Mouse

A Blast from the Past (Five Years Ago???)

Today dear Bakerina reminded me of one of our earlier encounters, from back in our deep pre-history when all the cool kids hung out at Plastic, long before Scrine was even a glimmer in Keith’s eye.

Bakerina wrote this great write-up (click link for the full story and comments she generated>:
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Slow Food In A Fast World Redux
found on Atlantic Unbound
written by jenmac, edited by Humberto (Plastic) [ read unedited ]
posted Mon 2 Dec [2002] 10:28am

In Europe almost everyone has memories going back over generations of food with actual flavor, food that’s carefully raised. So Slow Food has appealed not just to rich people who like better things but to pretty much everybody who knows that there was once actually good food…
There’s a real problem with Slow Food in America, and it’s this: we don’t have that memory bred into us, so it’s still a movement of the elite. The goal is to get it to appeal much more to a grass-roots level, and that means making people taste it. Generally, once people taste eggs, cheese, barbecue, beer, bread, that has real flavor, they understand that this is something they’d like to have again, and that might be better than what they’re having every day. But you have to organize events that will reach a wide range of people and give them something for a really reasonable cost. Or else they’re not going to try it, and they’re not going to know it, and it’s going to seem like an elitist movement.

“The Atlantic’s Corby Kummer speaks with Atlantic Unbound’s Katie Bacon upon the publication of his new book, The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors and Recipes,” writes jenmac. “The book is an expansion of his exuberant 1999 essay “Doing Good by Eating Well”, celebrating the arrival to the U.S. of Slow Food, a movement that not only celebrates artisanally-produced foods, but also fights to keep such foods alive. Slow Food was founded in 1986 by Italian journalist Carlo Petrini, who was aghast at the announcement that McDonald’s was opening a restaurant in the middle of the Piazza di Spagna in Rome.”

“While Slow Food is a champion of traditional production methods and regional foodways, it does not embrace a “rare=expensive=good” ethic; in fact, it recognizes that high labor costs and lack of easy distribution contribute to the disappearance of these foods, and that the best way to keep them alive is both to create a market for them, and to help them thrive under modern constraints that otherwise may have threatened their survival. According to Kummer, ‘[Slow Food] might help cheesemakers in Italy navigate the bureaucracy of the European Union. The European Union has mandated that you can’t use wood tools in food production, but wood has bacteria that cheesemakers need for their cheeses. They can get variances, but obtaining them means filling out a lot of paperwork. So local Slow Food members will find someone with law expertise to help them out.’ However, even as Kummer celebrates the efforts of Slow Food worldwide, he acknowledges that the size and food distribution channels of the U.S. tend to stack the deck against small-scale producers and farmers, and can make artisanally-produced foods difficult to find outside of cities on the East or West Coast. Is Slow Food a pipe dream in an industrialized world? Or is it our best hope for finding high-quality, tradition-based foods without driving 100 miles or spending a day’s paycheck?”

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To which a much younger ‘mouse responded:

I Call it Bullshit
by Anonymouse Savant [ message privately ]
at Mon 2 Dec 3:37pm score of 2 compelling

While it’s great that someone came up with the “slow food” moniker to counter the “fast food” culture, I’m afraid it’s 99% bullshit and marketing hype in order to sell books and attract attention to the new “slow food” gurus.

Don’t get me wrong, I am among the most ardent lovers of good food you’ll find on Plastic. If I had to choose between giving up my taste buds or my testicles, I’d be singing soprano.

My gripe is that I suspect that a very limited number of people “come to slow food” who weren’t foodies already or heavily leaning that direction.

Also, I don’t believe it’s a sign of a successful movement that 50 people ordered $75 turkey eggs and got a farmer to raise them. Hell, this morning I saw an advertisement in the newspaper selling “Real Legal Tender” silver dollars (the kind you can get from a bank or the mint for $1) for “Just $5.95 plus postage and handling.” There’s a sucker born every minute.

Not to be too cynical, but when it’s all said and done, food is all about quality versus price and convenience. Where you come out on the spectrum is about your own time and economic situation which changes over time.

I grew up on a farm and I do know the difference between a home-grown pig versus the cut I get at the local fancy food co-op and the one I get at the mega-supermarket. Same goes for milk and eggs and every other ingredient. While it would be real nice if I could be an ingredient snob like the slow foodies, it’s obvious that I and everyone else are NOT willing to pay $5 or $10 gallon for better milk from Jersey cows delivered fresh every morning to our homes. If we were, there would be a vital dairy delivery business which wouldn’t be pumping out shitty, hormone-full Hereford milk.

I think I’m going to start a new movement called “Practical Food” which strikes a reasonable balance and which eschews coffee table books for discussions with friends over a good meal.

