Food

BEAUTIFUL SLOW FOOD NOW

This week, as we connect with the beauty of Slow, we are getting hungry for it. We reach for Slow Food and find great pleasures in doing so. We put up a big pot of stew, opened a vintage Burgundy, baked a cake, and watched the snow fall for hours.

Slow Food is particularly beautiful because it often looks and tastes better because it often involves heritage varieties, traditional growing methodologies, and heirloom recipes. Beyond better nutrition and taste, Slow Food has important positive social impact -- on environmental and economic sustainability.

Slow Food is the name of a global, grassroots organization that founded the Slow Food movement. It links the pleasure of good food with a commitment to local communities and the environment. Today, we are revisiting their roots and checking out their important new initiatives.

Founded in 1989, by Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s mission is to “protect the heritage of biodiversity, culture and knowledge that make this pleasure possible” and contest the “disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes, and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”

The Slow Food movement first got underway in 1986, when members of the Italian civic and social organization ARCI (1957; Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana) came together to protest against the opening of a new McDonald’s at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome.

The members found that they had a unanimous concern about the disappearance of traditional food culture and the resulting loss of beauty. It gathered steam as a backlash against the industrialization and homogenization of agriculture.

What started as a few people who sought the pleasure of fully experiencing life by slowing down, grew and became a widespread campaign for sustainability. Chefs, like Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse, began to develop a contemporary view of Slow Food and its pleasures.

Slow Food now has coalition chapters in 150 countries boasting over 100,000 members. Together, they celebrate, educate, and support people who grow, sell, cook, and eat foods that are good (of high quality and delicious), clean (natural and environmentally conscious), and fair (in pricing and treatment for both buyer and seller).

Slow Food was the original inspiration for what we now call the Farm-to-Table, Nose-to-Tail, and artisanal food movements.

Slow Food has grown to now touch millions of people, in over 160 countries. It links food producers, chefs, academics and representatives of local communities worldwide in its Terra Madre network and is creating the next generation of food and gastronomy professionals at its University of Gastronomic Sciences.

THE ARK OF TASTE

The Ark of Taste, one of Slow Food’s more recent initiatives, is “a living catalog of delicious and distinctive foods facing extinction.” By showcasing these varieties and breeds, Slow Food hopes to inspire interest in them and keep them from disappearing from our planet.

10,000 GARDENS IN AFRICA

In another recent program, Slow Food International is helping to create “10,000 Gardens in Africa.” It aims to promote biodiversity and agricultural stewardship in some 25 African countries by creating 10,000 food gardens -- many in schools -- to prepare and inspire and reconnect young people back to the land.

SLOW WINE

Last month, Slow Food launched Slow Wine, a magazine dedicated to discovering the world of Italian wine, along with its beautiful slow traditions and culture.

You can check out the first issue of Slow Wine magazine, available now for free.

EARTHDANCE FARMS: INCLUSION, PEACE AND JUSTICE THROUGH SLOW FOOD

Earthdance Farms uses slow food to change the world. It operates both as an organic farm and as one of America’s few organic farm schools. It “sustainably grows food, farmers and community, one small farm at a time, through hands-on education and delicious experiences.”

Located in Ferguson, MO, Earthdance stepped up to the plate to offer slow food, as one solution to help the troubled community heal and strengthen after the shooting of Michael Brown.

Founder Molly Rocakamann sees slow food as a means to create a more equitable and sustainable food system for all.

The farm offers the community affordable organic produce at its farm stand, a work-study slow food program for local high school students, slow food apprenticeship programs for disadvantaged youth and adults, support for other local farmers, and inexpensive slow food agricultural education for all.

Soon after Brown’s death, amidst the gathering protests, Earthdance brought in two anti-racism facilitators to train their staff and began to offer free community classes at the farm to promote healing: trauma release, non-violent communication, and yoga. The response has been both heart and soul warming.

MEDLAR AND ROSE PETAL JELLY

Check out this beautiful epitome of a Slow Food recipe, from Chef Frances Atkins.

It is made from medlars, a strange fruit grown in the south of England that is all but forgotten. Slow Food wants to keep them from disappearing.

They taste like toffee apples and are extremely fragrant once they’ve been allowed to slightly decompose. Rose petals gild the lily.

Medlar & Rose Petal Jelly

Ingredients:

1 kilo of medlars (500g water to cover)
2 lemons, juiced
450g Sugar
Tbsp of dried Rose Petals

Directions:

Place the fruit in a large pan and cover with water. Bring to the boil.
When slightly soft remove from heat and discard the water.
Peel the medlars and place in a clean pan with equal weight of water and the juice of 2 lemons.
Bring to the boil, and cook until fruit is pulpy. Hang and strain the contents of the pan through muslin, saving the liquid (the juice).
Measure the juice and allow 450g sugar to 600ml of juice.
Place the juice and sugar into a heavy based pan / jam or preserves pan. On a low heat dissolve the sugar before bringing to a rapid boil for approx. 8 to 10 mins until it forms a skin on testing – place a little of the jelly on a cold saucer (place in the freezer before hand). If the liquid wrinkles (i.e. forms a skin), then the jelly is ready.
Cool and infuse the rose petals in the warm liquid.
Strain and pour into a sterilized bottle.

Check out Slow Food’s new travel app, Slow Food Planet. It can help you discover the delights of Slow Food in the best places around the world.

Time to Eat helps you find typical local restaurants, patisseries, cheese makers, pork butchers, workshops, markets, pubs and more.
Time for Me helps get you to places where you can chill out in elegant cafés or tea rooms, pubs, cocktail bars, bookshops, museums and nature reserves.
Time for Buying helps you to shop in craft workshops, at farmers’ markets or directly from local producers.

Petrini’s book, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair.

Read more about Beautiful Slow, as they relate to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including A Beautiful Slow Small World Now and Beautiful Slow Secrets Revealed Now.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Slow in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 02.22.15. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!