With 85,000 members in 132 countries according to its website, Slow Food International is a grassroots project created in response to the fast food movement. You can participate in the program by joining your local CSA, planting some seeds or by sharing a homemade meal with a friend.
The initiative offers a series of programs in an effort to encourage members to reconnect with farming, environmental and culinary techniques.
Here are some tips on how to eat more "slowly."
* Develop an "ark of taste" for each eco-region, where local culinary traditions and foods are celebrated.
* Promote "taste education."
* Educate consumers about the risks of fast food, the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few genomes or varieties.
* Form and sustain seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties in cooperation with local food systems.
Noted food and science writer Michael Pollan describes the importance of the slow food initiative:
Slow Food aims to elevate the quality over quantity and believes that doing so depends on cultivating our sense of taste as well as rebuilding the relationships between producers and consumers that the industrialization of our food has destroyed. To eat slowly, then, also means to eat deliberately, in the original sense of the word: 'from freedom' instead of compulsion.
Green Prophet, a green blogger from Israel, discusses the Slow Food program's appeal.
In modern times we eat fast, work fast, talk fast and even love fast. But as we race ahead from one experience to the next and to dizzying heights, one must wonder, is doing things quickly the best way to drive our lives. In little pockets around the globe, a group of people are saying it's time to use the brakes, take life slow and take the time to smell the roses.
Related:
::Read Treehugger's guide to the Slow movement.
::More about a similar local food campaign, the locavore initiative from the Huffington Post.
::Read more at the Huffington Post Food big news page.