…with finals, everyone! Remember to stay nourished 
Oh! And here’s an article from a local foodie magazine called Edible Front Range for which I was interviewed about Slow Food. Our triumphant little paragraph is at the end of the third page. Food for Thought Article
From a September 15, 2008 article in Time Magazine titled “Can Slow Food Feed the World? – Why a movement with a reputation for elitism is adopting a more inclusive agenda,” by Bryan Walsh.
Slow Food – the anti-fast-food, anti-industrial-agriculture movement launched in 1986 by a left-wing Italian journalist – too often has tilted more toward high-class gastronomy than hard-to-solve public-health issues…Who cares about the perfect mushroom when more people are going hungry?
The movement’s leaders are responding by calling for reform of a global agroindustry they say has failed farmers and eaters alike. “How did we get to a place where it is considered elitist to have food that is healthy for you?” asks Katrina Heron, head of the San Francisco-based Slow Food Nation.
The one thing Slow Food and its critics agree on is that something is wrong with the global food system. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in 2007 50 million more people were hungry than in 2006. At the same time, unhealthy, heavily processed, American-style fast food has spread beyond our borders, eroding traditional ways of eating. The solution, say Slow Food devotees, is to shift to cuisine that is “good, clean and fair,” grown mostly organically by local farmers.
Sure, slow food tastes better, but agribusiness has long argued that industrial farming is the only way to economically feed a global population nearing 7 billion. Organic farming yields less per acre than standard farming, which means a worldwide Slow Food initiative might lead to turning more forests into farmland. (To feed the U.S. alone with organic food, we’d need 40 million farmers, up from 1 million today).
Of course, most Slow Foodies aren’t arguing that we should eat only organic arugula. In its broadest sense, the movement is trying to get people to stop and really think about what’s on their plate and how it got there. In the end, Slow Food is more interested in producing better-tasting food than leading a jihad against chemical fertilizers.”
From Slow Food Nation, by Carlo Petrini. (Foreword by Alice Waters).
“Carlo Petrini is the founder of the Slow Food movement and an astonishing visionary. Unlike me, he grew up in a part of the world with a deeply traditional way of eating and living, where he learned an abiding love for the simple, life-affirming pleasures of the table. When he saw this way of eating in Italy start to dissapear, he decided to do something about it. Slow Food began as an ad hoc protest against fast-food restaurants in Rome, but it has grown into an international movement built on the principles he sets forth in these pages.
Most Americans are put off by the word gastronomy; it evokes either gastroenterology or, at best, gourmet pretention. But Carlo heroically appropriates and redefines the word. By gastronomy he wants us to understand a new science, which he defines as the study of our food and all the natural and manmade systems that produce it. It is therefore nothing less than the study of our place on earth and our survival as a species. It is a science far more comprehensive than any of the traditional social sciences. Indeed, because gastronomy relates to the study of every subject taught in school, it can organize and enliven the curriculum as no other subject can. And if economics is the dismal science, gastronomy is certainly the cheerful one – because of its assertion of a universal right to pleasure.
The vision that [Carlo] sets forth in these pages is of the planet as shared by all its inhabitants. The lifeline with which Carlo would bring us aboard is woven from three conceptual strands. He argues that, at every level, our food supply must meet the three criteria of quality, purity and justice. Our food must be buono, pulito, e giusto - words that resonate with more solemnity in Italian than do their literal English counterparts. Our food should be good, and tasty to eat; it should be clean, produced in ways that are humane and environmentally sound; and the system by which our food is provided must be economically and socially fair to all who labor in it. Carlo’s great insight is that when we seek out food that meets these criteria, we are no longer mere consumers but co-producers, who are bearing our fair share of the costs of producing good food and creating responsible communities.”
Could there be a better way to ring in October? I think not. Our potluck picnic was a perfect illustration of fall, from the hearty food to the crisp air to the early sunset.
Photographs by Alison Mesinger.
Of our table event last Wednesday at the UMC. Thank you to all who stopped by and THANK YOU to those who helped make it such a success!
