Where Does Your Food Come From?

Once, a few years ago, I saw mention of the Slow Food Movement. I think I read something about how you need to eat your food slowly. I thought they were talking about a kind of diet and it seemed weird, but I put little thought into it past that.

Too bad, as what I have just read about it sounds very interesting to me. Slow Food is more about sustaining different cultures based on their food and getting food that is not mass produced or just easy to transport. For example, there is this type of peach that is super tasty, but most of us don't know a thing about it just because it's not easy to transport. So, our grocery stores don't carry it, and our home farms don't plant them.

What's that? You don't have a garden or farm? See, that's another issue. Now, I don't need to have a farm and it's difficult in my area to have a garden (though I do have a few items), but preserving a variety of types of foods, styles, and cultures so that everything does not just go towards mass production sounds pretty good to me.

From the Sunday Paper, If you ate milk and cookies every day after school and now serve the same snack to your kids, you could say that’s a gastronomic tradition. If milk and cookies is the common after-school snack within your community, you could call it a local food tradition. If all the folks who once made cookies from scratch stopped baking, these traditions would be lost.

Slow Food is an international group with more than 80,000 members working to preserve food traditions, food heritage and food cultures throughout the world while focusing on what they call “eco-gastronomy” or the connection between plate and planet. Slow Food hopes to establish and protect food systems that result in food that is good, clean and fair: That is, food that tastes good, is produced without harming the environment, animals or health, and provides fair compensation to producers.

More on the Slow Food Movement...