Carlo Petrini, Slow Food founder/president and Corby Kummer, food writer/interpreter

Twenty years ago Carlo Petrini, founded Slow Food in an effort to resist McDonalds efforts to erect the Golden Arches in one of the most historical areas of Rome. Since then Petrini's work has spawned an international movement aimed at overhauling global food systems that he says are unhealthy and way out of balance. Petrini gave an impassioned lecture at U.C. Berkeley Tuesday night. While he spoke in vivid Italian, food writer Corby Kummer interpreted. Petrini seemed the perfect choice to inagurate the first class of Edible Education 101: The Rise and the Future of the Food Movement. The course is being co-taught by J-school professor, and author, Michael Pollan and Executive Director of People's Grocery in West Oakland, Nikki Henderson. The premise of the class is that food is political. Students and members of the public are given a chance to explore pressing issues such as food access, distribution and nutrition.

UC Berkeley students checking in for Edible Education

Student enrollment for the 13-week course filled up within minutes. The popular classes are also being offered to the public, free of charge and Bon Appétit Management Co. (BAMCO) is sponsoring the webcast on YouTube. In the audience Tuesday night were freshman Bridget Smith and Sarah Branoff. They said they are taking the course because, as undergrads, they don't usually get a chance to take a journalism class at Berkeley. They both like food and baking and have never even heard of Alice Waters. Waters' Chez Panisse Foundation is helping fund the class. David Park is a Venture Capitalist from Foster City. Park, who puts together health and wellness portfolios, says he is always on the lookout for who to hire and who to fund in the food and nutrition arena. Claudia Weisburd, another member of the public, is interested in how the course promises to integrate environmentalists, social justice activists and foodies.

I'm used to seeing these rock stars of the food movement on TV talk shows and not a scuffed up college stage in front of a white screen with no graphics but somehow Petrini kept everyone's attention. The International Slow Food founder talked about how there are two worlds, one where people get too much to eat and another that doesn't get enough to eat. He talked about gastronomy and how recipes are only one small part. Agriculture, anthropology and political economics are all part of gastronomy. What Petrini wants to do is fix the bad parts of the engine of gastronomy. He said right now, around the world, one billion people are suffering from hunger and in the U.S. we are throwing away twenty-two tons of food a day. For many of us with access to food, we have become locked into diets that are making us sick. Petrini says if you understand food politics you can help create change.

Here are some new paradigms he mentioned:

• Strengthen reciprocity -- Community supported agriculture is an example of this. You give money to a farmer and when he, or she, has it, they give you produce they have grown in return. Petrini's Slow Food movement is working to connect local food communities around the world.
• Share community tools. Why should every house have a shovel or a lawnmower?
• Give more value to the people who produce food. Petrini calls farmers the intellectuals of the earth.
• Give more value to food. Don't waste it.

The goal, says Petrini, is a world in which we stop consuming so much but also help those struggling so that they can have more. Petrini told the audience consuming less doesn't mean you will be less happy. "You will be more happy," he said.

Next week's class, which is already filled up, features film and theater director Peter Sellars. He will be discussing Food as Culture: the role of culture and the arts in deepening and strengthening the social and political roots of the food movement.

Well. It's been quite a week for the folks that love and hate the Ferry Building Farmers' Market. First, there was the revelation that a new book by Carlo Petrini (the founder of the Slow Food movement) was downright rude about the farmers and their customers, who work, shop, and food-stroll their Bay Area Saturdays away.

Then there was the CUESA follow-up meeting that attempted to get stuff hashed out between the offender and the offended.

This was followed by blog reaction all over the Bay Area and possibly the country. And finally, yesterday came some signs that maybe Alice Waters was Jimmy Cartering her way through the ugly muck and hurt feelings; possibly composting what was said and using it to feed new growth. Mum until just recently, Alice Waters was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday as weighing in with her opinion on the whole nasty mess.

"I don't think he was wrong about his perception that food is more expensive (at Ferry Plaza)," Waters told Scoop on Monday. "But I think he's wrong in his analysis of why it was."

The cost of raising good, fresh food and hauling it to market in the city "is something that's important for all of us to talk about," Waters says. And while she wishes Petrini hadn't written what he did, she supports him 100 percent.

The Chronicle notes that Petrini had apologized in what they term a "politician's type of apology" by saying he was sorry "for any offense caused by this passage." Which, I have to agree with the Chronicle, is sort of like that old wheeze, "I'm sorry you feel that way," which definitely removes the offender from acknowledging any blame whatsoever. As to the poor surfer-farmer that Petrini "outed" as specifically gouging customers just to support his surf habit?

Petrini insists he meant to give a "positive impression." He blamed his writing, and the translation, for distorting his efforts to illustrate the complexities of slow food in a fast world.

So...maybe what Petrini needed was a better editor? Interesting defense.

So far, I haven't subjected anyone to my own opinion about the kerfuffle. For one, there are plenty of opinions to go around and I'd just be adding to the noise, but for another, my opinion isn't really incendiary or original.

I frankly adore the Ferry Building Farmers' Market. Back in Boston, we didn't really have an equal to it. I mean, there was the one in Haymarket, but it smelled so much of rotting fish the one time I passed by that I never really wanted to go back.

However, the FBFM is so...pretty. Even in dank and drizzly weather -- my favorite time to shop there, actually -- it's just painfully beautiful to amble by the delicious, nourishing sculptures gently coaxed out of the simple dirt. The visions of bright tassels of radishes, the soft green piles of lettuces, shiny unblemished peppers, peaches that make you feel warm all over just by touching them. Even if I never pull out any money, I just feel at peace gazing at so much earthly beauty as the water laps the pylons. It's my art museum, and I can't get over it. I hope I never get over it. But maybe I'm naive or satisfied by simple things. After all, I still hunt for four-leaf clovers and hold buttercups under my husband's chin to see if he likes butter. (He does.)

Is the Ferry Building Farmers' Market expensive? Well, yeah, but so are Jimmy Choo shoes and Hummers and diamonds and memberships to Slow Food. It just happens to be where I choose to spend my money. Would it be nice if prices were lowered? Duh. Of course it would, but until I completely understand how much it costs to coax a small, organic farm to produce, transport, and sell the lovelies I put on my plate, I don't feel qualified to complain about it.

In fact, I've always been chuffed by the fact that my knowledgeable mother-in-law -- who can keep a vast number of figures in her head -- looks at the prices at our farmers' market and pronounces them to be competitive with what she pays at her farmers' market in Washington, D.C.

As other people have pointed out, if the Ferry Building Farmers' Market prices are so repugnant to people, there are so many other places to get good produce: Alemany, San Francisco's Civic Center, Marin -- and that's just the few I know about.

It just doesn't seem like the most productive plan of action to attack and tear down farmers and shoppers, call them names, assume motives and wallet size, and backbite.

I know what the real problem is here: we're all just crabby because the summer tomatoes haven't quite come in yet.