From our Archives – Slow Food Nation

By May 1, 2015 September 21st, 2023 Blog

Look what photo we found in a drawer of ours: Slow Food President and Founder, Carlo Petrini, with Susan Campbell (left) and Paula Shatkin (right)!

In 2008, in the run up to Slow Food Nation, the first national Slow Food event in the U.S., Carlo Petrini visited us here in northern California and some of our Russian River Convivium leaders attended a brainstorming meeting in San Francisco.

Susan Campbell, Michael Dimock, Paula Shatkin and others attended this meeting, along with numerous other NorCal leaders, and we proudly presented Carlo with our Save the Gravensteins bumper sticker.

Paul Kolling from Nana Mae Organics – the first producer we promoted who was making good, marketable products with local Gravenstein apples – had a really successful booth at Slow Food Nation. Marissa Guggiana, another of our leaders  – who later co-founded The Butcher’s Guild -, curated the meat part of the event.  Anya Fernald, who had helped our Gravenstein Presidium get off the ground a few years previously, was executive director of the entire amazing event. Fernald later founded the Belcampo Meat Company, with a USDA-approved multi-species slaughter facility designed by animal welfare expert Temple Grandin. Grandin will be a speaker at Slow Meat 2015, early June in Denver, where Michael Dimock, now President of Root of Change, will also be participating.

Now this is a photo that got us talking!

Zeno Swijtink is a member of the SFRR Leadership Team. He hails from the Netherlands where his ancestors were bakers and farmers.

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