A Model of the Slow Food, Slow Town Revolution

Cittaslow in Action on a Sebastopol Farm

October 3, 2014

©Copyright 2014: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

Fastest Food in the West

I was a teenager when the golden arches of the McDonald’s empire were first planted into everybody’s local landscape.  Looking back, I am surprised by how drawn I was to the idea of stepping up to a counter, asking for a this and a that, paying an “Are you sure that’s all?” amount of money, watching the clerk make some notes and turn around.  In the time it would take to draw out a handkerchief to cover your nose to sneeze, there was your food, bagged up, hot, ready to go!

I remember  how sobering it was when that word "million" went up on
McDonald's signs everywhere.  Now that seems like a thimble full

Two years before that I had been employed at a place a block from the beach that made burgers and malts.  Shakes were rarely asked for, but we made those too.  The burgers I was taught to make were as real as they could be at the time.  They weren’t putting chemicals, antibiotics, hormones and other sundry stimulants into the beef part of the food chain then, but they were spraying DDT from crop dusters up and down the valleys of our farms.  The burgers came with condiments, slices of tomato, lettuce and, for whatever it was worth at the time, the beef patties came without gristle or additives.  In other words, at the place where I worked, my boss had filtered out “cheap” and run-of-the-mill and opted for quality.  The milkshakes and malts weighed a lot in your hand. 

People who came in had one of those ubiquitous round, twirling seats at the counter or a booth to sit and socialize while they slowly consumed their pre-fast-food meal, spoke with the owners, made their eating experience a quality one that, after a few years, helped define their character by association.  Mr. and Mrs. Bogert were there practically every day, all day, put their heart into everything they did and, as a result, a high quality experience was available in their establishment for anyone who was looking for one.  The Bogerts were not “corporate” types, but your archetypical Mom and Pop.  Without intending, they ratcheted up quality expectations in everybody around them, while also, without intending, preparing within me some kind of standard by which to judge the quality of the soon-to-come invention of Richard and Maurice McDonald.

The day I went to McDonald’s the first time, it was mostly out of curiosity. I was not in a hurry nor was I penny-pinching.  One look around after stepping inside left me with a feeling I was probably not mature enough to identify at the time, one which today I would attribute to all activity on the premises NOT originating in the heart.  Heartfelt had been replaced by routine, mechanical, repeatable behaviors. The people employed there to do the job I did a couple of years earlier now looked and acted like robotic, mainstreamed, uniformed individuals with scripted and very finite numbers of sentences to parrot, trained in the corporate behaviors they were required to ape.  The only other place I could think of that harbored employees with similar attributes was Disneyland.  Like many people I suffered a cognitive dissonance from the effect of the culture shock.

The sense of alienation prompted by my initial exposure to the sterile environment subsided and was replaced by amazement by the speed with which my order was handed to me.  The cheeseburgers were 15 cents, and everything else was equivalently priced, far enough below local norms to galvanize and jolt the locals, most of whom seemed to be mesmerized by these “Pied Piper” tactics of Ray Kroc, the partner of the two McDonald brothers who, bought them out and radically transformed their business model into one based on the multiplier effect and, therefore, “franchisable”. 

Rumpelstiltskin Ronald McDonald

When I walked out to my car, I was holding a bag with burger and fries in one hand, and a milkshake in the other.  The milkshake felt too light for its mass to this kid who had, only a couple of years before, made hundreds and hundreds of milkshakes and malts using conventional ingredients and methods.

Frank Davidson, a boy my age I surfed with in Hermosa Beach, where I experienced my first golden arches baptism, got a job at the McDonald’s.  After a few weeks they promoted him, then whisked him downtown for some programs where he was steeped in corporate culture.  One day when we had both paddled our boards out from the lifeguard tower at Longfellow and were sitting, waiting for a nice set of swells to come along I asked Frank if there were any reason he could think of that the milkshake I drank felt so light.  I asked him if it was the cup.  I saw in his face that I had asked a question that caused some strong reaction inside, his eyes rolled a little, and then he burst out laughing.

He talked for a long time before any good waves came along and I remember only a few details, probably the details that were the most astonishing at the time.  First he told me about the machine they had that was adjustable, the one they made the shakes with.  What they adjusted was the amount of air the machine added to the milkshake ingredients.  The more air they added, the lighter it was.  By adding air they were able to double the profit on every milkshake sold at every location and garner unthinkable amounts of profitability.

