Fwd: Slow Food

Slowing Down

from http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/hungrymind/slowingdown.html

When did you last take the time to truly enjoy a meal? To savor the flavors individually or in concert with a well chosen wine? Perhaps linger over dessert and a final sip of sauterne with friends or family, fully immersed in — and aware of — the pleasure that is food and its partaking?

When did you last contemplate the food before you? Its origins, its history, its journey to you and the people responsible for growing it or raising it or crafting it?

For most of us, the answer is probably "a long time" or even "I can't remember." Some of you may even answer "never." But each day, there are more people who can say "last week" or "yesterday" or even "everyday." These are the folks who have discovered and embraced the concept of Slow Food.

It is an idea whose time has come. Slow Food is the antithesis of "fast food" and "fast life," products of a society in which speed is worshipped at pleasure's expense. It is an attempt to instill a measure of gastronomic composure and reflection into a world obsessed with haste. Its genesis was inevitable in an era when factory farms are replacing artisans, artificial flavors are replacing natural ones, and fads rule.

Slow Food, both the term and the idea, is now embodied in an international organization active in 100 countries. It emerged from a 1986 protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant near Rome's famed Spanish Steps. Wielding bowls of penne pasta, Carlo Petrini, the founding father of Slow Food, and his associates, stormed the golden arches and a revolutionary movement was born.

It's a movement with a soul, one that cares deeply about food artisans and their methods, preserving those unique flavors and gastronomic experiences that are disappearing beneath the twin juggernauts of corporate agriculture and mindless bureaucracy. By promoting the pleasures that can be found only in food, Slow Food has alerted many to the value of locally grown food, to food that tastes good, to food that is pure and from which farmers and artisans can make a living.

Slow Food is not about haute cuisine, painstaking preparation, culinary elitism or ostentatious consumption. The opposite is true. It is about peasant food, the unabashed celebration of simple meals and unadulterated flavors from a time when such things mattered. It's also about knowledge and education — knowing about the food we eat and where it comes from and teaching children and adults that there are gastronomic choices they can make that will give them pleasure, improve their health, and help the environment by promoting biodiversity, animal welfare and responsible agriculture.

Slow down. Take those few extra seconds to smell the wine's bouquet, or the perfume of those flowers on the table. Revel in the odors and activities of the kitchen. Enjoy the flavors on your plate and bask in the conviviality and love around your table.

Be curious. Seek out local food artisans. Ask questions about the food you buy. Insist on purity. Educate yourself about the food you need to fuel your life. But most of all, rediscover the sheer joy of eating. Alice Waters was correct when she wrote: "Slow food can teach us the things that really matter — compassion, beauty, community, and sensuality — all the best that humans are capable of."

Bon appétit!