It was a Woodstock for foodies, an event that drew more than 50,000 people to San Francisco to celebrate food and protect the future of sustainability in the U.S. and abroad. The first major event on these shores held by nonprofit educational organization Slow Food USA was a cumulative four-day party aptly named Slow Food Nation (SFN).

This past Labor Day weekend, San Francisco celebrated the intersection of taste, sustainability and social justice that is the Slow Food movement. SFN's executive director, Anya Fernald, said the event was expected to reach out beyond the obvious coalition of foodies, health-nuts and environmentalists, to "build momentum and demand for an American food system that is safer, healthier and more socially just."

The brainchild of Alice Waters (owner of Berkeley's renowned Chez Panisse restaurant), Slow Food Nation aims to harness the energy of that movement. By bringing together chefs, farmers, architects, urban planners and designers, Slow Food's organizers hope to encourage people to eat better-tasting food that's better for the environment.

Highlights of the festival included a speaker series featuring Slow Food luminaries like the movement's founder, Carlo Petrini; Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food; Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope; author Wendell Berry; and Slow Food Nation founder, chef and slow food activist Alice Waters.

It's not surprising that the modern slow food movement was born in Italy, well-known for its love of traditional gastronomy and the midday meal. In 1986, Italian journalist and philanthropist Carlo Petrini began to speak out against the industrialization of food. In an effort akin to an ecologist trying to preserve the world's biodiversity, Petrini wanted to show consumers that fast food was wiping out authentic culinary traditions, and the richness and enjoyment of access to a diverse and unprocessed diet. Petrini's Slow Food Movement is grounded in the belief that food should be good, clean and fair.

His 2007 book, Slow Food Nation, outlines the basic principles behind what he hopes will become a worldwide movement toward a more sustainable, healthy and just way to live and eat on planet Earth. Slow Food now has 120,000 members worldwide, with 15,000 of those in Slow Food USA.

In the United States, Michael Pollan's 2006 book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, inspired a national conversation about how our eating choices affect not only our own and our children's health, but the health of the environment that sustains us as well. Pollan's In Defense of Food, published this year, takes that argument a step further, advocating individual action to re-think the way we buy, prepare and consume food in order to be healthier, take pleasure in what we eat, and bring our own habits back into balance with a planet that needs our stewardship to survive.

Slow Food Nation event director Anya Fernald said Slow Food in the United States is struggling against the perception that it's a movement for the wealthy, gourmet few. She hopes the Labor Day weekend event will inspire attendees, as well as a larger public, to begin to see eating well and having access to well-grown, unprocessed food as a right, not a choice for the elite few.

For more on the festival, including Speaker Series blogs, visit http://slowfoodnation.org/blog/