I was much more jolted by this news in a negative way than anything I felt that was positive about the extremely low pricing and the rocket ship speed of the service.  This way of thinking was the intangible counterpart of the robotic environment that, together, spelled the doom of the simpler, more honest approach to business made possible by the Mr. and Mrs. Bogert’s of the world.

Next he explained how they could not make any money on the burgers except as a draw to their add-ons.  In order to keep the accountants in the firm happy, they found it necessary to “extend” the meat with oatmeal and other ingredients.  There were many other items on his list of things to tell me, but the only other salient fact I recall was about the French fries.  He referred to these as the absolute profit center of the business.  They were able to purchase entire potato productions of major Idaho farmers and get them so cheaply, that by the time they cut them and fried them up, the cost of goods relative to cost to the consumer yielded an obscene profit margin and propelled the company to stardom.

There have been many Ph.D. theses written about the long-term effects of Ray Kroc’s masterminding of what ultimately came to be known as the “Fast Food” movement that seems to know no boundaries. 

I remember seeing signs in Germany as long ago as the 1970’s that said “Schnellimbiss”, a term that came to stand for a category of eateries we call Fast Food restaurants.  In German the word means “Quick Snack”.  What I find even more interesting, however, is what is just now being written about its opposite:  The Slow Food Movement.

Big Slow Down on the Fast Food Highway

When I think about any of the small towns I have spent time in while traveling in Europe, especially the restaurants in those villages and towns, most of my memories are about sitting at a table surrounded by people laughing heartily, touting the ideas of a local politician with highly animated gestures, involved with each other, people taking their time, enmeshed in the richness of their culinary refresh time.  From their perspective, I can only guess how bizarre our Fast Food Movement must seem.

A couple of decades ago mayors of several small towns in Italy held a meeting to discuss this very subject from the perspective of enlightened, cultured people viewing the Fast Food Movement as a menacing tornado, spinning out of control.  The mayors were from towns in a part of the world known for cuisine, where restaurants have been passed down through 20 generations of secret recipes and a reverence for excellence, shrouded in a mystique so pervasive that the art of haut cuisine has been elevated to a status occupied by legendary musicians, painters, sculptors, artists of all kinds.  During the meeting attended by these sons and daughters of the spirit of small town Italy, the term Slow Food was coined.

It was a reaction to all that Fast Food had become: artificial, unhealthy, loveless, practical, dehumanizing.  The mayors knew the results for both people and the culture they are part of were unhealthy and were hoping to start a dialog that might get citizens to wake up before it was too late.  This movement has come to stand for the maintenance of quality living, for the consumption of real, unadulterated foods that promote health, the return to values that find the fast food mentality a social wrong turn.

After a reception that must have surprised those lofty-thinking mayors, hundreds of thousands of people world-wide began to jump on the bandwagon of those who would draw the line to stop the progression of our foodstuffs into further chemical experimentation and question the value of packaged culture in general.  Evidently feeling successful from their prior dabbling into the elevation of the significance of our daily consumption of what, for many, has come to be an interconnected web of unhealthy eating and lifestyle habits, those mayors, when they reconvened in the late 1990’s, amplified their agenda to the level of community.  They discussed ways of applying all the beneficent principles of the Slow Food Movement to urban planning and, in the process, coined yet another new term:  Cittaslow.  Citta means City in Italian.  In honor of the concept of Fast Food having originated in an English-speaking country, the SLOW part of the new word appears in English.  In honor of the fact that the mayors were the originators of the movement, Citta, in Italian, was combined with Slow, in English, to form Cittaslow.

The Slow City Movement, in other words

The existence of an international organization referred to as Cittaslow that consists of almost 200 small towns (populations of 50 thousand or less) spread all over the world shows how deep a nerve the Italian mayors touched when they made an issue of the fallout we are experiencing globally as a result of letting villages established as centers of local agricultural enterprise where local culture flourished be transformed into urban centers so densely populated and so vast in size, that the combined activity of the millions of participants in the daily social exchange creates a spinning dynamo of energy sending pressure from the inside outward to all the citizens who feel in a hurry, a need to conform, to be here now, there later, on time everywhere, constantly made aware by the mere presence of millions of people that any sense of uniqueness is an illusion.

For a town to be designated Cittaslow, it is required that it have a local chapter that is connected to the city it is in with representatives from the city council participating, the city, therefore, showing its support for the general provisions of all Cittaslow towns in the world.  There are 6 main points – priorities -- in the philosophy of Cittaslow, of which Sebastopol, California is a member, one of three towns currently in the American branch of Cittalsow:  Sebastopol, Sonoma and Fairfax.

