Bridgetsmusings’s Weblog

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.”