Features
The Slowfood solution
I reckon we are going to spend the next forty years seeking out solutions for the problems we have been busy creating for ourselves over the last forty years. It's my belief that Slow Food is a one-stop solution shop for many - if not most - of these problems. The 1989 manifesto of the movement asserted that "Slow Food guarantees a better future'. Here's how, and why.
Food for all
Human Health: we in the West are getting fatter and more unhealthy whilst we still have grave problems in ensuring that people in the developing world do not go to bed hungry. Our view of food is not just inherently capitalistic - a commodity to be traded at the best price - it is becoming even more capitalistic as companies seek to assert property rights over seeds and other foods.
But food is not an asset: it is a gift, a blessing. We need to re-envision the world not as a marketplace, but as a table: would you give more to one guest at your table than you would to the guest sitting beside them? Of course not. So, 'Our defence should begin at the table with Slow Food'.
Conserving resources
Our Environment: a biblically-charged ambiguity about using the resources of the earth for our benefit has led us to be not just careless about father earth, but downright contemptuous. This attitude - that we have no need of stewardship over the planet - has led us down the path of chemicalised agriculture, producing crops without nutritional benefit, emiserating farm animals, poisoning our rivers and seas.
'In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscape'.
Fortunately, once we hit the crisis point of Peak Oil, we will be forced to revert to a sane, seasonal, organic agriculture, because we will not be able to waste fossil fuels making pesticides and NPK which our plants actually don't need in order to grow. Fast Life needs fossil fuels. Slow Life needs sun, wind and rain. And good compost.
And it seems to me to be so apt that, having wasted fossil fuels to pollute our environment and landscape, mother earth should have the wisdom to turn off the tap as we rush towards crisis. What can we call that? Gaia Synergy?
Interfering with nature
Science versus Art: the struggle in food during the twentieth century has been the struggle between science and art. Scientists cannot understand how a cheese maker can work with raw milk, which is different every day, and yet make an almost identical cheese every day. The response of science to this culinary magic has been to dumb-down what it can't understand: pasteurisation is seen as an answer to the magic of milk, irradiation to the challenge of meat. But pasteurisation is only an answer to someone who can't read the poetry of nature's magic ingredients, such as milk. And irradiation is no answer to failing to treat farm animals humanely.
'That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it'.
Diversity is the key
Bio-Diversity: the writer Michael Pollan has unambiguously asserted that America's dependence on corn is what is making its people obese, prone to diabetes, and it is a corn-base agriculture and food system that has created the grisly spectacle of rich kids with rickets. The answer is simple; every food culture, to make good food and to have healthy citizens, must be as diverse as possible. This is what Terre Madre asserts: a world of difference, a world that embraces the many, and which shuns The One, the silver bullet, the magic solution. There is no magic solution, but there are many, many magic solutions. They are all around us, and all they need is our protection.
'And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects'.
Slowing down
Peace, Love and Understanding: in 1989, the Slow Food manifesto said that, having invented the machine, we had chosen to take it as our life model. And in yet another epithet from the Manifesto, it was stated that "Homo sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction'. That danger - of extinction - is now manifest, as everyone, from Al Gore to Tony Blair, now understands. It has arisen because we have become so addicted to speed and the machine, have become so enslaved to the frenzy we believe is efficiency. So, we must separate ourselves from speed, and the machine, and from the speedy-mechanistic way of thinking, and set ourselves the task of restoring Peace, Love and Understanding to our dealings with the planet. Slow Food set out that concord almost twenty years ago:
'Let us rediscover the flavours and savours of regional cooking… A firm defence of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the folly of Fast Life… Slow Food guarantees a better future'.
