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2008-02-19 issue:

Slow food: ‘good, clean and fair’

Mediaculture

by Gordon Houser

Print Article

We know about fast food, but what is “slow food”? Actually it’s a movement, begun in Italy as a protest to the opening of a McDonald’s near Rome’s Spanish Steps in 1986. Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini, a socialist and activist from northern Italy, bemoaned the homogeneity and fast-paced lifestyle that fast food seemed to represent.



“Slow Food has evolved over two decades into a feel-good movement about taste, community and sustainability wrapped around a nonprofit organization that claims 80,000 members worldwide,” writes Kathy Gilsinan in National Catholic Reporter (Jan. 11). Slow Food’s core principle is that food should be “good, clean and fair.” “Good” means it should give pleasure, “clean” that its mode of production and its components should not harm ourselves or the environment, “fair” in that food producers should receive an adequate wage for their work.

Many Mennonites have been promoting similar goals, even without knowing about the Slow Food movement, though “pleasure” may be suspect to some. With such popular Mennonite cookbooks as More-with-Less, Extending the Table and Simply in Season on our shelves, many of us try our best to eat healthily and promote fair trade and locally grown food.

Nevertheless, it’s a struggle. It’s the “slow” part that catches us up short, right? Who of us can take a day, or even a morning or afternoon, to shop at a farmer’s market, prepare a meal, serve it and enjoy the food’s flavors with friends over a long, leisurely dinner? Maybe once in a while, but not often. We all are caught up, to varying degrees, in a fast-paced lifestyle.

Such an approach may feel elitist, and that has been a criticism of the movement. Gilsinan writes: “While it is admirable to pursue just wages for farmers and food producers, people who don’t get fair wages themselves can be forgiven for trying to save money on food, even if that means eschewing farmers’ markets and personal contacts with food producers.”

However, Kurt Michael Friese, an Iowa City chef on Slow Food’s national board of directors, wrote in a blog last September that “love of humanity and love of the earth is love of the foods that make people distinct. Protecting that food, whether it is foie gras and caviar or bread and salt, is not an act of elitism but instead of human love.”

The Slow Food movement has brought together people from all over the world and raised a variety of issues. For instance, a meeting in 2006 brought 5,000 food producers from 150 countries to Turin, Italy, reports Gilsinan. Vandana Shiva of India told the group that every year in her country, “120,000 farmers, indebted to Monsanto and other agricultural holdings, commit suicide.” She went on to call patent protection of seeds “food fascism.” Farmers worldwide have limited rights when it comes to saving and sharing seeds. Petrini says, “No form of life must be patented.”

The Slow Food movement represents high ideals from a large spectrum of people and beliefs. But it also connects well with Christian faith. Jesus, after all, was notorious for eating with “sinners.” He took time to recline at the table with all kinds of people, both poor and wealthy. And he did not seem adverse to pleasure, such as when he commended a woman who poured expensive ointment on his feet (Luke 7:46).

Food has always had an attraction for Mennonites. The Slow Food movement has much to teach us about making our food good, clean and fair. And as people in a culture that moves us at a fast pace that harms our health and our relationships, slowing down to prepare and enjoy food seems like a radical, faithful act.

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