Location: Recess Coffee House @ 110 Harvard St.

Attendance: 27 people!

Started: 5:00pm

A. Introductions (Who are you? What is your favorite food?)

B. Updates

a. Media Activity

A lot of great feedback from the Post-Standard article! We now have nearly 60 people on our announcements list and had a lot of new faces at this meeting. Welcome all!

b. Slow Food USA application

We have had all of our round one information approved! Now we need to work on getting the more technical, legal information submitted. Then we’ll be official. The chapter board will take these tasks on!

C. Designate interim Chapter Board positions

Paul can’t do this alone. He called for two volunteers to fill two other executive roles. These roles are temporary, interim positions until we can set up our own bylaws for elections and actual positions.

a. Chair: Point person for the chapter, coordinates with regional and national officers. Paul will remain!

b. Secretary: Takes minutes, sets meeting agenda. Seth appointed!

c. Treasurer: Setting up bank account, getting EIN from government, managing dues. Meredith appointed!

D. Committee brainstorming

For this part of the meeting, we all broke out into six groups, listed below. Each group had a list of possible actions. They were tasked with brainstorming additional ideas, determining a committee leader and prioritizing one item for action. A LOT of ideas were generated during this part of the meeting. In order to keep these minutes mentally digestible, the committee chairs will be sending out an email on each committee within the next week. This email will do into more detail. In the meantime, here are the highlights:

a. Chapter Board

i. Chair: Paul

ii. Priority: Getting an EIN and submitting the second half of the application forms! ASAP!!

b. Event Coordination / Fundraising

i. Chair: Kris

ii. Priority: Introductory potluck.

c. Public Relations (Outreach and Communications)

i. Chair: Melissa

ii. Priority: Put together listserve groups and build a SFCNY website!

d. Slow Food in Schools

i. Chair: Jennifer

ii. Priority: Talk to a health class/food club in a specific school and do a harvest dinner. Perhaps Corcoran? Possible coordination with Syracuse Grows on this one.

e. Food Justice and Advocacy

i. Chair: Hanah

ii. Priority: Create a sustainable code to explicitly allow productive animals and urban gardening..

f. RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions)

i. Chair: Travis Hance

ii. Priority: Create a list of local varieties of foods!

E. Next Steps

a. Get listserves set up for each group.

b. Work on getting us to be on the SFUSA website to make signups easier!

c. Set up standardized meeting schedule and avoid conflicts. Veto 2^nd Tuesday of the month because of conflict with Syracuse Grows (4pm-6pm at CCE. Harold Pl/Franklin)

d. Finalize status with Slow Food USA

e. Get working on committee priorities!

F. Closing: 7:00PM

At the meeting we looked at the five pieces of the Convivium Application:

1. Description about your area
2. Bio about the team leadership
3. The convivium mission
4. Sign and return the Convivium Agreement name, logo and list letter.
5. Sign and return the convivium team application

…. and decided to focus on the first three for now.

1. Description about your area
Jonnell volunteered for this task, as she already has a lot of this written up. (I assume from grants to which she’s applied?) Later in the meeting, we talked about including information about indigenous / local foods to Syracuse. We assigned ourselves homework: research about a local food and post it to this blog. Off the top of our heads we discussed the Three Sisters (Corn, Beans and Squash), strawberry, hops, and salmon all being food that used to be harvested here. We also mentioned SALT!! (Hey Yury / Ed, can we count that as a food? ) I also warned that if you wait to submit a food, the easy ones will likely be taken! So act fast people! All people who attened the meeting are now blog authors. If you weren’t at the meeting (or can’t figure out how to post!) just email me and I’ll post it.

2. Bio about the team leadership
We talked about having a one page bio for each person, complete with a photo! We talked about what questions we’d like to ask:

• Name
• Profession
• What Slow Food means to you
• Where you grew up
• A dish indigenous to where you grew up, or a dish passed down within your family.
• You favorite meal ever

Anything you want added / taken off? Other ideas? Make a comment here or email me! Meredith took on the task of putting together the template. I’ll email it out to everyone when that is done. Everyone is asked to fill it out before our next meeting.

3. The convivium mission
For this item, we went discussed what Slow Foods meant to us, as well as what does “convivium” mean to us. Here are some of the comments:

• Italians eating lots of food and local-pressed wine in a field.
• Vermont. Clean water. Purity
• Connection to people to their food. Teaching people what their food is and where it comes from.
• Going Organic.
• Knowing exactly what we are eating. What every ingredient is and where it comes from.
• Michael Pollin going after that boar. Omnivore’s Dilemma. Food security. Connection between grocery store distance and low birth weight.
• Cooking in the kitchen with spouse… best time I have!
• Started thinking Slow Food was about affluency and exclusivity. Not suitable for a family on a budget! Slow Food is now actively trying not to be like that… I want to do my part to help that happen!
• Food is unique… it should be fun!
• Slow food… started as culinary arm of Italian communist party? Reclaiming cooking as a process of eating. Finding pleasure in the gathering and preparing of food. Pride in cooking!

We also had a discussion about what type of events we’d like to sponor:

• Going to local farms.
• Potlucks.
• Pie eating contest.
• Assure that local educational institutions have access to healthy/local food in their cafeteria.
• Possibly teaching gardening/growing food in schools.
• Block Party around community gardens.
• Support Syracuse Grows in their endeavours!
• Engage with food pantries to have Fresh Food Initiatives. Pair with CSAs to give excess produce to food pantries and distribute it with recipes on how to cook it.
• Have a presence at the Thornden Park Chili Festival in February and Taste of Syracuse in June.
• Seed Bank. Save seeds and seed exchange. Organic, heirloom varieties.
• Just have fun and not reinvent the wheel or try to do everything ourselves!

I (Paul) took on the task of consolidating all these ideas in a mission statement for our convivium.

Convivium-shed
One item we discussed was “what is local?” We bascially decided that our coverage area would be everything between the Finger Lakes, Rochester area, Catskills and Leatherstocking Region, as all these areas already have convivia. We also said we should include anything within our ecoregion. We will have a New York State map on hand at the next meeting to discuss this further.

Other notes
Here are some miscellaneous thoughts / comments from the meeting

• It was requested that we get copies of other Convivium Applications from Slow Food USA so we can see what SFUSA expects.
• We discussed how Slow Food USA’s new president is emphasizing food justice (see earlier blog entry about this).
• We talked up Syracuse Grows canning workshop. November 23rd. SU’s teaching kitchen. Room for 22.

Next meeting
Our next meeting will be sometime in December and we want to have it at Second Story again. I will send out infomation in the next week polling for the best date / time.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks to everyone for a great meeting!!!