Slow Food in a Fast Food World

There is a movement taking the nation by storm: the slow food movement. With the release of several foodie films over the last decade, including the 2009 documentary “Food, Inc.,” coupled with a growing genre of foodie books such as Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” and Marion Nestle’s “Food Politics,” people are paying attention – finally! – to the food they eat. So what exactly is slow food and how you can you begin to embrace it?

Slow Family
I grew up in a small Connecticut town where my family gave little thought to the food we ate. It’s not that we didn’t care about food – quite the opposite, in fact – but we never had to wonder where our food came from or how it was produced. This was because most of the food we ate we grew or bought locally.

Summers in the northeast meant planting and harvesting produce in our nearly quarter-acre garden, which was abundant with tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs, squash and other edibles. On those hot and lazy days of summer, my sister and I would pick what was ripe for my mother to serve at dinner. Summer also meant raspberry and blueberry picking and frequent pit stops at roadside farm stands for fresh veggies. Winter was not favorable for growing our own food, so while supermarket trips became more frequent, we also enjoyed the leftover bounty of summer with canned tomatoes and pears, pickled eggplant and peppers, and frozen berries.

While mealtimes growing up were pretty great, they were not perfect. It was the 1970s after all, and I do recall a few short-lived experiments with Shake N Bake and frozen dinners. You can thank the food industry whose commercials have always lured us toward “fast food,” telling us that there is an easier and cheaper way to feed our families without mentioning the cost to our health and well-being. But for the most part, our family was a slow food family without realizing it. We grew our own food, bought local, cooked from scratch, and sat down at the table together for meals – something rarely experienced by families today.

Fast Forward to Fast Food
In the late 1990s I became vegetarian, then vegan. I prided myself on my newfound way of eating. My skin glowed, the extra five pounds I had been carrying dropped effortlessly, and my allergies completely cleared up (buh-bye anti-histamines and inhaler!). In fact, I completely shunned the diet I was raised on. While full of homegrown fruits and vegetables, it was also heavy on the meat and dairy. But in the process of leaving behind the diet of my youth, I also left behind the slow food way of eating I was raised on.

Living in the city, I would now pass the neighborhood farmers market and head straight to the supermarket to pick up organic fruits and veggies (grown half-way around the world) and a selection of packaged vegan dishes (from frozen burritos to canned soups) that I could whip up in the galley kitchen of my studio apartment. Though my diet was a far cry from fast food, and certainly healthier than the meat- and dairy-centric diet I had been raised on, I had abandoned slow food and become what I call a fast-food vegan.

And Back to Slow Again
Sometime in the mid-2000s I began to find my way back to slow food. I am still working toward merging slow food with veganism, both of which benefit our health, the environment and the economy. And to my surprise, I am finding it quite easy! While I have yet to grow a garden (perhaps a resolution for 2011?), there are ways that my family and I have brought slow food into our home. Frequenting local farmers markets, joining a community-supported agriculture (CSA) group, and making trips to local farms have all been important in embracing slow. Mealtimes at home are based primarily upon made-from-scratch dishes using seasonal and local fare.

Keeping it Real
Does going slow mean you have to eliminate foods that aren’t local or seasonal? Of course not! If you looked in my kitchen today, among the locally grown squash and hydroponically-grown greens and sprouts, you will also find superfoods of the Amazon (acai and maca, anyone?). And I will certainly not tell my 4-year-old that she can’t pop a straw in her young Thai coconut when she is thirsty. It’s the ultimate juice box! So while we fill up on local foods, we also keep it real and include some of our exotic favorites! In the end it is about finding balance. In your quest for slow, remember to keep it real!

Ready to embrace the slow food movement? Here are a few tips to help you go slow without going crazy:

· Grow a garden. There is no better way to connect with your food than to grow it yourself. Grow your own sprouts, create a windowsill herb garden, or plant a full acre of green goodness. Get your hands dirty!
· Support your local farmer. Check out LocalHarvest for local farms, farmers markets (including winter markets!), and CSA groups in your area. And be sure to talk with growers about their farming methods. Many growers may not be certified organic, but still practice sustainable and organic farming methods. This means you can get local and organic, too!
· Buy local and organic at your supermarket. Every time you make a purchase, you are casting a vote for the food you want. Buy more local and organic options and you will begin to see those options grow!
· Eat meals together with family and friends. There is no better way to feed your soul than to sit down with others while enjoying a home-cooked meal and conversation!
· Forget perfection! Feeling guilty for buying an organic apple from New Zealand or fixing a frozen vegan meal rather than whipping one up from scratch? Don’t! Eating slow is also about the pleasure of food, so no stressing as you go slow!

Lauri Boone, RD, is a registered dietitian and certified raw food chef and instructor. She practices nutrition at Breathe Yoga in Pittsford, New York and blogs about food at her website, The Eclectic Kitchen.

Photo credit: Jon Wiley

This Earth Day, Thinking Ethically—Not Just Locally

Paul Shapiro, Humane Society of the United States

Who among us hasn’t heard it before? You don’t need to be a foodie to have read that we ought to be eating more locally-grown foods in order to reduce our carbon footprint. And I couldn’t agree more.

But the question of eating ethically involves a lot more than just questioning how many miles our food had to travel to get to our plates. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people proudly say, “I buy local meat,” implying that their meat (or eggs or dairy) didn’t come from a factory farm.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud any effort people make to avoid supporting factory farms. It’s imperative that we reduce the suffering of animals raised for food. But we can’t ignore the thorny issue that factory farms aren’t just “out there” in a faraway land. All factory farms are local to somewhere.

Case in point: This past month, Mercy for Animals released an investigation of a “family-owned” egg factory farm located in Turner, Maine. The results were gruesome: dead and live hens confined in the same cage, birds packed into cages where they could barely move an inch their whole lives, and workers kicking the animals as if they were mere footballs.

Is it possible that some Maine egg consumers felt good about buying these eggs just because they were produced locally? How easy it would be not to look beyond the fact that they were local eggs and not consider the suffering of the animals and degradation of the, yes, local environment.

On Earth Day, those who even make the association between the food they eat and the well-being of the planet are already ahead of the game. Indeed, they’re ahead of some of the leaders of the anti-global warming movement. But while local is certainly an important factor to weigh, other factors such as animal welfare, resource efficiency, and the local environment are also critical.

One way to work toward addressing all these issues is to choose more plant-based meals with an emphasis on local produce. Raising animals for food is extremely resource-inefficient, contributes enormously to global warming, and often causes cruelty few us would ever want to witness.

And fortunately, the number of restaurants catering to vegetarian-oriented diners has never been higher, making it easier than ever to live and let live every time we sit down to eat. There’s also an abundance of free recipes online diverse enough to keep even the most variety-hungry of us satiated.

So this Earth Day, let’s keep local on our minds. But, let’s not be lured into thinking that simply being local means something is ethical.

Paul Shapiro is the senior director of The Humane Society of the United States’ factory farming campaign. When he isn’t waging campaigns to protect farm animals, he can be found lifting weights, drinking vegan smoothies, and listening to C-SPAN radio on a lawn chair in the sun.