Slow Food Movement Defined

It all started with Chez Panisse restaurant, opened in Berkeley California in 1971 by Alice Waters. Alice Waters became the pioneer for seasonal cooking, offering one meal choice per night, always based around organically grown and ecologically friendly food items. The majority of ingredients are purchased from local farmers and ranchers, and are guaranteed to be fresh. Alice Waters now serves as an international governor of the Slow Food movement.

Carl Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement explains the slow food philosophy as, “It is useless to force the rhythms of life. The art of living is about learning how to give time to each and every thing.”

The Slow Food movement has three main focuses:

1. Being attentive to the harvesting and manufacturing practices of the food industry, and choosing to support those farmers and manufacturers that are most gentle to the Earth’s land and water.

2. Properly compensating food producers. .

3. Eating food that both tastes good, and is nutritionally nourishing.

The founders of the Slow Food movement strongly believe that convenience foods and the modern way of getting food from it’s rawest form to the form that appears on our dinner plate is slowly eroding our food supply, as many traditional food choices and methods of preparation are being pushed aside in the name of convenience. America has lost 93% of its agricultural products, and Europe has lost 85%, since the turn of the century. In essence, we are relying on fewer and fewer food products to make up our diet. We are boxing ourselves into a very small selection of food options. The Slow Food movement has created a program, The Ark of Taste, to acknowledge food items that are in danger of disappearing from the modern diet.

We are slowly losing our ability to truly taste food, because we are eating too quickly and thoughtlessly. To this end, the Slow Food movement holds tasting education for every age group. These tastings are often preceded by visits to orchards and farms, to further raise awareness of the direction that food should take from land to table, with as few stops in between as possible.

Teaching children how food is grown, and how to taste food properly, is one of the major undertakings of the movement. School gardens are instituted by every convivium to introduce children to food production and the different qualities of fresh versus processed foods.

Two of the major focuses of Slow Food are cheese and fish. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find and purchase unpasteurized, raw milk cheese. The general public considers eating unpasteurized milk or milk products, to be a very dangerous practice. Slow Food holds the opinion that if unpasteurized cheese is produced at suitable temperatures and if the milk is obtained from healthy animals, it should be perfectly safe for human consumption. Cheese is created through microbial means, and to pasteurize it kills many of the natural flavors of the product. According to Slow Food, the worldwide fish population has lessened by 90% since World War II, and yet we’re eating as much as ever, and perhaps more as the health benefits of fish consumption become more well known. Slow Fish, a branch of Slow Food, is interested in finding a compromise between saving the dwindling supply of fish while still allowing us the pleasure of consuming it.

A common misconception about Slow Food practitioners is that they advocate only purchasing organic food. While the movement does favor purchasing of agricultural products that have a low impact on the environment and that are produced without pesticide usage, they maintain that organic food grown on a large scale is very similar to conventional cropping, and that organic certification is not a guarantee of sustainable growth. In addition, the movement is against the use of genetically engineered crops, because the farming industry is not yet able to predict the results of such bioengineering, or to contain the results of this modification. For instance, the pollen of genetically engineered crops travels in the air and cause growth on other farms. Consequently, farmers then waste time and money to harvest these genetically engineered crops that they did not plant.

The Slow Food movement goes way beyond just food. It encompasses an entire way of living. Entire cities and towns have designated themselves Slow, by adhering to a set of guidelines as a means of making life more enjoyable for residents. For instance, the center of town may be closed to traffic for one day a week. Of course, food is also a major undertaking for “slow cities”, which must provide places for eating and enjoying food and to communicate with local food producers.

Recently, opponents of the Slow Food movement have stated that the movement is unrealistic for the bulk of the American population, and that it exists for the elite only. This is simply untrue. The movement exists not only for people with the means to eat at pricey slow food restaurants, and to travel to the Slow Food events held world-wide, but for anyone who has ever made a slow-cooker stew with ingredients purchased at a farmer’s market. The Slow Food movement is for anyone who cares to understand where their major source of sustenance comes from, and for anyone who wants to truly taste and enjoy the food and wine in front of them.

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