If you haven’t heard of the Slow Food or the “local food” aka Locavore movements or need a primer, KUOW’s June 6 Weekday installment provides a good overview of both movements and the benefits of adopting Slow Food and Locavorean practices.
The guests were Gerry Warren, Slow Food Seattle, Mary Embleton of Cascade Harvest Coalition and Farmlink, and Hsiao-Ching Chou, food editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of our local newspapers. The show is available in Real and MP3 formats.
The Slow Food movement began 20 years ago with a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in the heart of Rome. The movement opposed the transformation of food into a preprocessed commodity that had lost its role of focusing people on the companionship of a common meal. The movement expanded and evolved from an oppositional movement to a movement that promotes sustainability, biodiversity, and appreciation of the pleasures of food.
The original concept was to oppose fast food. What I think happened is the organization figured out being in opposition to something was not going to grow an organization. That triggered them to begin to look at how do we move towards a very positive approach to appreciating the pleasures of food and to introducing the concepts of sustainability and biodiversity of foods that are either underappreciated or foods that are endangered of not continuing to be present on our table. - Gerry Warren
Cascade Harvest Coalition works to preserve farmland at the community level, while Washington Farmlink (several other states have Farmlink programs) connects people interested in becoming farmers with farmers and landowners.
Our overall mission is to build a sustainable regional food system. A key part of that is helping people reconnect with local agriculture and local farms and local food. … One is to help keep farmers viable and sustainable on the land so that we can preserve the agricultural land and the food base. And the other is to educate consumers about all the wonderful things that are available here and how easy it is to find them and, if it isn’t easy for them to find, ways that they can go about making sure that they have access to local food. - Mary Embleton
Chou describes the benefits of buying local food (fresher, organic, less cost for transport) and posits that America is wasteful of food because we are wealthy. (This reminds me of my aunts comment last week about a bruised piece of fruit, “I’m rich enough to throw away this apple.”) Chou’s comments alone make the show worthwhile.
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