Slow Food Movement: How To Eat "Slowly"

With 85,000 members in 132 countries according to its website, Slow Food International is a grassroots project created in response to the fast food movement. You can participate in the program by joining your local CSA, planting some seeds or by sharing a homemade meal with a friend.

The initiative offers a series of programs in an effort to encourage members to reconnect with farming, environmental and culinary techniques.

Here are some tips on how to eat more "slowly."

* Develop an "ark of taste" for each eco-region, where local culinary traditions and foods are celebrated.
* Promote "taste education."
* Educate consumers about the risks of fast food, the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few genomes or varieties.
* Form and sustain seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties in cooperation with local food systems.

Noted food and science writer Michael Pollan describes the importance of the slow food initiative:

Slow Food aims to elevate the quality over quantity and believes that doing so depends on cultivating our sense of taste as well as rebuilding the relationships between producers and consumers that the industrialization of our food has destroyed. To eat slowly, then, also means to eat deliberately, in the original sense of the word: 'from freedom' instead of compulsion.

Green Prophet, a green blogger from Israel, discusses the Slow Food program's appeal.

In modern times we eat fast, work fast, talk fast and even love fast. But as we race ahead from one experience to the next and to dizzying heights, one must wonder, is doing things quickly the best way to drive our lives. In little pockets around the globe, a group of people are saying it's time to use the brakes, take life slow and take the time to smell the roses.

Related:

::Read Treehugger's guide to the Slow movement.
::More about a similar local food campaign, the locavore initiative from the Huffington Post.
::Read more at the Huffington Post Food big news page.

Comments

[Nato Green - Huffpost Blogger]

I agree with everything the slow food movement stands for. In fact, it's not enough for me that my food be local, sustainable, and free range. I'll only eat pork that comes from rare breeds of scottish pigs believed to be extinct in th eighteenth century, who receive regular rolfing, and who are read aloud to from Omnivore's Dilemma at bedtime.

That said, education and consumer choice changes can only go so far. It is hard for many working-class people to hop on the slow food turtle race because of working longer hours, more jobs, and commuting further to work. This movement will be stunted unless and until slow food, food security, and economic justice are tied together.

[consciousmom]

The Slow Food movement is a way of life -- including eating locally grown and raised vegetables, meats, preparing food in a way that it actually takes a certain amount of time and care. It is well-suited to an alternative way of life that rejects much of the materialism and instant gratification that is found is our culture today. It's saying that food is pleasurable and encourages us to embrace the pleasures we've rejected of late for the pleasure of instant gratification. It acknowledges that we are human, and therefore require sustenance on a variety of levels -- physical, social, emotional and spiritual.

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[Hamburger]

Use chopsticks!!

I've slowed down our more healthy eating by keeping the forks in the drawer.

Also, converse between bites. Put the chopsticks down, put your hands in your lap, talk to your partner. Breathe. If dining solo use chopsticks and take your time to chew, swallow, think, enjoy.

Besides it's fun to use chopsticks if you're not completely used to using them. (OK, ok, doesn't work for muesli for breakfast, but you get the idea.)

[mlaiuppa]

I've reclaimed a strip of planter along my garage for a garden this year. I've got the most delicious tomatoes when there were none to be had in the stores due to the contamination scare. I grow my own basil for pesto, which can be frozen. I don't think I'll have excess tomatoes this year, but in the past I've canned what I couldn't eat fresh.

Home cooking is the best slow food. Even though fast food in California is now barred from using transfats, home cooking is still healthiest. Most frozen and canned foods and convenience foods have way too much fat and salt. You can control both at home. While local and ethnic recipes are great, family recipes, no matter what your ethnicity are great. There's a reason their classic, tried and true. I'm lucky. I've got great Italian and German recipes in my family. And I live in an area with Latin and Asian traditions.

This school year I'll be making my own "frozen TV dinners" and lunches. I'll only need to go as far as my freezer for "convenience" foods.. No need to eat fast. And that will not only be healthier, I'll save big bucks.

[wm1066]

I started eating slow about two years ago and it does pay off, but it takes awhile to learn cause you forget and have to remind yourself to eat slow. You can wolf down a meal in no time only to rememder at the end to eat slow.
But your body gets more of the nutrition from the food if its well chewed.
Why take vitamins when you can get more nutrition from the food by eating slow.