In our literature, the Sebastopol branch espouses:

1.    Support locally made products and agriculture;

2.    Celebrate our culture and history;

3.    Welcome visitors and embrace neighbors;

4.    Use technology wisely;

5.    Promote the health of the environment;

6.    Develop community-friendly infrastructure (e.g., parks, open space, bike paths and pedestrian connections).

The organization, Cittaslow, has made the snail its symbol for self-explanatory reasons.  It has demonstrated around the world that it is possible for a community to prioritize the heart over depersonalization and turn the clock back to the oldest, most prized values of community while, at the same time, embracing any wise technology that offers only benefit, that does not marginalize or extinguish the value of our humanity.

Towns that are designated Cittaslow revere the relationships that exist between the town and its local artists and farmers.  Perhaps due to the fact that our area already has two prominent programs that connect the public with artists and farmers – ArtTrails and FarmTrails – it was a natural act to the founders of our local chapter of Cittaslow to assimilate the values of the organization at large.

Here is a link to Cittaslow Sebastopol’s web site:

www.cittaslowsebastopol.org

Out my rural Sebastopol living room window I see corporate farming and small family farming coexisting side-by-side, literally.  I see one of them operating from the heart and one operating from a balance sheet.  One of the farms is an agricultural counterpart of an urban factory that is dedicated to excellence in quality, providing an organic product, operating on a very large scale, employing hundreds of people, connected to “Corporate” as a “Division”.  The other farm is a gem-quality specimen of the heart of the Cittaslow philosophy. In other words: a working example to point to and elucidate the very concept of the Slow City Movement.

I am a member of the steering committee of Cittaslow Sebastopol and carry around within me, in my daily life, the previously mentioned espoused priorities.  I left a large urban area to come to Sebastopol almost half a century ago as I watched what I thought of as a meltdown of the fabric of the slow and kind way of life around me.  I tend to light up inside like a Canadian sunset whenever I come across somebody whose nature has led them to live a lifestyle that jibes with the whole “Slow” way of life.  That other farm, the non-corporate one, is owned by an extraordinary family of people who came to own it from Fairfax, California, one of the other two Cittaslow towns, and stepped into a way of life that had been deeded into the future of the farm by somebody whose vision was so far-seeing, that it included Citttaslow-like priorities long before the Slow City or Slow Food movements were conceived.

One of my blog posts was written about this far-seeing farmer.  Here is a link to it:

http://sebastopolrichard.blogspot.com/2012/05/west-county-valley-that-cannot-change.html

The Vallejo’s and the Carrillo’s

The large corporate farm I have referred to is the first organic Pinot Noir planting of the Kendall-Jackson wine empire.  Before Jess Jackson passed away, his company purchased a square mile of land that was once part of the much larger holdings of the family that was brought here when General Mariano Vallejo helped his mother in law, Maria Ygnacia Lopez de Carrillo, settle into the local landscape and bear 13 children.

General Vallejo was among the most important personages in the history of this area as he was sent here by a government as its chief military representative with the authority to do whatever was required to domesticate it.  He was given tens of thousands of acres of land.  When he was in power here, it took weeks to survey his holdings.  If you were to drive a mile a minute in a car today from one end of the original Vallejo and Carrillo holdings to the other end, you would be behind the wheel for hours.  People connected to or descending from the Vallejo and Carrillo families have or touch blood lines that date back to the time before gold was discovered and caused a population rush, before America’s Civil War, back to when the first struggles and bloodshed of the movement to civilize this area flared up.

When I purchased the property overlooking the Kendall-Jackson vineyard, it was not a vineyard.  Instead, it was something of a cattle ranch and a sheep and cattle dog training school on one square mile owned by the grandson of one of the Carrillo’s mentioned earlier, part of the California land grant act, still owned and operated by a descendant of the original owner.  There was a dwelling I could see out my window far off in the distance, far from the main road with a long, dirt road connecting it to the main road. I used to imagine what it must have been like to live on a whole square mile that you owned back in a time when there was no electricity, no power tools, no paving tractors or steam rollers.  The house was set so far back from the main road, that it would have probably cost a million dollars to pave it back when I built my house in the late 70’s.

