Last weekend's Good Food Awards transformed San Francisco's Ferry Building into a reinvented county fair with artisans from 26 states traveling to collect their prizes and share their wares. At Friday night's gala, red, white, and blue bunting and a stage framed by the American flag hinted at the organizer's ambitious national intentions for the fledgling awards: "We want the Good Food Awards to be for artisan food producers what the James Beard Awards are for chefs," said Sarah Weiner, its founder.
Weiner, the former Director of Communications for Slow Food International, built the awards on the solid base of 2008's successful Slow Food Nation conference, an event she helped organize. Like Slow Food Nation, the Good Food Awards are grounded in the philosophy that in order to be truly "good," food needs to be also clean and fair (although the organizers have been careful to adapt that particular Slow Food-branded "clean and fair" mantra, preferring "celebrating food that is tasty, authentic and responsibly produced").
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