Everything served at the recent slow food dinner held in the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House at Franklin & Marshall College was grown locally except the wine, salt, sugar, pepper and balsamic vinegar.

Slow foods — food that is raised locally and allows farmers and consumers to develop relationships —were on the menu.

Savory goat cheeses, cream of salsify soup, roasted heirloom carrots, grass-fed beef braised in Stoudt's ale and rustic apple tarts were only some of the locally grown dishes served in honor of guest speaker Judy Wicks, a Philadelphia restaurateur and a national advocate for local sustainability.

True to the slow food ideals, Wicks shared the meal with the chef, local farmers, activists, students and consumers — all people who were in some way involved with meal.

Most of them also shared Wicks' passion for sustaining local farms and businesses, nurturing a healthy planet and building strong communities.

The slow food movement fits easily within Wicks' overarching belief system that she calls a local living economy. She explained the evolution of the concept to about 150 people who came to hear her speak after the dinner.

Wicks' business experience began when she opened The White Dog Cafe, a home-based coffee and muffin takeout business in 1983. The business expanded to seat 200 people in three connected brownstone homes on Sansom Street, Philadelphia, in 1989.

The reason for its continued success, she said, is that it has remained "a community-based business, where decisions are made, not to maximize profits, but rather to maximize relationships with our customers, staff, community, suppliers and with our natural environment."

She established her community-based niche initially by buying as much food as she could from nearby farms. The food tastes better, and it's healthier, she said.

Wicks also likes knowing where her food came from and developing a relationship with the farmers who produce and deliver it.

She turned to those very farmers when she read about industrial farming of pigs and was convinced to stop supporting the industry. She asked the farmers where she could buy pigs that had been raised outside with other pigs, instead of being restrained in individual cages, artificially inseminated and forced to "manufacture" babies continuously.

They did know a farmer who raised free-range pigs, so she ordered two. Soon she was buying free-range beef too.

Living and working in the community, Wicks said, helps her to make decisions in the best interest of those affected by the decisions, she said.

For example, she had heard of paying all employees a living wage but dismissed it as unrealistic, until the day she walked into the dishroom and all three employees happened to look up at her at the same time.

Suddenly she realized that a living wage was reasonable. "Of course, I wanted anybody who works full time at the cafe to be able to buy food, pay their rent, buy their clothes and so on."

She learned too that she cared about the long-term survival of the Earth during a summer when a drought in Pennsylvania was causing trees to drop their leaves prematurely and farmers were plowing dried crops underground.

Seeing the devastation made her think about what her community could look like if global warming continues, so her business became the first in Pennsylvania to buy 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources, Wicks said.

Wicks reached a point in the restaurant's development where she considered expanding to other locations, but she chose not to do so.

"Success in our society is measured by material growth," Wicks said. "Yet we know that continual growth is destroying the planet. We've bypassed the point of sustainability. … On top of that material growth hasn't improved our happiness."

Instead, she chose to maintain her restaurant as a sustainable entity but widen its services.

Wicks began offering educational field trips to her customers, including taking leftover fryer oil to a Lancaster County farmer who uses it to heat his greenhouses and fuel his tractors.

She took customers to other countries that were in conflict with the United States, such as Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua. They talked with "enemies" in those countries to learn about the issues that were causing conflict, she said.

"We wanted to demonstrate that world peace comes from dialogue rather than through military and economic domination," Wicks said.

Some people have accused her, she said with amusement, of using good food to lure them into social activism.

Through these travels, she said, she saw the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement on small businesses and farmers in other countries.

As American farmers flooded Mexican markets with cheap corn subsidized by the U.S. government, Mexican farmers couldn't compete, Wicks said. "So thousands lost their land, lost their jobs and migrated to the United States, looking for work."

The knowledge reaffirmed Wicks' belief in the importance of maintaining her small but sustainable business in Philadelphia, and it convinced her she shouldn't do it alone.

To that end, she helped to create BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, which encourages businesses to support each other as they move toward sustainability.

More than 60 business alliances nationwide belong to BALLE, including the Susquehanna Sustainable Business Network, which includes Lancaster County business owners.

Together they support the belief that having a sustainable global economy requires having a sustainable local living economy — one based on local food, green (environmentally friendly) buildings, local capital and investments, renewable energy, independent media and local arts and cultures.

It also means buying products that aren't available locally from independent farmers and businessmen in other parts of the world for a fair price, she said.

"At its heart the local living economy is about love," — love of place, love of people, animals and nature and love of business, Wicks said.

"Our power comes from protecting what we love."

Glossary

• Slow food: the opposite of fast food. Any home-cooked meal is slow food, especially if it's made with local, fresh food and is used to support and establish relationships.
(Source: Lydia Sadauskas and Dulcey Antonucci, F&M)

• Sustainability: the quality of a state or process that allows it to be maintained indefinitely; the principles of sustainability integrate three closely interlinked elements — the environment, the economy and the social system — into a system that can be maintained in a healthy state indefinitely.
(Source: Canadian National Forestry Database Program)

• Living wage: a wage sufficient to provide the necessities and comforts essential to an acceptable standard of living.
(Source: www.Merriam-Webster.com)

• Susquehanna Sustainable Business Network: a network of businesses, advocates and community organizations working together to grow a local economy that promotes social, environmental and financial sustainability in Lancaster and York counties. It provides networking opportunities for local independent business owners to connect on any and all levels, purchasing from each other, getting ideas and working together.
(Source: Lydia Sadauskas, executive director, and www.susquehannasbn.org)

• BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies): A national organization of 60 sustainable business networks that seek to transform communities into local living economies.
(Source: www.livingeconomies.org)

• Local living economies: cities and towns that build community assets such as sustainable agriculture, green building, renewable energy, community capital, zero-waste manufacturing and independent retail.
(Source: www.livingeconomies.org)

• Buy Fresh, Buy Local: An awareness campaign which teaches and encourages consumers to buy products grown where they live.
(Source: Newspaper files)

E-mail: lespenshade@lnpnews.com