The future of food: Can Slow Food move beyond its elitist image?

If you managed to miss the media blitz, Slow Food USA recently held its Slow Food Nation conference in San Francisco. It was attended by over 60,000 people. At Culinate recent college graduate Eric Hass provides a brief look at the “concluding panel in the Food for Thought series”:http://www.culinate.com/articles/opinion/slow_food_nation_panel, consisting of “farmer [and author] Wendell Berry, physicist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva, journalists Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, and Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini.” He writes:
bq. …Slow Food is an effort to escape the strictures imposed by a monetary scale of value. In its best form, I think, Slow Food implies a personal stance explicitly at odds with the idea that the trophies of capitalism (wealth, efficiency, speed, opulence) make a good life. Life can clearly hold more profound pleasures, some of which can only be found in the enjoyment of a slow meal. It needn’t necessarily be a matter of wealth.
Slow Food has long been criticized for its elitism, but this conference marks a strong effort to give the organization broader appeal. With food at the forefront of the U.S. (indeed, global) consciousness, the moment is ripe.