Slow Food and Me
As an active member of Slow Food St. Louis, I have a brief spiel when someone asks me what we’re all about which goes something like this:
Slow Food is the opposite of Fast Food. Slow Food is good, clean and fair food.
The idea for Slow Food came from a journalist in Italy, Carlo Petrini. Basically, in 1986, while in Rome, he saw a McDonald’s being built outside the Spanish Steps and thought to himself, obviously enough, “what the hell?” He started an organization called Arcigola at that time, but in 1989 it became Slow Food International when delegates from 15 countries descended upon Paris, France and signed The Slow Food Manifesto.
In the US, when people think of Slow Food, they often think of it as a locavore group and, while it is certainly true that when food is good, clean and fair it is often local, this does not represent the complete picture.
More specifically, local food is often discussed in tandem with Slow Food because many small local farmers have a devotion to growing crop varieties that do not transport well. These foods are good because they make for biodiversity as varieties that would otherwise go more-or-less extinct continue to be grown. They are clean because the methods of production do less damage to our environment by cutting down things like pesticides and transportation costs. And they are fair because the farmers are being paid a living wage for their product.
But Slow Food is more than that… after the jump…
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