Slow Food

The Slow Food organization not only celebrates currently popular local foods, it also honors foods and culinary techniques that are close to extinction by listing then in a special catalogue: The Ark of Taste.  Revered Ark of Taste products include the Kerry, an Irish breed of cattle; Navajo-Churro sheep; and the Gravenstein apple.

I encountered the last on the list, the Gravenstein apple, when I lived in California in the 1970s and l980s.  This smallish, tart green apple with unique slashes of red on its shoulders is primarily grown in Sonoma County, 50 miles north of San Francisco.  Once grown on almost 7,000 acres, orchard now occupy less than eight hundred acres.  Land used to grow apples is under pressure from both housing and viticulture developments. 

I was only one member of a large crowd of fervent supporters of this plucky little apple. To announce the Gravenstein’s merits, the Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce once rented a billboard situated along the freeway that links apple country to the Bay Area.  A huge green apple with its distinctive narrow bands of red stood proudly on the billboard’s white face:  “These apples have earned their stripes!”

In 2005, Slow Food agreed.  The organization declared the Gravenstein a heritage food and added it to The Ark of Taste.  The Gravenstein joins a list of 158 other heritage varieties grown throughout the United States.