The San Francisco Citizen

Things are speeding up at Slow Food Nation ‘08 in San Francisco.  After fighting the worm wars, it’s nice to sit back and spend $500 to eat some celebrity chef food under the rotunda of City Hall. It’s the Victory Garden Celebration Dinner on August 24:

District Attorney Kamala Harris, Peter Coyote, Thomas Keller and Alice Waters invite you to celebrate the Victory Garden on Civic Center Plaza. We’ll gather in the garden, share a meal prepared by Chez Panisse, and plant the seeds of victory at San Francisco City Hall.

Or just get a table for $10k and invite a few friends to have some paella, your choice.

Blue corn as high as a elephant’s eye, and it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky: 

See you there!

“The Slow Food Nation Victory Garden, planted by a coalition of volunteers including Mayor Gavin Newsom and Alice Waters, is an edible garden on the Civic Center Plaza. Planted on the same site as the post World War II Victory Gardens 60 years ago, the Victory Garden represents the values of sustainability, community and stewardship of the land, while producing high quality food for people in need.”

Part of this crowd, a large crowd actually, at the San Francisco Ferry Building yesterday was there to get their very own free stainless steel vacuum flask to carry around tap water as an alternative to buying water in plastic bottles.

These were handed out for free:

Doesn’t everyone heart S.F.? How about the tap water you get in S.F. and some sourrounding areas? It comes from the Yosemite area, takes a rest around here, and then comes into your kitchen. It’s the best tap water in the world. So what’s wrong with drinking it instead of Dasani or Aquafina or whatever?

In 2007, Mayor Newsom famously worked on getting municipal workers off of the plastic water bottle. That move generated a little blowback but it also attracted some national interest.

In 2008, attention turns to restaurants routinely offering bottled water to patrons. It didn’t used to be this way, but nowadays it’s the first choice  you have to make at some joints and some diners might feel that they’re being a bit cheap if they don’t spring for the spring water. What the Mayor is doing is using a little moral suasion to affect public behavior for the greater good. It’s not really “greenwashing,” actually. What it is is a perfectly appropriate use of the bully pulpit, as it doesn’t force anybody to do anything and it doesn’t cost the taxpayers any substantial amount of money.

Of course the bottled water industry thinks yesterday’s effort smacks of  totalitarianism.

Stainless steel bottles are available while supplies last at SFPUC Customer Service at 1155 Market Street near Civic Center. Take a pledge to stop buying plastic bottles of water and you can get a nice metal bottle as well. Just drop on by. Who knows, you might get lucky.