The road from Bloomfield Road to the main house runs quite a distance back from the entrance to the property, once
part of the Carrillo holdings, now part of an organic Pinot Noir vineyard the size of my home town:
1 square mile

It never was paved.  Likely only horses and carts traversed it in the beginning and people whose holdings included hundreds of acres generated enough income from their land to be able to employ many people to maintain roads and everything else that needed maintaining.  But as the years passed and we switched to fuel-driven vehicles, the world changed pretty fast and those who did not keep up were left behind.  I could tell from the condition of the road at Carrillo’s property that he must have fallen behind somehow because his pick-up banged and clanged along the deep ruts in his neglected road and kicked up an entire countryside of dust as he suffered the jaw-jarring impacts of the frame of his truck along the rut bottoms.  There did not appear to be enough enterprising going on to generate enough income to maintain that road or to restore it by paving it even with blue shale and gravel.  I used to wonder how they kept it going on that big historical stead I looked at in my view, glad they did, very much appreciating that nobody brought Los Angeles style wanton development to transform it away from pastoral and calming.

Jess Jackson was in the news a lot once he got on the list of the world’s richest people and began to invest in racehorses.  He shopped locally and purchased jewelry from a jewelry store that carried the brand of diamond I was cutting at the time in my cutting factory in Santa Rosa.  The store was one of the prestige ateliers of this area with a good reputation.  Our diamonds carried that same reputation in our trade and it made my head spin with glee one day to hear the owner tell me that Mr. Jackson appreciated our cutting and our local flavor so much, he bought some for his family.

He also bought the old ranch with the gritty road dating back to the beginning of California history and brought his deep pockets to pour millions of dollars into vines, excavating, an enormous holding pond to be used by firefighters in helicopters to hover over, siphon water and fly away to drop on local brush fires.  One day my view was of the “Old California” and the next day I woke up in Wine Country.  It is a spectacular sight to behold, but trucks much larger than Mr. Carrillo’s old pick up truck make far more attention-getting screeches and booms as they come to haul away the ultra premium grapes on a road that seems destined to resemble something in an old Western movie.

At harvest time you can witness agribusiness in motion 24/7.  There are brightly lighted vehicles scurrying around the vineyard in the middle of the night and scores of workers shouting to each other starting just before the sun comes up.  It can be hot or cold and rainy, those workers will invariably be out there carefully piling up tons and tons of grapes to make sure the news from the company chemists about their ideal sugar content and a window of opportunity of just so many days is taken seriously.  All the scurrying and hurrying are important in order to achieve the goal of producing healthy, premium grapes, but, being a corporate venture, the profit on the books is the priority that all participants in the organization must defer to.  The heart is pretty much left on the perimeter of the business activity that leads to profit, albeit it likely was present in the original idea to broaden the company’s horizons with organic Pinot.

The Caretakers of Blucher Valley

Just to the east of the organic Pinot Noir planting, however, lies a type of family farm that resonates in harmonious sync with the principles of the new Slow movements, 80 acres that are part flat pasture land and part hillock, that occupy quite a bit of the valley known as Blucher Valley south and east of the town of Sebastopol.

Top of the Canfield hill looking down into Blucher Valley

On a cold night a few years ago a man was traveling on a 2-wheeled vehicle, headed home, taking a short cut through Blucher Valley.  At the top of the hill on Canfield Road where the 80-acre farm begins, this man began to pick up speed as he headed toward the valley floor and, in the middle of his momentum-building, he broadsided a deer and skidded and scraped his way all the way down to where the occupants of the farm could hear something horrific was taking place.  Lorri Duckworth, who with her husband, Oscar, and her children, make up the family that owns the farm, ran to the scene of the collision to see if she could help.  I confirmed with the man who hit the deer that Lorri saved his life by following her heart.  She noticed a wedding ring on this bloody mess of a man on the road and imagined being part of his family not knowing what was happening, not knowing the man of the family was dickering with death on the pavement.  The possibility of the extinction of the life of this family man burned in Lorri’s soul and prompted her to tell him over and over to speak to her, that she could see he had a family and to stay alive for them.  And he lived.

There, now, is a tiny glimpse into the nature of the family that bought into the idea that it is wiser in the long run to conserve family farming rather than to seek mere profitability for one generation of the family that disgorges the sentiments of the great grandparents who began the farm and sells to developers with plans to pave over the little dairy operation, the truck farm, the hay field and plant 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom Xerox copies of each other in their place.

