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In Europe, there is an increasing resistance to what is viewed by many as the american globalization of food. Coke, Big Macs, genetically-fiddled corn---all are viewed as the ugly American's hegemony of the European appetite. The reaction is getting militant. Earlier this month, a MacDonald's in France was demolished by a so-called freedom fighter for the battle against the globalization of food.
There is, however, a more peaceful response to the fear that America is converting the European Community into a giant Jack in the Box--the Slow Food movement--a movement which has found a small but willing membership here in Portland.
In Europe, the Slow Food movement recognzies 1986 as the year of its intellectual birth, a year in which the American Golden Arches appeared in Rome's Piazza di Spagna. Carlo Petrini, an aging Italian gourmand, viewed this as a call to arms against corporate cuisine which threatened Italy's time-honored way of eating: a three-hour lunch break and an evening meal that often lasts until 11 pm. Petrini, a food and wine write, started Slow Food to counter the spread of fast food and help others instead to "rediscover the richness and aromas of local cuisines to fight the standardization of Fast Food."
In the last few years, Slow Food has shifted its emphasis, most significantly to preserve foods threatened by an increasingly homogenous market. With an initiative called The Ark of Taste, Slow Food hopes to bring attention to the edible equivalent of endangered species. Inhabitants of the symbolic ark include violini di capra (a rare Italian goat leg charcuterie), French pardigone plums, tome de barousse (a cheese from the Pyrenees curdled with the aid of a split fir branch), Slovenian buck wheat, and other similarly obscure foodstuffs. Americans might be able to relate a little better to our own contributions. Sweet Gravenstein apples require careful handling, so they don't fit the industrialized agriculture model that fills supermarket bins across the country with standardized Red Delicious. Thirty years ago you could order abalone in seafood restaurants up and down the west coast, but overfishing and habitat destruction led to a population crash and harvest restrictions. A Tomales Bay abalone farmer who spends more than three years growing the shellfish to market size is one of the most recent additions to the Ark.
Slow Food's emphasis on local growers and artisan producers fits with the growing awareness of how good food is produced. Farmers markets are growing more popular, organic produce shows up in mainstream grocery stores, and you can find good bread almost everywhere. Preserving the culture of the family farm and local baker can keep us eating well, but it also protects the environment and prevents urban sprawl. Corporate agriculture uses more chemicals and energy for production and transportation, and small businesses are an important element in the neighborhood communities that provide an alternative to traffic-generating suburbs. Its Italian origins give Slow Food's proclamations an old world elegance, something it wouldn't hurt homegrown food fanatics to emulate. Taste is defined as "the perfect equilibrium between pleasure and knowledge," and "conviviality" is a guiding principal. The Slow Food Manifesto offers this blessing: "May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency." Such a civilized approach is welcome relief from the Spartan dictates of, say, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food-watchdog group that recently grabbed headlines with studies about the health risk of eating Chinese takeout and the dangers of movie theater popcorn.
Slow Food publishes a quarterly journal called, naturally, Slow, that provides one of the best incentives for joining. Printed on archive-quality paper and featuring inimitable Italian design, the magazine offers articles on the most arcane aspects of eating and drinking. The current issue tackles the new morality of health, including the "dietary terrorism of the women's magazines," and features articles on the history of smoking, supermarkets and heart disease in Scotland, the recent conference of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance in Santa Monica, and the myths and fables about the relationship between menstrual blood and fermented beverages. You won't read that in Bon Appetite.
Here in Portland, Pastaworks' owner Peter deGarmo organized the local Slow Food chapter, more pleasantly referred as a "convivium." The group, which now numbers 55 members, prefers dinners with Italian winemakers and other food-focused gatherings to regular meetings. Over the past year members made periodic visits to Cameron Winery to participate in the wine-making process. They trimmed vines, picked grapes, and tasted the developing wine from the barrel, all so they might better enjoy their next glass of pinot noir. Recently they offered a few local nominations for inclusion in the Ark of Taste. One of them is White Oak Cidery in Newburg, where Alan Foster grows more than fifty varieties of heirloom apples to make farmhouse cider, the alcoholic brew popular in southwest England.
There's a little irony in the Slow Food push for new members, especially American ones. We are, after all, responsible for the very things the group was formed to oppose, and I don't know many people who believe that life here is slowing down. If anything, the pace has increased, pushed along communications technology that demands our attention 24/7. But the longing for a bit of calm is definitely there. Slow Food might provide the respite and help us realize that "a firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life."