Bridgetsmusings’s Weblog

Continuing on the subject of Slow Food…. it’s more than just cooking up locally-sourced ingredients and traditional varieties, it’s also about being aware of how our food is produced.

The Slow Food movement supports sustainable agriculture and cultivation methods, respects cultural and natural diversity and is everything that industrially mass-produced food is not.  It’s about agriculture rather than agri-business.

Speaking at the recent ‘A Taste of Slow’ festival in Melbourne, Barbara Burstyn, an investigative journalist from New Zealand, spoke about her travels throughout India during the making of the award-winning film, One Man, One Cow, One Planet.

Barbara and her husband, Canadian cinematographer Tom Burstyn, filmed biodynamic farmer Peter Proctor as he travelled throughout India promoting the benefits of biodynamic farming and, in particular, the use of cow dung to enrich the soil. You may snigger about cow dung, but it remains one of the best and simplest ways to enrich the soil.

It’s interesting that they found many of the younger, literate Indian farmers are turning their back on Western aid and so-called ‘development’ with some becoming increasingly militant in their fight to maintain their traditional seed banks and cultivation methods.

In her talk, Barbara explained that, thanks to the introduction of intensive, chemical agriculture, there is no topsoil left in India. Subject to years of chemical input and water-hungry high-yield crop varities, the soil  has become barren and India’s once efficient system of irrigation has all but dried up.

Since the introduction of large-scale, industralized farming in the 1970s,   suicide rates among Indian farmers - either made redundant or weighed down by debt - have rocketed. If ‘we’ in the West hadn’t interferred, perhaps India farmers would still be in good shape, with small-holdings cultivated with mixed rotational cropping and local seed varieties.

Now, after 30-years of the topsoil-stripping ‘Green Revolution’,  India is at the forefront of GM experimentation. As Barbara puts it, “we have gone from the Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution.”  But many farmers don’t want a bar of it and are aware that GM crops are not all they are promoted to be. And I say promoted to be as the realities of GM technology and its application on the land is not as simple as the global agro-chemical companies would have us believe.

In the mainstream press we are fed stories of how GM will feed the world by achieving higher yields and using less pesticides. But if you scratch below the surface, you’ll find the GM debate gets murkier and murkier with plenty of good-guy-versus-the-big-bad-corporate stories.  If  you’ve seen the film Michael Clayton starring George Clooney about a lawsuit against an agrochemical company, the plot won’t seem so far-fetched.

In my next post, I’ll talk about Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, who was sued by Monsanto for patent infringement when his canola crops were contaminated by GM canola. More food for thought if you’ll excuse the pun!

At Melbourne’s recent ‘A Taste of Slow Food’ Festival, Slow Food President Kelly Donati suggested we could try and change the world one meal at a time. I like that idea! Food is more than just a calorific mass that we stuff down to satisfy our hunger or, dare I say, greed! Food is about our connection to the earth, to the soil, to family mealtimes, to ritual and to the seasons.  

It’s a shame that the food we buy in our supermarkets is so divorced from its origins  - some kids don’t even know that eggs come from chickens.  Wrapped in plastic, injected with hormones, preservatives and God knows what, much of our industrially-produced food lacks character and nutritional value. And, although we don’t get to read about it, there are some crazy goings-on in the food production world: scampi is sent from the UK to Thailand where it is peeled and then flown back again to the UK to sit on a supermarket shelf.  Think of all those carbon emission and air miles. Ouch!

And the trouble is that all this mass-produced, quick-fix pap is laden with the wrong kind of fat and full of sugar and salt. It’s calorie-laden convenience.

In his book, Fat Land, American journalist Greg Critser looks at how those living in the land that invented Ronald Mc Donald, got so fat, so fast. Needless to say it all boils down to fast food.

When someone yelled ‘fatso’ at him in the street, Greg decided to do something about being 40 pounds overweight. He wrote about the experience in a daily paper in a column that became known as ‘The Chubic Odyssey’. A brave soul, Greg fought off threats from Fat Rights groups who didn’t like the apparent attack on their size issue. That was five years ago when it was politically incorrect to talk about obesity, but OK to bury the issue under mountains of junk food.

What impressed me most about Greg is that he doesn’t champion any headline-grabbing diets or formulas, but he does champion the pleasure of simple, home-cooked food and sitting around a convivial (and conviviality is a big thing in the Slow Food Movement) table with family and friends to enjoy meals.

Forget eating on the run, drive-in hamburgers and portions of food served up in polystyrene boxes, take the time to cook a meal at home with family and friends.

Be inventive with your cooking and buy what’s in season. Seek out local producers and farmers and look for REAL food– think knobbly carrots, unwaxed apples and potatoes covered in dirt.  That’ll get your dinner guests talking. As Greg says, “A return to the table is a return to civilisation.”