Slow Food Nation will take place Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. Here's a another chance to answer the question of whether sustainable, localized, in-season eating is a luxury, available only to the froo-frooiest among us. It's interesting. The slow food movement in Europe, despite being seen as a high-brow food dilettantism and a shallow cultural choice, is still quite popular. But it's been slow to take root in the U.S., even though it has the awesomest of snail logos.

How do we get over that hurdle stateside? It seems like it might require those of us who believe in slow food principles to articulate some clearer thinking about the politics of said food: who deserves to eat what, when, why, and how. Seems to me one answer is to infiltrate American culture through school cafeterias -- brainwash 'em when they're young and can't put up a fight!

I feel like I should probably offer a comment on the giant salmonella'd tomato recall going on given that I just recently wrote a piece for the Center for American Progress on the inability of the fractured federal food safety system to actually ensure the safety of the food supply. Um, told ya? But it seems to me that as I spent a good deal of time talking to the former head of the FDA about this very sort of thing happening, I'll leave it to him:

"When we had the spinach episode, everyone acted like it was a great surprise," former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, a Bush-appointee and long-time federal food safety official, told Science Progress. "But the likelihood of something bad happening [with the food supply] is always quite high."

Listen to the man. He spent decades working at the highest levels of food safety. The every-now-and-then food outbreak isn't really more of a feature than a bug, isn't it, when we have more than a dozen (!) federal agencies with a finger in the oversight of which, one of which (USDA) has the food industry in its driver's seat and another (FDA) that screams up and down the halls of the Capitol Building that they don't have enough money to do their job. The only element of surprise here is that we're shocked each and every time our 'matoes make us sick. (Photo thx Ian S)

Over on the Center for American Progress's Science Progress, I have a new story up on the mismatch between the U.S. food safety system that grew out of the response to The Jungle's gruesome depiction of Chicago's meatpacking plants ("...the meat would be moldy and white, stinking and full of maggots.") more than a century ago and the globalized way we eat today, where a fast-food hamburger can contain the beef from a hundred cows and ingredients from around the world. As things stand today, more than a dozen inside-the-Beltway agencies, offices, and bodies with widely different ideas about food safety have jurisdiction over the American food supply.

In the article, titled "Our Fractured Food Safety System," I cover a proposal now pending in Congress to unify food oversight under the roof of a single public health agency, which is the way the EU is trending. I hope you might have a look at the piece. I guess if you have a weak stomach, you might want to wait until after your next meal.

There's a little-noticed detail to the ongoing farm bill debate that I thought might be of some interest in the context of the presidential primary process. It has to do with Barack Obama and a uncollected restitution payments owed to many black farmers.

The deal is this. Pigford v. Glickman alleged that black farmers had faced institutional and systematic discrimination at the hands of the USDA for years and years, generation after generation. (Dan Glickman was the USDA Secretary at the time the case was filed.) In case after case, black farmers where denied loans and other lines of credit that their white counterparts were regularly granted. After years of wrangling, Pigford was finally settled in 1999 by consent decree. The USDA agreed to a process by which black farmers could apply for restitution.

All well and good, but those applications were due within six months of the settlement. It's been estimated that as many as 74,000 farmers applied for Pigford payments after the deadline. They were shut out of the settlement for good, it seemed.

And so, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been pushing for Congress to intervene and offer some relief to the farmers who were eligible for Pigford payment but somehow missed the boat. More recently, Barack Obama has gotten in front of the issue. He's co-sponsored legislation championed by the CBC in the House, with the goal of getting in passed as part of the massive Farm Bill. And he's been fairly aggressive against some inappropriate lobbying against the Pigford language by USDA employees. (The USDA is unhappy with the many millions of dollars further restitution might cost.)

In addition to the policy imperative behind Pigford language in the farm bill, it's not bad politics for Obama. Restitution is a very big deal in the rural South -- you know, places like South Carolina, Florida, and the like. It has been for many years, and the flavor of the fight for Pigford compensation is similar to other civil rights fights.

The Senate just finished marking up the farm bill. No word yet on whether Pigford language has survived the sausage making process so far. If it makes it all the way into law, and his campaign sees the political value in it, Pigford may give Obama a healthy boost in some important early states.

Senator Obama has a press release up that seems to imply that his Pigford language was accepted by Ag Committee Chairman Tom Harkin and rolled into the Farm Bill that passed the committee late yesterday. But I'm not entirely clear on that point. So I've asked his press office for clarification, and haven't heard back anything yet.

Might seem like a policy quirk, yeah, but it's a quirk worth many thousands of dollars to many thousands of black farmers.

"Someone will probably have my head for saying this," said Gary Ibsen, an organic tomato farmer in central California. "But to my mind, what the Jersey tomato has going for it is the legend, and the loyalty, and the rest of it is just the pronounced flavor of any tomato that’s picked ripe and not shipped around the continent."