Slow Food

WHILE SELLING PRODUCE at a farmers’ market in Santa Monica, I’ve witnessed the power of food to touch hearts. With just a wave of basil people from all walks of life literally stop in their tracks, follow the waft and admire the heirloom tomatoes. The delicate scent of lavender and white bunches of sweet peas transport men and women alike back in time to the gardens of their grandparents. Stories of reminiscence and contagious smiles flow through an eclectic (and often eccentric) crowd.

Dave, Sandy and I lure people to our stand with luscious samples. On one particular day we had baskets of black mulberries hand-picked by Aureliano, a farm hand in his sixties whose Mexican folk songs seemed to alleviate the tedium of bean picking. As one customer popped a buttery morsel of love into her mouth, tears welled up in her round, chocolate eyes—My grandfather in Iran had a tree like this. We used to climb its branches and shake out the fruit.

Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Quixotic and yet simultaneously simple, connecting people with the land through their taste buds is transforming—hearts open, people stop. Community is created as neighbors meet and converse with the producers. Foods move directly from the hands of the farmer to the hands of the consumer instead of via the mass-market, machine-driven processes that regrettably have become the norm in our society.

Community and relationship comprise the essence of ecology. The root word eco comes from the Greek oikos, meaning household. Ecology is literally the study of our home—the connections that tie all life to the land. We humans all yearn for community, be it with family, friends, or the natural world. Living in the context of our relationships, no thing exists apart from its surroundings. To nurture community is quite literally to nurture ourselves.

Today’s world is rife with suffering and conflict as we seem to be focused on the differences between us while forgetting the similarities. Conservative versus liberal, Christian versus Muslim, north versus south, jock versus skater, my beliefs versus your beliefs. Opinions, opinions, opinions! Aren’t we all essentially the same? Let’s look for commonalities. Search out that which we share rather than succumbing to the fear of superficial differences. Reach out, even when we’d rather withdraw. And what better place to begin to make peace and cultivate community than around the dinner table while enjoying wholesome food and drink? This is the essence of Slow Food.

When that notorious American fast-food chain, McDonald’s, managed to land a spot in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna in 1986, it elicited a creative response from culinary journalist Carlo Petrini. He established “Slow Food”, a movement dedicated to preserving regional culinary traditions and small artisan producers and growers. Slow Food is a call to return to the senses, to celebrate the slow enjoyment of food, wine and conversation. Over the past 16 years, Slow Food has evolved into an eco-gastronomical society, with a broader mission to cultivate an awareness of the connections between food and the land on which it is grown as well as the politics and culture surrounding it.

In the words of Carlo Petrini, “I want Slow Food not to be merely a gastronomical organization but to deal with problems of the environment and world hunger without renouncing the right to pleasure. The American gastronomical community simply contemplates its own navel and has no political consciousness, while the American environmental movement has tended to have a self-denying, ascetic component that regards eating anything other than tofu as hopelessly selfish and decadent. By now even the Food and Agriculture Organization has recognized that you can’t talk about hunger without talking about pleasure. At the same time, you can’t deal with pleasure without being aware of hunger.”

Slow Food now has over 60,000 members in about 45 countries worldwide. Members join small chapters called convivia (Latin for feast) that gather locally to celebrate and preserve regional food and culture. Convivium events include such activities as wine and food tastings, talks with artisan producers and growers, and festivities in honor of seasonal harvests.

It’s important to note that Slow Food is not some snooty, exclusive food and wine club. Consider the Brooklyn Pig-Fest—a traditional North Carolinian slow-cooked BBQ that took place last year at the Brooklyn Brewery and used sustainably raised pork from Niman Ranch.

Slow Food is about celebration, coming together with community and enjoying food. It’s about making food choices that are informed, not neurotic. It’s about the joy of eating, the joy of cooking, and literally coming back to our senses.

With a focus on quantity, mass food production and industrial agriculture have a homogenizing effect on the world’s consumption. We have what Andrew Kimbrell in the new book Fatal Harvest calls “an illusion of choice”—plenty of brands from which to choose, yet they all have the same basic ingredients (corn, wheat, rice or potatoes). Nine crops now account for over seventy-five percent of the world’s plant consumption (by humans). In the name of efficiency, we are losing the diversity that supports sustainable agriculture, as well as the wisdom of traditional farming practices and the nutritional/medicinal value of the species lost. Indian farmers once grew 30,000 varieties of indigenous rice, but at the rate of present growth of industrial agriculture, by the year 2010 they will be growing fewer than 50. Wow. We’re also losing small food producers and artisans to the gulp of the monoculture monster as the tremendous cost to meet the latest production standards puts them out of business.

