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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Slow Food Nation, by Alice Waters
  • Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:26:39 -0600



Slow Food Nation, by Alice Waters
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060911/waters
posted August 24, 2006 (September 11, 2006 issue)


It turns out that Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin was right in 1825 when he
wrote in his magnum opus, The Physiology of Taste, that "the destiny of
nations depends on the manner in which they are fed." If you think this
aphorism exaggerates the importance of food, consider that today almost 4
billion people worldwide depend on the agricultural sector for their
livelihood. Food is destiny, all right; every decision we make about food
has personal and global repercussions. By now it is generally conceded that
the food we eat could actually be making us sick, but we still haven't
acknowledged the full consequences--environmental, political, cultural,
social and ethical--of our national diet.

These consequences include soil depletion, water and air pollution, the
loss of family farms and rural communities, and even global warming.
(Inconveniently, Al Gore's otherwise invaluable documentary An Inconvenient
Truth has disappointingly little to say about how industrial food
contributes to climate change.) When we pledge our dietary allegiance to a
fast-food nation, there are also grave consequences to the health of our
civil society and our national character. When we eat fast-food meals alone
in our cars, we swallow the values and assumptions of the corporations that
manufacture them. According to these values, eating is no more important
than fueling up, and should be done quickly and anonymously. Since food
will always be cheap, and resources abundant, it's OK to waste. Feedlot
beef, french fries and Coke are actually good for you. It doesn't matter
where food comes from, or how fresh it is, because standardized consistency
is more important than diversified quality. Finally, hard work--work that
requires concentration, application and honesty, such as cooking for your
family--is seen as drudgery, of no commercial value and to be avoided at
all costs. There are more important things to do.

It's no wonder our national attention span is so short: We get hammered
with the message that everything in our lives should be fast, cheap and
easy--especially food. So conditioned are we to believe that food should be
almost free that even the rich, who pay a tinier fraction of their incomes
for food than has ever been paid before in human history, grumble at the
price of an organic peach--a peach grown for flavor and picked, perfectly
ripe, by a local farmer who is taking care of the land and paying his
workers a fair wage! And yet, as the writer and farmer David Mas Masumoto
recently pointed out, pound for pound, peaches that good still cost less
than Twinkies. When we claim that eating well is an elitist preoccupation,
we create a smokescreen that obscures the fundamental role our food
decisions have in shaping the world. The reason that eating well in this
country costs more than eating poorly is that we have a set of agricultural
policies that subsidize fast food and make fresh, wholesome foods, which
receive no government support, seem expensive. Organic foods seem elitist
only because industrial food is artificially cheap, with its real costs
being charged to the public purse, the public health and the environment.

The contributors to this forum have been asked to name just one thing that
could be done to fix the food system. What they propose are solutions that
arise out of what I think of as "slow food values," which run counter to
the assumptions of fast-food marketing. To me, these are the values of the
family meal, which teaches us, among other things, that the pleasures of
the table are a social as well as a private good. At the table we learn
moderation, conversation, tolerance, generosity and conviviality; these are
civic virtues. The pleasures of the table also beget responsibilities--to
one another, to the animals we eat, to the land and to the people who work
it. It follows that food that is healthy in every way will cost us more, in
time and money, than we pay now. But when we have learned what the real
costs of food are, and relearned the real rewards of eating, we will have
laid a foundation for not just a healthier food system but a healthier
twenty-first-century democracy.






  • [Livingontheland] Slow Food Nation, by Alice Waters, TradingPostPaul, 08/30/2006

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