My kitchen is the heart of my home. My friends all like to hang out in there instead of in my more spacious living room.
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My kitchen is the heart of my home. My friends all like to hang out in there instead of in my more spacious living room.
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The Slow Food movement has changed our perception of how we eat. Now it's impossible to go back.
Thirty years ago, on the 3rd November 1987, Italian food and wine magazine Gambero Rosso published a manifesto about a new approach to food, the Slow Food Movement was born. It was a shout out, a call to focus on the pleasure of eating and the importance of food quality and tradition.
Italy is widely seen as a land of good food, so why would an Italian magazine feel the need to reaffirm this?
At the time, fast food was a novelty young Italians welcomed with open arms. MacDonalds offered a sense of freedom and a way to rebel against your parents, still happy as they were to spend endless hours at the dining table.
The Slow Food movement seemed mired in the past, a way to cherish the good old days for people unhappy with modern society. Like many Italians of my generation, the Slow Food movement looked to me like a snobbish, gourmet reaction to the idea of globalisation in the food we eat. 'Fair trade', 'sustainability', 'locally produced' didn't mean much at the time. Most people were happy to eat oranges in summer and water melons at Christmas, and pre-prepared food just meant less time spent drudging in the kitchen. Fast food was a vital part of a modern lifestyle.
...although it should be said that Italy was then, and still is, a country where food as culture is deeply rooted in society. We still prefer home cooking, and recipes are still handed down through the generations.
But for the movement's founder, Carlo Petrini, the idea behind slow food was that we had lost the enjoyment of eating and no longer understood the meaning of its production and preparation. We had started to miss the time formerly spent relishing food.
With time, things changed. Fast food lost much of its appeal, and we started to realise that globalisation has its dark side.
'Food', we now know, is not just what we have on our plates, but the result of how our society is structured. We also now recognize that how food is produced has deep and long-lasting effects on the environment.
The Slow Food movement, born in a small town in the north of Italy, has gone global. What was once perceived as 'fringe' and rather snobbish is now part of the mainstream. All over the world, in fields and orchards, on farms, in boats, kitchens, small breweries and vineyards, small-scale food producers and harvesters have bought into Slow Food's vision of good, clean and fair food for all.
Will globalisation and sustainability ever be reconciled? Perhaps the movement's philosophy hasn't got everyone convinced just yet, but fifteen years ago, few were arguing about how our food was produced, and its quality. Now we're more aware about how food chains work, and we're more involved than ever in how we choose what we eat. We're more supermarket-savvy than we were a few decades ago, and we can't unlearn what we have learned.
Will the Slow Food movement help to change the way we feed ourselves once and for all? We'll see, in another fifteen years. See you then!
The Main Features of the Slow Food Movement
• Value typical traditions and specific sets of knowledge, resources and competences that were headed for destruction under the pressure of a global, standardised mass market • Protect and support local communities • Shape new connections and social networks amongst producers and co-producers, i.e. aware consumers • Bypass brokers and foster direct relationships between farmers and responsible consumers • Reduce transports to minimise the food miles • Safeguard the environment • Promote virtuous globalisation through a network of neo-gastronomes. The different communities promote sustainable practices at the local level to achieve a real global sustainability • Ensure the universal right to pleasure and good living • Overcome the currently prevailing agri-food business model to embrace a more robust and consistent idea of sustainable development
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AuthorI love cooking, and when it comes to quality I'm quite fussy. Archives
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