Slow Food

Our family ate a slow dinner over the holidays. Fourteen people, three courses – We had gathered from six provinces for the occasion. There was enough time to change places between courses so most people had a chance to chat with everyone else who was there. Does it sound like Christmas on the farm? Actually it was at an award winning restaurant that has committed itself to the international slow food movement.

In 1986, McDonald’s opened a hamburger franchise beside the Spanish Steps in Rome. For the Italians, it was the last straw. In order to repel the invasion of fast food, Carlo Petrini, a famous and popular food writer, launched the ‘Slow Food Movement’. Its message is very simple: ‘Eat well and save the planet’! This movement now has 78,000 members in over 50 countries. Outside of Turin they have started a University devoted to gastronomic science.

How will this movement save the planet? First of all the movement is committed to ‘eco-gastronomy’. This means that eating well goes hand in hand with saving the environment. So the movement is committed to preserving heritage varieties of foodstuffs. In Canada there is an agricultural underground of people deliberately cultivating old and uncommon varieties of carrots, potatoes, wheat, rye and flax in order to preserve them. These people are the first heroes of slow food. They are part of the resistance movement for global biodiversity.

Secondly, restaurants committed to slow food are committed to local sourcing of their produce. This means that Jeff Crump, the Head Chef at the Ancaster Old Mill where my family dined, made sure he served a delicate butternut squash soup because he had a local supplier in the middle of winter. Even though he couldn’t provide certified organic venison, he still provided deer meat from a farmer he knew and could observe following organic principles. Disciples of slow food are supporters of local farmers.

Followers of slow food are fighters against the obesity epidemic in North America. It takes fifteen minutes for the brain to register the signal that you have eaten too much. In most fast food restaurants, your meal is over by then. If you take more time over a meal your body will be able to complete the information circuit and moderate its intake. At the University of Toronto, the Human Resources Department is trying to promote work/life balance by persuading faculty and staff to stop eating lunch at their desks. They want people to reduce stress and achieve balance by working less, socializing more and moving about frequently.

In my twenty years of work on rural issues, I can’t count the number of times I heard people say ‘we want to put the culture back in agri-culture’. Well, now there’s a larger, international movement trying to do the same thing. It’s not against trade. It promotes the global trade of unique products, but it is pro-local. By focusing on the benefits of food grown locally and consumed socially, it has touched a nerve at the heart of our modern madness. Do farmers really want to become bio-industrialists? Well, neither do consumers.

First Published in January 2005