Yet instead of harping on the negative, Slow Food intends to “take on McDonald’s and win” by emphasizing quality over quantity and humanity over profit. Petrini calls Slow Food’s international network “virtuous globalization”—promoting cultural and biological diversity in contrast to the homogenizing effect of the current global economic model. In Italy, Slow Food started a petition that resulted in exemption from rigid uniform production standards for small-scale food makers who would have been devastated otherwise.

One particular Slow Food project, The Ark of Taste, set sail in the mid-1990s to “save the universe of flavors.” The Ark aims to preserve foods in danger of extinction by identifying these foods (and/or their producers) and promoting them in order to increase market demand. From the Ark of Taste Manifesto: “To protect the small purveyors of fine food from the deluge of industrial standardization; to ensure the survival of endangered animal breeds, cheeses, cold cuts, edible herbs—both spontaneous and cultivated-cereals and fruit; to promulgate taste education; to make a stand against obsessive worrying about hygienic matters, which kills the specific character of many kinds of production; to protect the right to pleasure.”

The Ark looks for foods that are tied to the history and culture of a particular region, that use sustainable practices in agriculture and production, that are in danger of being lost to industrial standardization, and that offer “a unique, pleasurable gastronomic experience.” The Delaware Bay Oyster, Creole cream cheese, and hand-parched Minnesota wild rice are among the growing list of endangered American foods that Ark USA has taken under its wing. California protected foods include the Sun Crest peach from the San Joaquin Valley (a free-stone, fragile peach that most distributors do not want to handle and ship), Monterey Dry Jack cheese which was originally discovered by accident when a San Francisco cheese wholesaler left his Jack cheese in storage for too long during the first World War, and the Red Abalone, whose vast populations along the California shoreline have dwindled due to over-fishing.

By drawing attention to culturally rich, sustainably produced foods, the Ark hopes to educate consumers’ taste buds so that they’d choose local over a Big Mac in the future.

Taking time to honor food and how it gets to our plate is not something modern America tends to slow down to do. Most children (and probably an equal number of adults) have no idea how their food gets to their plates. Neon green-ketchup (was this marketing maneuver really necessary?) and packaged, processed foods made primarily of additives tend to mask the original ingredients. A study of National Merit Scholars found that what academic achievers had most in common was that they ate meals together with their families. Yet surprisingly (or maybe not) polls say that 57 percent of American children do not have regular meals with their families.

I’ve spent some time teaching children about the natural world, and an inside activity that I love is What’s For Lunch? Students pick something that they had for lunch and in a flow chart complete with illustrations they trace that food back to the earth. Children are amazed as they discover that bread comes from a plant. As they read the ingredients of processed foods, they soon realize that it’s easier to trace back the apple than the Oreo. The activity can be adapted for older students and address the social and environmental issues that are involved in each stage of getting that particular food to their lunch bags.

The Edible Schoolyard, initiated by renowned Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters, is a school garden program at a public middle school in Berkeley. Students grow their own food and then learn to prepare and cook their meals in the kitchen. Broccoli takes a new form and taste in the mind of a child who has cared for it from seed. Connecting children to the earth, teaching about the cycles of life and what foods are in season, and the preparation and nutrition of food are hands-on skills and experiences that are meaningful for students. (I love this program! Find out more at www.edibleschoolyard.org.)

But taste education isn’t just for children. If we see the value in the Slow Food philosophy, it is up to us to educate our own senses, to talk to our local growers and producers, to eat consciously and graciously, and to share and enjoy meals with others.

Celebrating, eating well, slowing down, connecting with people and the land—this is the essence of Slow Food. In the fast lane of American busy-ness this may seem challenging, or even sacrilegious to some. Yet the ability to feel a sense of community, a sense of relatedness is within us, waiting to be awakened. There is what Michael Abelman (an organic farmer, and director of the Center for Urban Agriculture) calls, “a quiet revolution stirring in our food system” reclaiming the right to safe, “real” foods.

