walk to eat, eat to walk (fond memories of slow food nation)

That pithy little axiom has definitely become our vacation M.O. If we were to start a travel agency, it'd likely be emblazoned on our brochures. Then again, if A and I were to start a travel agency, I don't think we'd find too many customers eager for a grueling schedule of zig-zagging back-and-forth across a city in search of something to eat. Maybe we need a different business plan.

Still, it suits us just fine (even if it runs a little contrary to most people's idea of "relaxation") and for our recent trip to San Francisco, we found a few kindred spirits (or at least good sports) to drag along with us. We'd gone down to the Bay Area to document Slow Food Nation, the first national celebration of American food culture, but managed to fit in a few side meals explorations as well.

I won't delve too much into the details of Slow Food Nation here - for that, you can see A's post on the Slow Food Portland blog - but I will mention a few of our favorite moments from the event:

As soon as we got into the city, we dove right into the fracas. We checked out a panel on "re-localizing" food, which was a bit of a let-down, given how familiar all the discussion was. I did come away with a great story about sustainable foie-gras, which I'm planning on writing about later. The second panel definitely upped the ante with a staggering raft of stories about brutal American farm labor conditions. A did a really good job of capturing that panel on the Slow Food Portland site.


The weekend was packed with Slow Food events - a congress for leaders, a networking day for activists, a marketplace, a victory garden, a tasting hall, and a street food bazaar. Most of it centered on the front lawn of City Hall, where we explored the large farmer's market of growers who were showcasing just one item. Everyone was over-the-top generous with their products, and we took full advantage of that. We tasted handfuls of heirloom apples, blenheim apricot jam, and some really amazing goat's milk caramel. One stand was selling pawpaw, one of the oldest native fruits in America. It tasted very tropical, somewhere between a guava and an avocado with huge, glossy black seeds. I don't think it fairly deserves the name "Ozark banana."


This seriously was the weekend of a hundred hams: domestic prosciutto, salame picante, mortadella, Kentucky country ham, Tennesee country ham, country ham with sweet corn relish, country ham with lard biscuits and raspberry jam. People are seriously obsessive about their country ham, but I suppose it makes sense to be so irrational over such a buttery, salty delight. We did manage to taste some non-pork foods as well; from the street food vendors, we tried doha papdi chaat (yogurt, chickpeas, tamarind and fried crisps), huaraches con chorizo (admittedly pig-inflected), and A got her free-range, grass fed hot dog, which may have been her weekend highlight.

On Sunday, we had tickets to Taste, a pier filled with themed food pavilions serving samples of artisanal American foods from around the country. It was delicious, but horrible for my poor buffet etiquette. When I end up in a scenario that involves both food and "lines," I get a cruel, game-day mentality of win-at-all-costs. It is no longer about enjoyment, only quantity. We ate a god-awful amount of food and certainly got our tickets-worth, but ended up with a weirdly-queasy buzz because of my neuroses-driven choices.


The whole experience was based on a system of points for tastes - you received 20 upon entry that you could trade for food samples, ranging in cost from 1 to 3 points. I was panicked. "We won't be able to try everything!" I pleaded to A. Then I noticed that the two pavilions that should have had the strictest limits, in fact had the least: coffee and spirits. The sustainable coffee booth was all-you-can-drink, so we quickly had a three-coffee cupping, followed by four half-shot macchiatos from different US baristas. Smart. The spirits pavilion, too, was a low-ticket, all-you-can-drink booth. I made sure that A and I got our fill. We sipped on estate tequila, a Bloody Mary that reversed my hatred of tomato juice, a few gin cocktails, and a taster of absinthe. We were well on our way. You can imagine what a great base all of that caffeine and booze made for the rest of the samples.


In truth, we got to try an unbelievable amount of products. From the pickles pavilion, we had some sublime sweet-corn relish on top of, you guessed it, country ham. We also tried green-tomato chutney, four types of classic cucumber pickles and had our pictures taken in a pickle barrel. The honey and preserves pavilion was similarly great, with some amazing bites like an apricot and green almond preserve and lavender-honey cupcakes. Oregon producers (like our beloved Ayer's Creek) were featured front-and-center, alongside delicious-sounding recipes, including one for Sweet Potato and Sour Cherry butter that I need to make next year.


It was particularly cool that a lot of the booths showcased the process of making their featured foods - in the chocolate pavilion, we tried four single-origin dark chocolates, but we also had a tasting of four phases of the chocolate refining process. Luckily, we could head back to the spirits pavilion to wash the flavor of those middle steps of chocolate-making out of our mouth. From the ice cream booth, we had six types of ice cream (including sorbets, gelato, and yogurts), but the fig ice stands out the most for how pure the flavor of the fruit was. We had stuffed Indian naan from the bread pavilion, mortadella ham with sauerkraut from the charcuterie vendors, and five kinds of aged, raw milk cheeses. But lest you think we didn't get our fill, we also had three cured hams, four sustainable seafood dishes and a buffalo and red-bean chili. All this, and we didn't even finish using up our points! Chalk that one up to efficient and liberal use of the spirits pavilion.

As much as we did attend, we didn't spend our entire weekend in Slow Food events. After all, we were in San Francisco, which has some pretty good food of its own. Next post up, I'll share some of the other (still food-related) things we did in town...