Sarah Timmcke, 11/16/09, Research

The slow food movement is all about eating foods that are healthy for you, the environment, and also help your local community. It goes against all the ideas that large corporations have about food manufacturing and distribution. The goal is to eat healthy foods from local sources. This is the main idea of the movement because this one act can help in so many other ways. By shopping locally you help your local farmers which are quickly dwindling. The number of American farmers has gone from almost half the population to about 1 percent, so they can use all the business they can get. Unfortunately large corporations have created this problem for farmers in America. Instead of buying from them they instead buy internationally, which believe it or not is cheaper in the long run. And it really is a “long run”; the average bite of food an American takes has traveled 1,500 miles before it even reaches their mouth. This results in a lot more carbon emissions going into the environment as well. Not only does that food have to be flown here but once it arrives it needs to get transported to different destinations by truck. 40% of truck traffic is from the shuttling of food. In order for these foods to stay fresh that long they have a ton of pesticides and hormones in them, and even then they are not as fresh as they could be. Romaine lettuce for instance, should be green, not yellow or white. So by buying from local organic farmers you are ultimately eating better.
Also shopping locally saves energy. It takes a lot of energy to create certain mass produced food. Meat is one such product. While most people do not want to quit eating meat altogether, the slow food movement suggests getting your meat from local meat farmers or eating meat less frequently.
The packaging that food is put in is also very bad for the environment. There is a lot of cardboard used to store these products while they are being shipped. Not only that, but think about how many individually wrapped products there are. Even the products that are not individually wrapped all have some sort of packaging.
Not only are there environmental and health reasons for joining the slow food movement but there are also economical ones. The money you spend on locally grown foods also stays in your community, which ends up helping you even more. Instead of shopping at large corporations that treat their employees poorly, you can help your local business owners stay in a job.
With all these things considered, I can’t think of a better object to go along with the slow food movement then a tea infuser. Tea takes awhile to steep which goes along with the whole idea of things slowing down. Also by using a tea infuser you are cutting down on all unnecessary packaging because you are using loose tea which does not use any paper products. It is also very easy to find organically grown loose tea. Tea is also very simplistic. As much as Starbucks tries to add more fluff to it, it is still just hot water and tea leaves. This simplicity is probably the one thing that ties it in to the slow food movement. The whole idea is to stop complicating our food and getting back to eating a natural, healthy diet.