Verve magazine’s November issue reports that Tia Bednar is set to become president of Slow Food Asheville in 2011. Bednar works at West End Bakery in West Asheville. Cathy Cleary, the bakery owner and Bednar’s employer, is the current president of the group that’s worked hard to preserve the “slowness” of preparing and eating food.
From Verve:
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.
In a side note, a locally grown sweet potato called the Nancy Hall was recently inducted into Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste, a national repository for heirloom foods in danger of extinction. There’s a local party to celebrate that induction on Nov. 6. Pretty cool.