Fast turnaround and fast food are two phrases our culture has prided itself on, but consider the costs that these two concepts cause to our health, and by these I mean stress and disease, and then think about what could be different. Women such as Alice Waters and Sue Muncaster are thinking about that on a daily basis.
In the seventies, Alice Waters created the California cuisine movement with a commitment to serve only the highest quality products when they were in season, which she exhibited through her two Berkeley, California institutions. First at Chez Panisse, her signature restaurant where she has developed a network of local farmers and ranchers dedicated to sustainable agriculture in order to provide her ingredients, and second, a foundation in the same name which has created educational programs such as the Edible Schoolyard. The Edible Schoolyard brings it all back to ground level by educating kids in schools about growing and preparing their own food. Later, Waters connected with the founding father of the Slow Food movement in Italy, Carlo Petrini, who recognized in the mid-eighties that the industrialization of food was going to annihilate thousands of food varieties and flavors. He decided that food production and the enjoyment of food needed to slow down, gathered with twenty delegates from different countries to create a Slow Food International Manifesto, and made Waters Vice President of Slow Food International. The result: an organization and movement that is now active in fifty countries, and has a worldwide membership of 80,000, which includes 12,000 members of Slow Food USA.
Sue Muncaster first noticed those pleasures of the table from her aunt who loved to cook. One day after Sue’s four-year-old daughter and she had had “one of those days,” Muncaster’s aunt made them feel better by cooking her and her daughter “the most incredible meal ever.” Muncaster’s family had a history of cooking and recipes, so she thought about writing a book of family recipes with one chapter as a green guide for cooking. As Muncaster researched the environmental, social, and health aspects regarding food, the book idea dropped off. But the green guide took off, which led to the creation of her blog, The Ecogastronomy Initiative, a place for her to sound off about important issues affecting the food around her in Teton Valley, Idaho. She created the Web site to create a platform for her book, but in creating the platform, she decided that she was more into the platform than she was into the writing.
