Snail Powered
Posted on September 1, 2010
Thanks to the curiosity piqued by Russ Raney’s involvement in the Slow Food Movement, I found the book Slow Food by Carlo Petrini and finished reading it yesterday.
The basic idea of the book, and the name, is that fast food is bad and the opposite, natural food produced by families in traditional ways, is good. A number of American movies and articles on NPR have talked about the same thing in the last few years, so the concept can’t be unfamiliar to anyone. In fact, if you’re buying Illahe’s wine, you probably already care about appreciating the flavors and goodness inherent in natural production. You might care at least a little that your wine is made by hand and that people are involved in the love of its production. You might be quite interested in helping out the family farmer and the local farmer.
But, you say, you also like fast food, at least every once in a while, and, hey, who can afford to eat all local hand-picked stuff every day? Another neat aspect of the Slow Food concept is that he’s clear that it’s about affordability and not buying that extremely expensive coffee wrapped in monkey dung. It’s not about making food the most exclusive and expensive process possible, even if the old production methods are more expensive than the economy of scale corporate food producers provide.
He talks about food education, which will supposedly lead to extra enjoyment and better gastronomic decisions. I’m not so sure this is the best idea, though it’s worked really well for Slow Food in Italy and Europe. I don’t know if there’s any better food education than simply growing up in France or Italy or Japan or China. Our biggest problem seems not to be education. People know about food here, we just don’t have it easily available, because we started fast food and we’re pretty good at it.
I just made my first good homemade loaf of bread last weekend, and it was wonderful, and I realized Salem doesn’t have a regular local bakery. The Slow Food concept works again and again. It works on our wine and it works on bread. Less mechanization=more love. Unfortunately it seems economically that more love=less money. Maybe that’s why Petrini hopes that education will solve the problem.
My guess is that it’s a matter of years of civilization. That will solve it. Unfortunately that’s really slow food.
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