“What is slow food?”
I posed this question to two of my more enlightened friends, self-proclaimed “locavores” and rigid followers of the organic movement, and these were their candid responses:
“Oh, I don’t know … bad service in a restaurant?”
“Does it have to do with slow cooking?”
Hmm. Then I asked my youngest child the same question. Being all of five years old and obliged to understand the literal meaning of words, he plainly responded, “It’s not fast food.”
Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere … or are we?
A Twenty-Year International History
According to their Web site, Slow Food is an international “non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions, and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes, and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”
Somewhere in that fantastically long sentence are the tenets of a movement that began as a protest to the building of a fast food chain restaurant (McDonalds) near the famed Spanish Steps in Rome, Italy. It has over 100,000 registered members in 132 countries around the world. In each country, the movement is spearheaded by local chapters known as convivia and there are over 1,000 convivia worldwide. In the United States, it is known as Slow Food USA. Forty-two states have at least one convivia and there are 200 convivia nationwide. Some well-known American members are Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser.
The slow food movement is a response to the loss of agricultural biodiversity and local food heritage due to the global domination of industrial agribusiness and convenience food. The concept of eco-gastronomy, which is the foundation of the movement, is that there is an inherent connection between delicious food and responsible farming. Slow food is good to taste because it is farmed using clean, renewable methods. Slow food is fair because food producers receive just compensation for their work and anyone can have access to it. Thus the phrase “Good, Clean, and Fair” has come be known as the movement’s slogan.
