I find that just being in Italy for a little while is enough to reset my inner clock. In the land of midday naps and long-simmering pasta sauces it feels appropriate to set out on a long walk without a destination, or to take a meandering drive through the countryside, stopping to talk to farmers I meet along the road. I leave my American sense of urgency at the airport.
Recently I visited Italy at the behest of a group for which the deceleration of modern life is a major goal. Slow Food International, a worldwide movement based in Bra, Italy, works to save small-scale, local, artisanal food production from the march of industrial "progress," by encouraging and aiding the few who still practice it.
Every other year, in the industrial city of Turin, the group holds a huge food fair called the Salone del Gusto (Hall of Taste), celebrating traditional, hand-produced edibles from all over the world. (Picture Madison Square Garden filled with hundreds of booths displaying and selling cheeses, wines, pickles and hundreds of things you've never even heard of.)
This year, the Salone ran concurrently with a very different event called Terra Madre (Mother Earth). Funded in large part by the Italian government and the European Union, Terra Madre brought together nearly 5,000 small-scale farmers from 128 nations -- many of them holding onto the land by their fingernails in the face of competition from global agribusiness. I was part of the American delegation.
For four days, a population not normally prone to a globe-trotting lifestyle congregated in one huge hall to share knowledge and to discuss ways to confront what often seems like our impending extinction. We wore ponchos, Polartec vests, saris, turbans. We brought samples of dried Andean potatoes, Yak cheese and ancient beans and stories about the challenges and satisfactions of our way of life. We discussed threats such as pesticide drift, the overregulation of traditional raw cheese, the threat from genetic modification to American wild rice strains so diverse that harvesters can pinpoint their lake of origin simply by taste. It was astounding to see such a group brought together and honored. In a profit-centered world, the work done by small farmers is usually portrayed as marginal, inefficient, backward.
Sometimes it felt embarrassing to be an American at Terra Madre. Slow Food was founded in the mid-1980s in opposition to American-inspired fast food, specifically to the opening of a McDonald's at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome. Nonetheless, I took comfort in the large numbers of excellent farmers in our delegation. Along with stirring speeches by India's Vandana Shiva and Britain's Prince Charles, there was a fine one by our own Alice Waters, author, chef and owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., who still has not given up trying to put a vegetable garden on the White House grounds. I was happy that the quotation chosen for the hall's main banner was from an American president: "In the long view, no nation is any healthier than its children or more prosperous than its farmers." Harry Truman said that, on signing the School Lunch Act in 1946.
What would he say about the lunches our children eat now? The current application of that law now allows schools to offer fast food and soda machines with the argument that "they're going to get hold of that stuff anyway." When did we give up on teaching children to value real food?
The sorry fact is that Americans don't value food nearly as much as we should. Of all the industrialized nations, we spend the lowest percentage of our incomes on food. And few purchasers calculate the economic, environmental and health costs hidden in the price of a "cheap" industrial-food diet. Buying, cooking or growing good wholesome meat, grains and vegetables is something we say we no longer have time to do. But it's our choice. We make a huge amount of time available for watching TV, commuting to our jobs, mowing our large lawns and polishing our cars. It finally comes down to where we put both our time and our dollar. And if we make time for a garden, much of our food is free.
Anyone who cooks or gardens already knows what slow food is all about. Certain things can't be rushed -- spring coming, the drought breaking, the corn ripening, the wine aging. Dried beans softening for hours until they make their own gravy. Meat, carrots, celery and bay gradually releasing and mingling their juices to become a rich stew. And richness it is -- a word I always savor whenever it is applied to anything other than money -- a rich trove of stories, a rich diversity of languages, a richly flavored pumpkin. How tragic that our almighty burger has become the international symbol of a sameness that impoverishes our daily lives.
I think that the worst thing about a globalized, corporately controlled food system is that it seems so relentlessly successful. Often our world seems like a speeding car with locked doors that will not stop to let us get out. But slow food as a concept is able to inspire hope, precisely because it celebrates the power of the particular. The quality of life does not improve by decree but by one seed, one carrot, one soup at a time. And one farmer or one gardener at a time.
When Carlo Petrini, Slow Food's founder, delivered his closing address at Terra Madre, he invoked Ghandi's directive, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world," then added one of his own, "Sow utopia, reap reality."
It's always heartening to travel to a country where people have more roots in the land, where the typical cabdriver can enlighten you about the best heirloom pepper varieties and which region grows them. But the land of Slow is a lot closer than you think. If you're reading this in your kitchen, or in your garden, you're already there.
