Tia Bednar takes over as prez of Slow Food Asheville in January.

story and photos by Naomi Johnson

Imagine this: You’re a tourist from Italy spending your vacation in scenic Asheville, North Carolina. But you can’t figure out where to eat. Mama mia, what to do? Suddenly, you see a sticker on a restaurant door: a “Snail of Approval,” the international symbol of Slow Food, the organization dedicated to tasty, responsible, real food worldwide. Dinner is saved.

If Tia Bednar has her way, Asheville’s future might look a bit like that. Starting next year, Bednar, 35, takes the reins as board president of Slow Food Asheville. High on her agenda is introducing the Snail of Approval, a certification program aimed at making it easier to find food that fits with the Slow Food philosophy, which exalts the “quiet material pleasure”—the slowness—of preparing and sharing real food. In a restaurant setting, the snail basically means the establishment uses local products and ingredients, prepared in a traditional way, she says. WNC will join big-time food cities like New York and Chicago as early adopters of the program.

Slow Food International was founded in Italy in 1989, but of course slow food itself has been around a lot longer. Bednar says she grew up on it, in the woods of northeast Pennsylvania, where her father and grandfather hunted and fished to feed the family and her Italian grandmother grew an enormous garden. There was “always a pot of rabbit or something on the stove,” she says. For a few years after she left home, Bednar followed other interests, including several jobs in the medical field. But a chance hiring as a pastry chef ten years ago reawakened her fascination with all things edible. That interest has grown and deepened since, including not just preparation but the production and politics behind food. For the past nine years, she’s worked as head baker and kitchen manager at West End Bakery and pursued special training in sugar art and pastry.

Bednar hastens to point out that, as the new leader of Slow Food Asheville, she’s stepping into some pretty big shoes. The previous president has been West End Bakery owner Cathy Cleary, Bednar’s employer and mentor. Cleary’s accomplishments include guiding the local chapter of Slow Food away from exclusive gourmet dinners and into a more inclusive vision of food justice. To that end, Cleary created the FEAST program (that’s Fresh, Easy, Affordable, Sustainable, and Tasty) which teaches real-food cooking to low-income kids at schools and community centers. Bednar plans to continue and expand that program and the school gardens that go with it. Also on her radar: the Local Bread Flour Project, documentation of regional heritage foods, and the 10 Percent Local Campaign, out of Raleigh, which encourages North Carolinians to pledge to spend 10 percent of their food budget on local products.

All that may sound complicated, but from Bednar’s point of view, she’s simplifying. She’s doing more of what she really loves: Slow Food work, hiking and writing her food blog, seasonitslow.wordpress.com. She dreams of someday attending “Slow Food University” near Torino, Italy, and sums things up this way: “I just want to enjoy my life,” she says. “Just enjoy my life and be happy.” Slow living, you might call it.

Who Gives A Yam?

WNC does. A local sweet potato, the Nancy Hall, is inducted into Slow Food’s Ark of Taste.

It’s our state vegetable, you know. And no wonder: since the 1700s, sweet potatoes have been used in North Carolina kitchens to make everything from beer to bread. The tastiest of them all was the Nancy Hall, tan-skinned with a creamy yellow-orange flesh, cultivated in many parts of the Southeast. Sadly, in recent times, the sweet potato market has become dominated by just two varieties, Beauregard and Covington, both copper-colored outside and orange inside—less flavorful, but with higher yields.

Area “heritage gardener” Yanna Elliot decided to do something about it. She nominated the Nancy Hall sweet potato for Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste, a national repository for heirloom foods in danger of extinction. It was inducted this fall. Slow Food Asheville will celebrate the tuber’s induction with a sweet potato-themed party on November 6. Go to their web site, www.slowfoodasheville.org, for more info.