I have been reading about the Slow Food Movement today. Slow food is best summed up in this little nutshell from Slow Food International:
"Slow Food is a 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."
Slow Food USA, the American subsidiary of the slow food movement, continues along the same lines.
"The founding father of the Slow Food Movement, Carlo Petrini, recognized in 1986 that the industrialization of food was standardizing taste and leading to the annihilation of thousands of food varieties and flavors. Concerned that the world was quickly reaching a point of no return, he wanted to reach out to consumers and demonstrate to them that they have choices over fast food and supermarket homogenization. He rallied his friends and began to speak out at every available opportunity and soon the movement was born and Slow Food was created. Today the organization is active in 50 countries and has a worldwide membership of over 80,000.
People have responded to the growing movement, because they have become tired of buying the same things, eating the same foods and living the same lives. With these interests in mind, our mission is to create a robust, active movement that protects taste, culture and the environment as universal social values. Slow Food programs are dedicated to the mingling of taste, culture and the environment."
This movement makes perfect sense to me. In many cases, and in my own life, food has ceased being an important part of daily living that is carefully assembled. Owing to geographical inconvenience, lack of funds, and a number of other factors, food has become a simple act of quenching hunger. The irony behind all of this is that I have all the time in the world to cook good, slow food; I simply lack the tools (both in terms of raw ingredients and cooking equipment) needed to properly cook. So most of the time we wind up eating fairly bland meals of chicken, pasta or salad.
But I can remember when I used to be able to experiment more with cooking. In Maine, I had a great deal of time on my hands in which I cooked many intriguing sorts of food. I spent a good deal of time baking bread, rolls, cookies and cakes which I sometimes shared and sometimes hoarded. I didn't use much in the way of "local" or "organic" ingredients with the exception of organic whole-wheat flour, but I did get to spend a great deal of time actually cooking food in an oven with spices and herbs. I spent a great deal of time making stews and even my own tomato sauce once. I made lots of good dishes, and it was an excellent way to spend some time.
When I return to Florida and manage to settle myself in, I plan to spend some time cooking real food again. It will take a few weeks until I can afford any quality ingredients, but it will be well worth the wait.
:::
Anyway, slow food seems to be a culinary counterculture. I have heard that critics accuse the movement of being elitist and snobbish, but I fail to see how advocating for a shift back to locally grown and raised food is elitist. Yes, enormous chain supermarkets and gigantic food producers are cheaper and more homogenized, but if people weren't conditioned from birth to enjoy bland food then I doubt that they would even want to eat the food sold at most giant retailers. There are a lot of people in cities who would be affected by a change in food supplies from "giant retailers" to "local food," but as I have mentioned before, Vertical Farming could solve a lot of those problems.
It's food for thought.
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