These neighborhoods of 3/2 houses, mind you, are extremely important to the social and economic vitality of any urban or suburban area.  The matter at hand is not whether tract neighborhoods are good or bad, but where they are located.  Strategically situated, safe neighborhoods access arterial travel and commute routes, can have great schools, shopping areas, entertainment centers, can be great places to raise a family.  Neighborhoods that are built over family farms in which a time-tempered symbiosis between land and caring human is filled in, paved over, leaving no actual trace of any farming, only graphic mementos that appear as street sign names of family members of the farm that used to be, are starting to be perceived as regrettable acts that bulldoze away a sacred connection to the land we can never retrieve.  Many foundations and government agencies now exist to preserve the condition of the most vital pieces of ground whence our spirit as a community of people sprang.

October, 1931 to  March, 2004, the era of “Bud”

Bernard Nahmens, known locally as “Bud”, was born in Blucher Valley in October of 1931. See the blog post I wrote about this man here: http://sebastopolrichard.blogspot.com/2012/05/west-county-valley-that-cannot-change.html    During Bud’s lifetime, the world began to change faster than at any time in history up to then.  He lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War.  He could hike up to the highest place on his property and see down into the Santa Rosa Plain from Cotati to Windsor.  When he was a teenager, looking down from that ridge top in the Spring on what is now Rohnert Park, what was there to see were miles of the Ferry Morse flower-seed farms where they had acres and acres of flowers every color of the rainbow in full bloom.

In 1959 he surely noticed the 101 Freeway stretch north and replace the main streets of towns from Novato northward and, in short order, people saw an opportunity to trade their seed-farming kinds of activities, hay farming and ranching and the like, for amounts of money that the grandparents of these agrarians never could have contemplated – in their heydays -- without laughing.  Bud worried about the future and must have had unthinkable visions of army ants of Caterpillar tractors ripping up the fields where his parents’ dairy cattle would spend their lives on scores of peaceful acres of quiet, snail-pace pastures, lost in his vision of himself as a caretaker of his little corner of the world.  In a eulogy posted on line I found: "Bud's goal was to preserve the land. He always felt farmers were the best stewards of the land in Sonoma County," said his wife, Janet Nahmens.

His parents came to America from one of those

ubiquitous European villages I alluded to earlier in this writing leaving behind memories of family and centuries of ties to the earth, where families, as Bud’s wife put it, either “caretook” the land or were unable to reap the harvests that kept them and their local centers of gentility and culture fed.  Bud, therefore, was his parents’ Americanized recipient of the personal history that a great writer of the same ancestry as Bud (German), a writer named Thomas Mann described and capsulized in his novel, the Magic Mountain, in a scene in which Hans, the main character, is handed a silver goblet by his grandfather as he says:  “This belonged to your great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.”  Bud Nahmens was given the orientation of a caretaker of the land through all the lore, tales and whisperings of a thousand years of smart, aware, farmers and felt he had to act.

His personal observations of history unfolding from dirt roads to freeways and his fear of spinoffs like Silicon Valley in this county made him decide to preserve his land by selling his development rights to the Sonoma County Agriculture Preservation and Open Space District.  He did this before there was any Slow Food movement, but he was born with the same outlook on life as those small town mayors whose simple proposal became a world movement.

Bud’s heart was a Cittaslow kind of heart.  I say this because, if you read over the 6 priorities of our organization, you can see how Bud was a “natural”:

1.    Support locally made products and agriculture;

2.    Celebrate our culture and history;

3.    Welcome visitors and embrace neighbors;

4.    Use technology wisely;

5.    Promote the health of the environment;

6.    Develop community-friendly infrastructure (e.g., parks, open space, bike paths and pedestrian connections).

When he decided to sell his dairy herd and retire, it was only a matter of time, I thought, before I would see a FOR SALE sign along Canfield Road and, sure enough, up one went.  80 acres for sale with two houses, barns, fences, outbuildings and land with a proven history.  There could be no more houses, but any agricultural endeavor could be pursued.

Handing the Torch of Goodness to the Duckworth’s

I used to go running, now only fast walking, along Canfield Road, have for decades.  The pace of change along that road has been so minimal, that it seems to be playing out exactly according to the hopes of hero Bud.  The buyers who came along to grasp the torch Bud handed down were the couple mentioned before: Lorri and Oscar Duckworth.  I can bear witness to the fact that Lorri and Oscar have kept their covenant to be righteous stewards of the 80 acres.

The sun about to rise over yet another idyllic day in Blucher Valley

These two people from Fairfax, owners of a concrete business in which Oscar has risen steadily into the upper levels of knowledge-bearers of his technology: shotcrete, the nozzling of liquefied concrete, speaking at conferences on the subject, came to the 80 acres in need of a great deal of on-the-job-training as farmers.  Lorri told me once they could feel the farming instinct within. 

