ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, DANIEL BALAKOV
In 2008, I was attending a panel discussion on “sustainable food” at Harvard University, in the storied Faculty Room of University Hall. The purpose of the panel was to promote and celebrate good food, so we were all served tasty hors d’oeuvres carefully sourced from local farmers and fishermen, beginning with demitasse cups of a delicious scallop chowder from Cape Cod Bay. The featured speakers were a celebrity restaurateur from the San Francisco Bay area, a playwright from New York, and the young leader of Slow Food USA. It didn’t take long for all three to reach a lockstep conclusion: In the future, they said, sustainable food would have to be organic, local, and “slow,” definitely not fast or industrial.
Most at the event nodded their heads in assent, but I had a different take, having just returned from a research trip to rural Africa. ...
