2 page paper about slow food ideologies

I don't know if I was supposed to post this, but i figured better safe than sorry.

Stephanie Ireland

Slow food findings

Upon researching the slow food movement I found that it was started in 1989 in order to promote “good, clean, and fair food”- good meaning good for you, clean meaning good for our eco-system and/or organic, and fair meaning that the farmers who cultivate this food are paid fair and square for their efforts to provide us with healthy natural choices in food, and that anyone should be able to acquire healthy food regardless of income.

The slow food movement is also meant to keep alive the traditions of cooking; they value it as a skill and believe that it is something that everyone ought to know how to do. They also see food as a means to bring people together, to represent culture and community, and something that we need to slow down and enjoy day to day.

My response to the slow food movement is that I see it as a means to bring together the family and have them all sit around the table for dinner like the majority of families used to do. Nowadays families rarely eat together; they are constantly on the go and the importance and significant of a home cooked family meal seems to have been forgotten. Not only eating the meal together, but cooking the meal together is important; cooking is a skill that anyone can learn, but few have to opportunity to learn because the skill was not passed down through the family. My mother learned to cook from her mother, and I learned how to cook from mine. The simple act of cooking is much more than learning a skill, it is a bond, a tradition, a feeling of home, and a part of a tightly wound family.

Another part of the slow food movement is the awareness of people. The obesity rates in our country are worse than any other country in the world, and the slow food movement is out to raise awareness in the American people on how to eat healthy, and how to stray away from foods that misleadingly pronounce themselves at healthy.

What this portrays to me is that the slow food movement is also out to educate people. Eating correctly is a hard skill to master. Many people will eat things that they would assume to be healthy, but it turns out that it really isn’t. For instance a salad may be healthy but if you drown it is ranch dressing the fat outweighs the nutrition. Healthy eating is a complicated life to live, and I believe that it is yet another thing that the people of the slow food movement are aspiring to teach people.

So basically after researching the slow food movement I came to find that it is about more than taking you time eating, and organic food; it is about togetherness, tradition, culture, and health.