Life in the Slow Lane
One of the markers of modern life is instant gratification. We can get almost anything we want or need in minutes via a drive–through window, a delivery service, or on the Internet. Food is the industry most affected by the instant gratification phenomenon. From doughnuts to roasted chicken, and every burger, taco, or milkshake in between, we have access to our bellies’ desires any time of the day or night in just about any town or city in the United States. We are a fast food nation.
Aside from the obvious health concerns associated with a diet that includes frequent fast food meals are the less obvious, but more culturally felt, collateral losses. When we eat at a fast–food restaurant, pick up a meal or a coffee at a drive through window, or have a pizza delivered, we are about as far away as possible from experiencing food as a ritual, a tradition, an art, or as a socio–environmental entity.
One answer to the growing fast–food trend is the slow food movement. With a snail adopted as its logo, the movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986. Slow Food is an international association that promotes food and wine culture, but also defends food and agricultural biodiversity worldwide. They oppose the standardization of taste, defend the need for consumer information, protect cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguard foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition, and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable species.
Twenty years later the association has more than 83,000 members worldwide, organizes annual educational and awareness events, has entered the publishing world, and has become a non-profit organization with the mission of funding projects that defend the world’s heritage of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions.
There are local groups in more than 50 countries around the world. To learn more, or to find a group in your area, visit www.slowfoodusa.org or www.slowfood.com.
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