In Praise of Slow Read online

  Of course, attitudes to food are not the same everywhere. Americans devote less time than anyone else—about an hour a day—to eating, and are more likely to buy processed food and to dine alone. Britons and Canadians are not much better. In southern Europe, where good food is still seen as a cultural birthright, people are nevertheless learning to eat with Anglo-Saxon haste during the week. In Paris, which fancies itself the world capital of fine dining, cafés specializing in réstauration rapide are stealing trade from the laidback bistros of yesteryear. At Goûts et Saveurs, in the ninth arrondissement, lunch is a twenty-minute affair where the wine is poured as soon as you sit down and the food comes straight from the microwave. At the Hôtel Montalembert on the Left Bank, the chef serves a three-course lunch on a single airline-style tray.

  Nearly two hundred years ago, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the legendary French gastronome, remarked that “The destiny of nations depends upon the manner in which they feed themselves.” That caveat is more apt today than ever before. In our haste, we feed ourselves badly, and suffer the consequences. Obesity rates are rocketing, in part because we wolf down processed food packed with sugar and fat. We all know the results of picking produce before it reaches full ripeness, shipping it across the planet in refrigerated containers and then ripening it artificially: avocadoes that go from rock hard to rotten overnight; tomatoes that taste like cotton wool. In the pursuit of low costs and high turnover, industrial farms do damage to livestock, the environment and even the consumer. Intensive agriculture is now a leading cause of water pollution in most Western countries. In his bestselling exposé, Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser revealed that mass-produced American ground beef is often tainted with fecal matter and other pathogens. Thousands of Americans catch E-coli poisoning from hamburgers every year. Scratch the surface and the “cheap food” brought to us by factory farms turns out to be a false economy. In 2003, researchers at Essex University calculated that British taxpayers spend up to £2.3 billion every year repairing the damage that industrial farming does to the environment and human health.

  Many of us have swallowed the idea that when it comes to food, faster is better. We are in a hurry, and we want meals to match. But many people are waking up to the drawbacks of the gobble-gulp-and-go ethos. On the farm, in the kitchen and at the table, they are slowing down. Leading the charge is an international movement with a name that says it all: Slow Food.

  Rome is the capital city of a nation in love with food. On shady terraces overlooking the vine-clad hills of Tuscany, lunch stretches deep into the afternoon. As the clock strikes midnight in osterie up and down Italy, couples are still flirting over plates of prosciutto and handmade ravioli. Yet these days Italians often take a faster approach to food. Young Romans are more likely to grab a Big Mac on the run than to spend the afternoon making fresh pasta. Fast-food joints have sprung up all over the country. All is not lost, though. The culture of mangiare bene still informs the Italian psyche, and that is why Italy is at the forefront of the movement for culinary slowness.

  It all started in 1986, when McDonald’s opened a branch beside the famous Spanish Steps in Rome. To many locals, this was one restaurant too far: the barbarians were inside the gates and something had to be done. To roll back the fast-food tsunami sweeping across the planet, Carlo Petrini, a charismatic culinary writer, launched Slow Food. As the name suggests, the movement stands for everything that McDonald’s does not: fresh, local, seasonal produce; recipes handed down through the generations; sustainable farming; artisanal production; leisurely dining with family and friends. Slow Food also preaches “eco-gastronomy”—the notion that eating well can, and should, go hand in hand with protecting the environment. At its heart, though, the movement is about pleasure.

  Petrini thinks this is a good starting point for tackling our obsession with speed in all walks of life. The group’s manifesto states: “A firm defence of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life … Our defence should begin at the table with Slow Food.”

  With its very modern message—eat well and still save the planet—Slow Food has attracted seventy-eight thousand members in more than fifty countries. In 2001, the New York Times Magazine named it one of the “80 ideas that shook the world (or at least jostled it a little).” Aptly enough, Slow Food takes the snail as its symbol, but that does not mean the members are lazy or sluggish. Even in the sticky heat of July, the head office in Bra, a small city south of Turin, buzzes with young, cosmopolitan staff fielding emails, editing press releases and putting the finishing touches on the newsletter that is sent to every member in the world. Slow Food also publishes a quarterly magazine in five languages and a host of respected food and wine guides. Other projects include setting up an online catalogue of every artisanal food on the planet.

