"Slow" is not just a speed

If we’re talking about all things slow, think of simple, green and sustainable. Also local, old-fashioned, and low tech—sort of the antithesis of modern daily life. Take food, for example. I know, “slow food” has been so done, and most people who have been paying any attention whatsoever to food trends know about the Slow Food Philosophy. For instance, that it began in Rome when McDonald’s moved in, and “slow food” has become a buzzword for local, healthy, and often organic foodstuffs cooked lovingly by hand.

But slow food isn’t just the opposite of fast food. Author Barbara Kingsolver writes extensively about slow and local food issues in one of the best books I’ve read in years, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life. (I’ll be referring to this book a lot, so let’s call it AVM for short.) Although I’ve been a pretty healthy eater for years, she started me on a whole new journey to focus on eating locally grown and/or produced food. AVM also inspired me to pay closer attention to food labels, keeping a watchful eye out for the yucky additives and sneaky chemicals in our food.

But it’s not just additives you’ve got to look out for. Some time ago, like any careful consumer, I perused a package of frozen organic broccoli my husband brought home. Although this item was produced by a company thirty miles away, in small print, the package read, “Product of China.”

Slow food recently made a much bigger blip on my personal radar when I heard about what a regional pickle company has been up to. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that this company, which markets itself as a purveyor of wholesome, local food, was “outsourcing” its pickling cucumbers from India.

India! It’s not like you can’t get cukes here in the State of Washington. Traveling I-5, you’ll pass field after field of pickling cucumbers. I can only shudder to think how low the wages must be for the Indian workers, that makes their cukes more cost–effective than the locally grown ones. Especially given the price of fuel and transportation. With this kind of nutty corporate behavior, is it any wonder we find ourselves in the environmental pickle we’re in?

To me, “slow” is also about sanity, and I think the sooner we return to some semblance of it, the better off we’ll be.