“Turn on a TV anywhere in the world and you will see an idiot with a spoon. And every newspaper and magazine has recipes and a photo of the dish taken from above like a cadaver. It’s a form of onanism and is masturbatory. We must normalise food rather than put it on a pedestal far out of reach.”
Such are the words of Carlo Petrini, the man who coined and founded an international movement for slow food.
In an informative article published in yesterday’s Guardian, from which the above quotation was extracted, Leo Hickman interviews Petrini about the problems with fast food and importance of slow food.
“Children should meet people who produce food,” Petrini says in no uncertain words comparing refrigerators to tombs and freezers to cultural perversions, not to mention a need to reduce waste. “That’s how you learn to be a co-producer.”
In my role as the co-chair of a greater Newburyport Earth Day Celebration, I am working with colleagues to set into motion a series of dialogues among local farmers and elementary school students. From school assemblies and presentations to farm tours, sustainable actions are happening.
Which leads me to restaurants. In several weeks, the aptly-named Port Tavern will open its doors around the corner from me in what used to be an Irish pub. I wonder if any high school students will be employed as servers or cashiers.
The same day as Hickman’s interview ran, the Boston Globe’s Devra First reported on the emergence of clusters of neighborhood restaurants as social networks where community residents can gather and eat.
“More than a single restaurant, what really turns a neighborhood around are clusters of restaurants, even if it’s just a handful,” says Aseem Inam, a visiting lecturer at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “The point is to create a destination. A restaurant almost always does better if others are nearby. It creates that foot traffic. Studies have shown most people like to be where there are other people. Critical mass is so important psychologically.”
The momentum is shifting.
Local to the greater Newburyport region, a group of restauranteurs, caterers, and bakers are in the process of shifting toward locally or regionally produced ingredients to incorporate into their menus.
To this end, an ad-hoc group of interested residents and business owners have formed a local and social network to share ideas about implementing slow food into kitchens and households. The group’s second meeting occurs tonight at 6:45 p.m. at the Newburyport Public Library. I’ll be there, and will report on its slow and local nature for an upcoming blog post.
If you want to be involved in slow food online, I offer my thanks to @mistermichael on Twitter who shared with me this link to the International Slow Food Movement’s Facebook group, with 15,000 members and growing. And here’s a link to a list of food bloggers also on Twitter if you want to read their tips and interact with them online.
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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I’ve been a Slow Food follower for years and am very excited about the prospect of its ideals making all the way up to the North Shore. We have such a bounty of produce at our disposal and I have so dismayed about how hard it is to find local produce when I dine out.
As a blogger, I take slight umbrage at some Petrini’s comments. I feel that the popularity of food blogs, television shows and culinary celebrities has taken food *off* its pedestal. Yes, molecular gastronomy and sous vide techniques and the like are not exactly welcoming to the casual cook. But the sheer volume of information available about food and cooking has opened up cuisines, techniques and ingredients to a whole new population of home cooks.
Until we have better networks of local providers (and easier access to slaughterhouses for our local meat producers), I will have to use my “culturally perverse” freezer and “tomblike” fridge to hold the local meat and vegetables I buy.
I respect Petrini greatly and think he has done amazing things since founding Slow Food. Unfortunately, we all don’t live next to farms and we have to use conventional supermarkets to feed ourselves. I am not going to get much traction with the manager at Shaw’s if I show up ranting about conventionally-raised vegetables or fruit. He might listen to me though I can provide a well-thought out, non-emotional argument based on consumer market need and the goodwill it will bring to his store.
So pleased to hear about your efforts to pull in sustainability issues to Earth Day.
The Slow Food movement is a worthwhile one. It is helpful to the environment as a whole, it is better for our personal health, and it supports the farms and businesses in our local communities.
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Ari,
Thanks for blogging on Slow Food and Newburyport area’s beginning a network of folks concerned with Local Foods and the slow food principles.
If people want more info try http://www.thenewburyportfarmersmarket.org/
I havent joined the Slow Food movement, but I do believe in what they stand for. I would like to find a way to bring slow food/real food into poorer and inner-city communities. Some of this is already being done in some areas via local farmers markets, etc but I feel more can be done.
Maybe I should join Slow Foods to see how I can play a larger role in this.
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You may not get traction with the Shaw’s manager, Mary, but the chain offers an organic Wild Harvest section–which may not be “local” ingredients, but at least are more naturally-occurring than the rest of the store or anything you’d find at some competing chains.
There are numerous organizations comparable to the Slow Food group, Carla. One I heard last night was the Washington, DC-based Albert A. Price Foundation which has a different focus but a similar goal.
True Ari, I’m not expecting much traction from big chains anyway – I actually buy most of my produce from Tendercrop and other local suppliers when I can. I guess my point was more that you’re not going to be taken seriously by the mainstream if you resort to hyperbole. Reasoned arguments tend to get reasonable answers (maybe not the one you want, but still …). In my experience, hyberbolic and emotional arguments are received with closed minds.
Do you mean the Weston A Price Foundation?
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