  All over the world, Slow Food activists organize dinners, workshops, school visits and other events to promote the benefits of taking our time over what we eat. Education is key. In 2004, Slow Food will open its own University of Gastronomic Sciences at Pollenzo, near Bra, where students will study not only the science of food, but also its history and sensual character. The movement has already persuaded the Italian state to build “food studies” into the school curriculum. In 2003, Petrini himself helped the German government lay the groundwork for a nationwide “taste education” program.

  On the economic side, Slow Food seeks out artisanal foods that are on the way to extinction and helps them gain a foothold in the global market. It puts small producers in touch with one another, shows them how to slice through red tape and promotes their wares to chefs, shops and gourmets around the world. In Italy, over 130 dying delicacies have been saved, including lentils from Abruzzi, Ligurian potatoes, the black celery of Trevi, the Vesuvian apricot and purple asparagus from Albenga. Not long ago, Slow Food rescued a breed of Sienese wild boar once prized in the courts of medieval Tuscany. The pigs are now being reared—and turned into succulent sausages, salamis and hams—on a thriving Tuscan farm. Similar rescue operations are underway in other countries. Slow Food is working to save the Firiki apple and traditional olive oil-soaked ladotiri cheese in Greece. In France it has thrown its weight behind the Pardigone plum and a delicate goat’s cheese called Brousse du Ruve.

  As you might expect, Slow Food is strongest in Europe, which has a rich tradition of indigenous cuisine, and where fast-food culture is less entrenched. But the movement is also making strides across the Atlantic. Its American membership is eight thousand and rising. In the United States, Slow Food helped persuade Time magazine to run a feature on the Sun Crest peach of northern California, a fruit that tastes sublime but travels badly. After the article appeared, the small producer was inundated with buyers wanting to sample his crop. Slow Food is also leading a successful campaign to resurrect the tasty rare-breed turkeys—Naragansett, Jersey Buff, Standard Bronze, Bourbon Red—that were the centrepiece of every American family’s Thanksgiving supper until bland factory-farmed birds took over.

  Slow Food has not been afraid to take on the powers that be. In 1999, it raised over half a million signatures in a campaign that eventually persuaded the Italian government to amend a law that would have forced even the smallest food-maker to conform to the rigid hygiene standards used by corporate giants such as Kraft Foods. As a result, thousands of traditional producers were saved from a flood of unnecessary paperwork. With backing from Slow Food, artisanal cheese-makers formed a Europe-wide alliance in 2003 to fight for the right to work with raw milk. The campaign against pasteurization will soon cross to North America.

  As part of its ecological credo, Slow Food opposes the genetic modification of foodstuffs and promotes organic farming. Nobody has conclusively proven that organic food is more nutritious or better tasting than non-organic, but it is clear that the methods used by many conventional farmers take a toll on the environment, polluting the water table, killing off other plants and exhausting the soil. According to the Smithsonian Migratory Bi
rd Center, pesticides, directly or indirectly, kill at least sixty-seven million American birds every year. By contrast, a well-run organic farm can use crop rotation to enrich the soil and manage pests—and still be very productive.

  Slow Food also fights for biodiversity. In the food industry, haste leads to homogenization: manufacturers can process inputs—be they turkeys, tomatoes or turnips—more quickly if they are all the same. So the pressure is on farmers to concentrate on single strains or breeds. Over the last century, for instance, the number of artichoke varieties grown in Italy has tumbled from two hundred to about a dozen. Besides narrowing our choice of flavours, the loss of fauna upsets delicate ecosystems. By putting our eggs in fewer baskets, we court disaster. When all you have is one breed of turkey, a single virus can wipe out the whole species.

