Hey, Washington, You're About to be Served: Michael Pollan Thinks Labor Day Potlucks Send a Message

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Pollan: Show up with hummus, change the world.

​There's still time to sign up for one of the Bay Area's several potluck Labor Day Eat-Ins this Monday, September 7, organized by Slow Food USA. They'll mark the launch of Slow Food's Time for Lunch, an initiative to improve school lunches and introduce farm-to-table curricula for the 30 million children covered by the National School Lunch program. If you need more of a nudge than that, there's always Michael Pollan.

"You guys are the leaders in the sustainable food movement," the Berkeley author and journalism prof said during a recent press conference for Slow Food USA, "and I want to applaud that. I want to talk about political power. The amazing cover of Time magazine, The Real Cost of Cheap Food, was kind of an incredible story -- a lot of things the mainstream hasn't said in this way."

Pollan thinks supporters of a sustainable food system are winning the media war, but Washington is just starting to listen. "There's a gap between media and reality -- 2 or 3 percent of U.S. food production is sustainable. Congress sees this as a gnat or a fly on a behemoth of an industry. In connecting farms to schools, the tremendous impediment is Congress. The food industry is the biggest lobby on the hill."

Pollan thinks the Labor Day Eat-Ins are a way to show Washington the strength of the movement. "Obama says, 'Show me the movement,'" Pollan said. "That's really what Labor Day is about -- to do something more than sign an online petition. It sends a message about democratizing a movement that has often been criticized as elitist," Pollan said, "and to rebrand the Slow Food movement and introduce a lot of people to it."

Eat-Ins are planned for more than 280 locations in all 50 states. In the Bay Area, they're scheduled for Franklin Park in Alameda, Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Berkeley, the plaza in Healdsburg, Boyle Park in Mill Valley, 525 Midcrest Road in Oakland, Stanford, and four locations in San Francisco (Dolores Park, Civic Center, Brooks Park, and Potrero Hill).