The main tenets of my movement will be that good fast food is available if you look for it—I can recommend a vietnamese noodle place in Milpitas, CA that has a steaming bowl of pho on your table which is to die for in less time than you can get through the drive thru at the McDonalds down the street. Yoshinoya, which actually has a drive through, is a new chain selling quite edible Japanese-inspired fast food. There’s a taqueria in Willow Glen, CA (next to the laundromat) that will convince you that you died and went to Mexico—in six minutes or less.

Also, my practical food movement will point out that a reasonably competent chef with a well stocked kitchen can make a good “slow” meal in about the same time as it takes you to drive to and from the fast food place. I can whip up the world’s best biscuits in 5 minutes (including clean-up) and 8 minutes in the oven. They go well with my orgasm-inducing clam chowder that takes an hour to make on Sunday but which provides two days of lunches and one more dinner over the course of the next week—and improves each day it ages and the flavors mix. (That’s only net 15 minutes prep time averaged over the 4 meals).

Finally, if you think food was better in the “good old days,” you’re nuts. My grandmother was fond of pointing out that she never saw much beyond cauliflower and broccoli in the stores in the 40’s and 50’s. Now she practically has to fight her way past the bok choy and seven types of lettuce to get to the brussels sprouts, and the taro root at her local Safeway. Don’t even get her started about the joys of good oyster sauce in a Chinese stir fry or she’ll go on all night.

Anyway, my point is, good food is not “dead.” It’s being prepared in kitchens all over the country/world as we speak. If it’s not being prepared in yours, skip the coffee table book—get out the Joy of Cooking and start at the beginning. Get the basics down. Then become a snob in your spare time.

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The rest, as they say, is history.

Posted by 'mouse on 04/07 at 02:14 PM

Wow. :) I’m beyond tickled—and touched—that you liked this exchange enough to blog about it, and to speak so warmly of my original writeup. But of course you know I can’t leave well enough alone. ;) I believe my reply to you went something like this:

Sign me up for “practical food!”

by jenmac [ message privately ]
at Tue 3 Dec 9:43am score of 1
in reply to comment 14

You are absolutely, positively right. Although I have warm feelings about Slow Food, I am not a member, despite attempts at recruiting (oh, now, there’s a loaded word) by friends of mine who are members. As you point out, no matter what Corby Kummer says, it will be impossible for Slow Food to transcend the “elitist” moniker as long as they cite examples like $75 turkey eggs as a success story.

I think that, like so many things in life, food is a series of compromises. I probably wouldn’t pay $10/gallon for Jersey milk, either—but I would pay $3 per pint for Jersey heavy cream, simply because the difference between UHT cream and good cream is more noticeable to me than the difference between good milk and merely okay milk. Now, what sounds like an acceptable compromise to me may sound like selling out my principles to the Slow Food crew, or like a big waste of $3 to, well, just about everyone else. The key is enjoyment. The person who stresses out about buying all of the “right” food is not going to get any pleasure from that food.

Finally, if you think food was better in the “good old days,” you’re nuts.

Weelll...yes and no. I think that food was better in the “good old days”, but those good old days predate any of our lifetimes. (I’m really trying not to cite The Taste of America in every single post, but the chapters that address the progression of foodways through the 20th century are really lucid.) I think that if you grew up in the 40’s and 50’s and you either had a victory/kitchen garden or had access to truck farmers (as my mom did in Wilmington, DE in the 70’s), you could find more than broccoli and cauliflower. If you had to rely on either a supermarket or a corner grocery, odds are your choices were pretty thin. I agree that the increased availability of lettuces and taro root at the supermarket is a great thing, and it must be a kick and two-thirds to talk to your grandmother about it. :)

If you are not familiar with Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, I would definitely recommend that you check them out. Ms. Colwin passed away in 1992, but if she were still with us, she would probably join your practical food movement. She was a fan of the homemade, and of easily-prepared, no-fuss savory food. And she was not above going out for a hamburger when dinner did not go well.

I totally agree with you that good food is not “dead,” and that we need only to look in the home kitchens of good cooks to find it. (This is the argument I make whenever I hear that British food sucks; yes, I have had awful, awful meals in British restaurants, but I have also had meals in tearooms and in friends’ homes that were prepared with such love, care and skill that they were some of the best meals I’d ever had.) But I think that technique will only take us so far, and anything that could, potentially, improve the quality of raw ingredients that all of us, not just the wealthiest of us, can buy, will benefit all of us in the end. Slow Food is a step in the right direction, but it is not the solution. I don’t know if we’ll ever find one. Maybe the whole point is the journey, not the destination.

Time for my poached egg on toast! (My idea of great eating.)

Posted by Bakerina on 04/07 at 05:32 PM
I remember when the only choices of juice at the grocery were apple, orange, grape and grapefruit. They all had sugar added to them. Now I can get a quart of apricot or mango, blueberry, pomegranite...(salivates, pauses, spaces out)

Posted by molly on 04/08 at 10:30 PM