  With its love of the small, the unhurried and the local, Slow Food seems like a natural-born enemy of global capitalism. But nothing could be further from the truth. Slow Food campaigners are not against globalization per se. Many artisanal products, from Parmesan cheese to traditional soya sauce, travel well—and need overseas markets to thrive. When Petrini talks of “virtuous globalization,” he is thinking of trade agreements that allow European chefs to import quinoa from a family farm in Chile, or the information technology that permits a smoked salmon specialist in the Scottish Highlands to find customers in Japan.

  The virtues of globalization are on full display at the Salone del Gusto, Slow Food’s biannual jamboree. Held in a former Fiat factory in Turin, Salone 2002 was the mother of all smorgasbords, attracting five hundred artisanal food producers from thirty countries. Over five waist-expanding days, 138,000 people strolled among the stalls, soaking up the wonderful aromas and sampling the exquisite cheeses, hams, fruits, sausages, wines, pastas, breads, mustards, preserves and chocolates. All over the Salone, people networked as they nibbled. A Japanese sake-maker discussed Internet marketing with a Bolivian llama herder. Bakers from France and Italy compared notes on stone-ground flours.

  Everywhere you looked, someone was turning the principles of Slow Food into profit. Susana Martinez had travelled from Jujuy, a province in the remote, rugged north of Argentina, to promote yacon, an ancient Andean root that was slipping into oblivion. Sweet and crunchy, like jicama or water chestnut, yacon is easy on the waistline because its sugars pass through the human body unmetabolized. With help from Slow Food, Martinez and forty other families are now growing it on small, organic plots for export. Orders are flooding in from overseas, with posh restaurants in Spain eager to put the root on the menu and Japanese retailers clamouring for crates of yacon jam. At Salone 2002, Martinez was upbeat. “When you look around the Salone, at all the different producers, you realize that you don’t have to be big and fast to survive,” she said. “You can be small and slow and still be successful. More and more people in the world want to eat things that are produced in a natural, non-industrial way.”

  With so much emphasis on eating, you might expect everyone at the Salone to be of Pavarotti proportions. Far from it. There is a lot more surplus flesh wobbling round your average Dunkin’ Donuts. But the sensual pleasures of the table are definitely more important to the Slow Food crowd than being able to swap dresses with Calista Flockhart. That is why Elena Miro, an Italian fashion designer who specializes in clothes for larger women, had a stall at Salone 2002. A curvy young model named Viviane Zunino was handing out brochures when I visited. She scoffed at the catwalk queens who live on mineral water and salad leaves. “Diets just make people unhappy,” she said. “One of the most beautiful things in life is taking the time to sit round the table with friends and family to enjoy really good food and wine.” A middle-aged man with an enormous belly waddled past, breathing heavily and dabbing his forehead with a silk handkerchief. We watched him make a beeline for the biscuits lathered with jalapeño jelly at the US stall. Zunino smiled: “There are limits, though.”

  The Slow Food movement is part of a much broader backlash against the high-speed, high-turnover culture of the global food industry. After half a century of relentless growth, McDonald’s recorded its first losses in 2002 and immediately began closing overseas branches. All over the world, consumers are steering clear of the golden arches because they find the food inside uninspiring and unhealthy. For many, boycotting the Big Mac is a way of saying no to the global standardization of taste. As Philip Hensher, a British commentator, noted, people are finally waking up to the fact that “their own culture does not, and will not, depend on a burnt hamburger in a calcium-peroxide-flavoured bun.” On home turf, McDonald’s faces an avalanche of lawsuits from Americans claiming its food made them obese.

