A few days ago, I was watching an interview on TV, and I heard the phrase “slow food” go by. I’d never heard it before. Immediately, this meme was lodged firmly in a fertile part of my mind and it grew rapidly on its own, with no explanations needed from the speakers. Slow food. Produced and prepared slow — many implications there. Eaten slowly — another set of excellent meaning there as well. This was a fine phrase indeed.
One of the speakers gave me an aha moment when she said that part of the meaning of “slow” in “slow food” is that the only way to use ingredients right from the earth, and eat at home, is to actually cook, which takes time, energy, and knowledge. She said that this is a high hurdle for many people who want to eat better in ways that are least harmful to the planet, but can’t quite pull it off because their current habits are/seem unbreakable.
I Googled “slow food” and learned about an organization called “Slow Food” that’s been around a long time. During my brief stay at their site I got the strong impression that if there is such a thing as good guys and bad guys, these are good guys.
I read about “slow food” as it pertains to food production, and food preparation, but I didn’t see anything about rate of intake. Too bad really, since this is yet another way that fast food loses to slow food.
I’m always looking for reminders to slow down when I’m in mid glut. And this phrase has already proved its worth by coming to my rescue last night. It was like my entire arm-to-jaw feeding system was a horse. I was riding the horse. The name of the horse was, “Food.” We were galloping along, and suddenly, I said the words, and the horse obeyed: “Sloooow Food. That’s it. Slow down. Good boy.”
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 9:53 am and is filed under other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted by Anna Paradox on August 17th, 2009 at 8:29 am:
Finding time to cook is a challenge. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that we have thought of wealth as the accumulation of money. Time spent preparing food falls more heavily on women, cutting them out of time to accumulate money, which is unfair.
On the other hand, since I heard Peter Carroll say that wealth is the ability to spend time in enjoyable ways — in other words, the accumulation of experiences rather than money — that meme has been slowly crowding out the “wealth = stuff” meme in my mind. It’s quite possible to make preparing and eating food a rich experience.
So my ideal is to see everyone earning enough income in enjoyable ways to sustain enjoyable lifestyles. Cooking and eating well can definitely be part of the whole lifestyle package.
I find myself grappling with the vision of a completely sustainable economy a lot recently. I believe only one that people enjoy living in will be sustainable. We’ll be much more likely to do what it takes if we can enjoy the process and the outcome.