Together they dug right in.  Instead of throwing them a welcoming party, Mother Nature tested the family’s will to deurbanize with a wild, wild storm.  Lorri told it to me this way:

“Bud was the nicest, most kind man I ever met. True story: A few months after we bought the ranch, there was a terrible wind storm in the evening, it got worse, much worse after dark; we were living in the camper by the horse barn, Oscar, myself and our two girls, I have never heard wind howl like it did that night. Oscar looked at the large hay barn and realized something was wrong, it was lifting. The camper was rocking so violently we thought it might take flight.

“It felt like a hurricane, we decided to load the kids in the truck and head out. After we loaded the girls and the dog in the truck I went into the horse barn, (against Oscar’s wishes) to check on the horses one more time, I heard Oscar screaming at me to "get under the truck, now!” I barely had time to drop to the ground under the back of the truck when I heard the hay barn lift up and collapse. Parts of the barn flew past us, it felt like over 80 miles per hour, and landed across Canfield to the field beyond. No sooner did we crawl out from under the truck to check on the girls when we saw headlights coming toward us, It was Bud and Jan. Bud heard the wind, and thought the girls and I were alone during the storm, he told Jan he was coming to check on us and bring us to their house if necessary. We followed them home, slept on their floor (we were too scared to sleep apart in a room) and then came back every night for 4 nights and slept on their floor because I was so rattled. Bud told everyone that he didn’t know when he sold the ranch it would come with a new family. He was so gracious.”

Over the years, as I have walked or run along the eastern perimeter of Lorri and Oscar’s farm, I have run into both of them and chatted with them and watched their many organic farm projects develop through my time-lapse views.  The Duckworth’s spent one summer driving all over America’s farm belt studying the architecture of farm houses, then came back home and remodeled their little gem of a mid-century farm house.  Lorri told me they had the deeded right to have two houses on the property and one of them could be a modern-day dream home if they chose, but, instead, they elected to revivify the lines of the original house, clean up the inside, and stick to the original specifications as much as possible.

Land Stewardship Memorialized

I don’t doubt that Bud would be very proud of these neighbors who have continued to keep the forces of change at bay.  Their stewardship was written about in the Press Democrat by Michelle Anna Jordan:  http://pantry.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/14967/fresh-from-our-farmers-blueberry-season/?tc=ar

In this article, as in talking to Lorri about this subject, it is easy to see that Bud lives on through the Duckworth family: “Lorri and Oscar Duckworth bought Nahman’s Dairy, an eighty-acre ranch on Canfield Rd. in southwest Sebastopol, in 2002. The property, now called Duckworth Farm, is part of the Sonoma County Open Space District, which ensures that it will never be subdivided. Additional housing is prohibited, as well, but there are no restrictions on agricultural endeavors.”

In another article, the Duckworth’s stewardship is honored as exactly that:

From Landpaths ----  June-11-2011

“Where can you find organic hay fields, berries by the bushel, free range chickens, river otters (occasionally), and relic black oak forest - all within a stone throw of Sebastopol? Part of the Nahmens conservation easement from your County Agricultural Preservation & Open Space District, Duckworth Ranch produces local food AND stewards the land.”

“When the Duckworths first acquired the property, they began growing hay. Soon they added strawberries, which I tasted several years ago. The berries were delicious despite the fact that the soil is not perfectly suited to them.

“Three years ago, they switched over to three organic acres of blueberries. The late Bud Nahman helped Lorri Duckworth research blueberries before he passed away; it turns out the land is ideally suited to these berries. A single bite reveals this wisdom.

“In addition to blueberries, the farm also has chickens, ducks, geese, goats, sheep, cows and horses, along with a multitude of pets.”

On my walks, when I get to the top of the hill above their property I usually stop to rest from the physical activity that got me there and look down upon two things:  the house where Bud was born and the adjacent parcel of land that Lorri and Oscar tend with a caretaker’s touch.  “This is it, I remind myself; this is what the Italian mayors had in mind.”

Lorri and Oscar have a piece of reality, an exemplary model of what the inventors of Cittaslow configured in their idealized version of the organic symbiosis of town and land stewards, of town and artists, of Mom and Pop merchants who keep the part of the world that matters to all of them and its inhabitants most, humming and business-as-usual downtown.  Here then, on Canfield Road, Sebastopol is one shining example of what is possible.