“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.
Slow food shares many of the ideals of the organic movement (e.g., clean production of food) as well as the eco or green movement (e.g., use of renewable resources in production and reduction of carbon footprint by supporting local farms). These two parallel movements have become omnipresent in the entertainment business as well as in politics. This year, Academy Awards went green and First Lady Michelle Obama recently broke ground for an organic garden on the White House lawn.
So why is it that the majority of Americans know so little about the Slow Food Movement? And why are my two incredibly crunchy friends left out of its circle of trust?
Slowing Down in a Fast Paced Society
The United States gained entry in this global food club in 1998, just as the words “organic” and “green” began to aggressively court the mainstream. While it was easy to understand the implications of organic and green, slow food had a misunderstood message. Organic meant better health because you avoided putting chemicals in your body. Green meant saving the planet as well as (eventually) saving money because you drove a hybrid car or used compressed fluorescent light bulbs. Big box stores like Costco and Target started to carry organic and green products, from cosmetics to toilet tissue. So it was easy to be organic or green because its advocates made the message accessible and participation effortless.
But slow food? Americans who eventually heard about it equated the movement with elitism or simply didn’t understand its intent. It didn’t help that many foods associated with the slow movement are called “artisanal,” which most people interpret as “unjustly expensive.” And a movement that asks people to slow down, cook and eat together, and enjoy their food, in the land where the concept of fast food originated and the culture behind it flourished to the point of worldwide franchising, seemed completely contradictory to the American way of life.