Visit your local farmers’ market and you’ll see it. Just yesterday, the Farmers’ Market in Arnold was buzzing. A Slow Food cooking demonstration and a tomato taste-off brought a new dimension to the scene. As one man tasted an heirloom Brandywine tomato he said decisively, “That’s the one.” I thought he meant that it was his favorite, but he went on. “There was a patch of these tomatoes that grew in the hills by my house. I don’t know whose they were. I don’t think anyone even tended them. We used to eat them like apples in the field.” And off he walked, waving.

For information on becoming a member or starting a Slow Food convivium, contact Colleen Gavan at colleen@brushwoodinstitute.com.

IN THINKING ABOUT Slow Food I am immediately picturing our garden in Murphys, the way it gently follows the curvature of the land. Seen from the air, one might think a computer had designed the shape and proportions it has taken on. As a co-creator I look back ten years and remember no planning, just a shared vision that manifested as a reality and a way of life for our family. I have walked on hands and knees, bent over, not in labor but humbled by this work that has me planting thousands of seedlings.

My husband Eric and I often shake our heads in disbelief, saying, “It’s not just about growing vegetables.” We hadn’t begun to fully understand that shared statement until recently. We met Jeannine Hebel, a French chef. It’s not really the French part that’s important, although Europe is where the idea of Slow Food evolved. It wasn’t until Jeannine pronounced, “It’s not just about cooking” that we really started to delve into what “it” was about. We had dinner in the slow food tradition and a lively discussion about creating something that embodied our ideas and visions of food, cooking, nature and community. The Slow Food Movement captures our ideas quite openly and clearly in a positive way that celebrates the joy of living. It’s more than just ourselves, and it’s more than growing vegetables and cooking. It’s about community and the connections made through sharing one of the most basic of human needs—food.

The ripening of a tomato has become a metaphor for me. Every year a wonderful thing happens when tomatoes arrive. It seems to me that a ripe tasty tomato embodies the very essence of experiencing the moment. Weeks beforehand the hot question at the Farmers’ Market is, “When will the tomatoes be ready?” We inevitably reply, “Soon, soon.” That building of energy and excitement comes to a peak in mid-August when the heirloom tomatoes come in. With such names as Brandywine, Marvel Striped and Camalay, the fragrance and full body of what we term “pure sunshine” comes into play. All that indulge, and that’s quite a few, are practicing Slow Food. As a customer said recently, “We’ve been doing this for years.”

We savor the flavor of summer and realize that “it’s not just about eating a ripe tomato.” In eating a truly ripe tomato we experience a deep connection with the seasons and the earthly forces that represent life. Through food and the pleasure of taste as a basic human right we enjoy the moment and experience the celebration that good food can create in our lives.

The most entertaining aspect of Slow Food cooking is building with the "flavors we cannot buy."

In summer, I might start by making a vegetable stock, which will have all the flavors of the garden and keep any dish light and fragrant. Once the stock is done and I have tested it (tasting is highly recommended in Slow Food), already I am being transported somewhere I did not know existed. The garden flavors always surprise me, blending yet again in a magical aroma that makes me dream on.

On to the next step of the dish. I do not want to know too soon what the final result will to be.

While sipping on a little cup of this delicious broth, I think of summer and the ready-to-pick corn that Eric and Christine are growing in their garden and wonder how fabulous it would be to put some of those sweet yellow kernels into my stock, and how tarragon and corn are made for each other…YES! We are having cold corn soup tonight, with some chopped, ripe, red meaty tomatoes in it. I know exactly the ones I'll pick.

To cook Slow Food is to become intimate with the ingredients so that with no hesitation or fear of the outcome, you will blend the flavors to your delight.

OUR CENTURY, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.

We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapien should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.
A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.
Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.
In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.

That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects?
Slow Food guarantees a better future.

Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can help turn this (slow) motion into an international movement, with the little snail as its symbol.

The excellent new book Fatal Harvest will forever change the way you think about food. This book will inform and influence the growing public movement of activists, farmers, policymakers, and consumers who are fighting to make our food safer for ourselves and for the planet. It features stunning photography contrasting the practices of “agribusiness” and those of small-scale organic farms alongside essays from more than 30 authors, including Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, Michael Ableman, Jim Hightower, and Alice Waters.

Taking it Slow