  Across the world, food-makers of all stripes are proving that small and slow are not only beautiful, but profitable, too. Fifteen years ago, for instance, two large companies, Miller and Busch, dominated the US beer market. Today, fifteen hundred craft breweries make beer following Slow Food principles. Artisanal bakers are also making a comeback and showing that time is an essential ingredient of good bread. Most use stone-ground flour, rather than the cheaper, industrial equivalent, which passes through high-speed rollers that destroy many of the natural nutrients. Real bakers also favour longer proving times—anywhere from sixteen hours to three days—to let the dough ferment and develop flavour. The result is bread that tastes better and is more nutritious. A local bakery can also help people reconnect with their community. Round the corner from my house in London, two former publishers opened the Lighthouse Bakery in 2001. Apart from making heavenly bread, one of their aims was to create a social hub. The lineup on Saturday morning is now the perfect place to bump into neighbours and catch up on local gossip.

  Chickens are also enjoying more slowness nowadays. Living a measly four weeks, most of it in cramped coops, the factory-farmed chicken produces meat with as much taste and texture as tofu. More and more farmers, though, are now raising poultry in the Slow style. At the Leckford Estate in Hampshire, England, the chickens spend up to three months roaming freely round the farm. At night, they sleep in spacious sheds. The birds produce meat that is firm, juicy and flavourful. To win back consumers fed up with industrial broilers, Japanese farmers are also returning to slower growing, better tasting breeds of chickens, such as the Akita hinaidori and the Nagoya cochin.

  Nothing, however, illustrates the spread of the Slow Food gospel better than the renaissance of the traditional farmers’ market. In towns and cities across the industrial world, and often a few blocks from large supermarkets, farmers are once again selling their fruits, vegetables, cheeses and meats directly to the public. Not only do consumers like putting a face to the food, but the produce usually tastes better. The fruit and vegetables are seasonal, left to ripen naturally, and travel only short distances. Nor is the farmers’ market a plaything for the gourmet minority. Prices are often lower than in supermarkets, which spend a fortune on transport, advertising, staff and storage. The three thousand farmers’ markets in the United States now turn over more than $1 billion in annual revenue, allowing nearly twenty thousand farmers to opt out of the industrial food chain altogether.

  Many people are going one step further and cultivating their own produce. All over Britain, young urbanites are queuing up to rent small plots of land from their local authorities. At the “allotments” near my house, you can see yuppies stepping out of BMW Roadsters to check on their rocket, carrots, new potatoes and chillies.

  As consumers become more discerning, everyone is forced to raise their game. Ambitious restaurants make a point of cooking with ingredients sourced directly from local farms. Manufacturers sell higher grade convenience and takeout food. Supermarkets clear shelf space for cheeses, sausages and other goods made by artisanal producers.

  A common denominator in all of these trends is flavour. Industrial methods knock much of the natural taste out of food. Consider the case of cheddar cheese. The factory-made stuff on sale in supermarkets tends to be boring and predictable. Artisanal cheddar,
made by hand with natural ingredients, offers a kaleidoscope of subtle flavours that vary from one batch to the next.

  Neal’s Yard Dairy, in London’s Covent Garden, stocks around eighty cheeses from small producers in Britain and Ireland. The shop is a feast for the senses. Behind the counter and along the painted wooden shelves, crumbly Wensleydales jostle with creamy Stiltons, giving off a delightful aroma. Flavour is king here. Neal’s Yard sells a range of artisanal cheddars, each with its own distinct character. The one made by Keen’s is soft, a little waxy, with sharp, grassy notes. Montgomery cheddar is drier, firmer, with a nutty, savoury taste. Lincolnshire Poacher is smooth and mellow, with a hint of Alpine sweetness. A Scottish cheddar from the Isle of Mull, where grass is scarce and the cows mainly survive on draff from a local brewery, is much paler than the rest, with a wild, almost gamey taste.

  When it comes to pleasure, factory cheese simply cannot compete. Most leave little impression on the taste buds. The flavours in an artisanal cheese, by contrast, develop slowly in the mouth, and then linger, tickling the palate like a fine wine. “Often a customer will taste a cheese, not be very impressed, and then move on down the counter,” says Randolph Hodgson, the founder and manager of Neal’s Yard Dairy. “After a few seconds, though, the flavour hits them. Their head suddenly turns and they say: ‘Wow, that actually tastes really nice.’”