Amongst the various readings assigned for this week I found a common trend to the idea of “slow food”. The slow food movement seemed to discover, or rediscover the benefit of a greater knowledge or closeness to the sustenance that we put into our bodies. It’s definitely another movement that appears as if it is highlighting a revolutionary way of thinking or acting, when in reality what is happening is just a regeneration of practices that were the standard in previous times. For example, Michael Pollan describes one of his ‘rules’ of eating as “don’t eat anything with an ingredient your grandmother hasn’t heard of”. While this succinct advise leaves out some important subtleties, it gets the point across that the slow food movement is not something entirely new.
As Pollan and Petrini emphasize, today’s food industry involves a lot more ignorance and distance – we buy food from a grocery store possibly 15 minutes away from our home, but the distance the banana we bought for breakfast might be ten fold. In addition, one has to sift through a whole slew of smoke and mirrors when it comes to deciding what food strays away from the industrial feedlot standard. One of the talks I attended at the Slow Living Summit this Thursday revealed that many cereal companies purposefully put BoxTops (a cause that supposedly helps raise money for schools) on only their most sugar packed cereals. There are marketing ploys everywhere to make people think that food has some sort of special benefit.
Pollan’s very succinct and marketable set of rules aids in this struggle, however the trade off to the easily translatable advice is the lack of depth and detail they provide. Encouraging everyone to do their grocery shopping at farmers markets is a rather idealistic approach because it leaves out the topic of food justice, and suggesting that we should rarely eat meat lacks different cultural perspectives. Given these deficiencies I personally preferred Petrini’s categorical approach to judging the quality of food.
Carlo Petrini named three major categories for the expectations of food: good, clean, fair. As he outlines it, using these broader headings allows for a more ‘knowledgeable’ and informed perspective by which to judge food and food culture. I think another term that could be added to this list is “real”, mostly because it is something I am familiar with due to my work with Middlebury’s EatReal club. The Real Food Challenge describes this sort of food something that fits into two of the following for categories: local, fair, humane, or ecologically sound. Because categories like humane or sustainable have been well defined, one can compare the food they are purchasing to such categories in order to make a more informed decision for themselves. For example, if I learn that a box of strawberries has traveled from large monoculture, pesticide fed farm in Ecuador I can realize that this food does not fall into the categories of “local” or “ecologically” sound. From this point I probably won’t be buying the strawberries. What I believe I’m amounting to is the importance of knowledge and experience that the slow food movement highlights. Food has so much more of a journey, and requires so much more effort than a simple plate to mouth trip.
Nina,
I can really relate to your take on “slow food” in this post. I think you are absolutely correct with the points you convey in this blog post. I really relate to you when you mention that knowledge and experience are important in highlighting the intricacies of slow food. I also enjoy the economic and tangible perspective you put on the ability, or lack there of, to track exactly where our food comes from. This is a substantial problem in our society, and needs to be solved before we can continue defining the many different food movements and perspectives that are defined in our society today. I also agree with your point about the marketing aspects that go in to something like boxtops, which is meant to be positive and useful. It ultimately comes down to money and marketability, which in turn creates and generates money, and I am glad you pointed that out in your post. I also really enjoyed your mention of food justice because this is what I wrote my post on. Food justice is definitely overlooked, but is an influential part of not just the food movement in this country, but also the historical aspects of this country which is something I learned in doing my blog post.