Terra Madre

I believe environmentalism is dying and will be replaced within fifteen years by a resurgent agrarianism, focused on food, and led by youth.

Life takes curious twists.

I'm a former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist who in 2006 became a dues-paying member of the New Mexico Cattlemen's Association as a producer of local grassfed beef. Then last year, I was selected as an American delegate to Terra Madre, the biennial convening of the Slow Food movement in Turin, Italy, where I joined thousands of farmers from around the planet in a four-day festival of lectures, workshops and a mountain of unbelievably good food.

For a boy raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, during the heyday of sprawl, fast food, and disco music, this is still a bewildering sequence of events. I grew up with cars, concrete, transplanted cactus, and copious amounts of air conditioning. The closest I came to livestock were the horses my parents owned for trail-riding purposes.

Cattle? Local food? Sustainability? I had no clue. Like everyone else coming of age in a big American city during 1970s, I didn't give a second thought to anything related to what I ate. Geez, back then fast food was still considered a good thing. Even when I joined the Sierra Club, eventually becoming an activist during the 1990s, I rarely thought about the sources of my daily meals. It was all wilderness, wildlife, and outrage all the time. If I thought about food, it was only in the context of the  bad  things  it