field.

Food and agriculture were related to issues such as climate change, social justice, re-localizing food, and the policy and planning needed to replace our current food system

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