San Francisco Blog

​Canny: At Civil Eats, Anya Fernald opens up about Yes We Can, the series of communal preserve-a-thons at La Cocina. Fernald, director of last year's Slow Food Nation events and organizing force behind the upcoming Eat Real Festival in O-Town, is, ahem, canny about organizing around food. Who knew that putting up cans of apricot preserves could be thick with political purpose: Here's Fernald:

In my work, I face the constant struggle of figuring out how to produce better food for a cost that is within shouting distance of the cost of industrial mass-produced food. This spring I was working on a project that got me thinking more about this challenge, and I considered simply scaling up the same tools that I use to make sustainable locally-produced food affordable in my own life. First up: canning. How do you make organic local handmade jam affordable? Make it yourself.

Since Slow Food began arousing media interest in this country, it's been bedeviled by well-worn accusations of elitism. Though she's not affiliated with Slow Food in any formal way, has Fernald found a way to blast those accusations once and for all? With a DIY populism that doesn't give up eating pristine food, only cuts the cost of labor, as it were, by putting the means of production in everyone's hands. Very smart, this Fernald.