Slow Food Movement Grows Across the USA
USA: SLOW FOOD GAINS FAST ACCEPTANCE AMONG ALL BREEDS OF CONSUMERS
3 August, Houston Business Journal

There is a growing desire on the part of the more discerning American
consumer to regain the quality and taste of food as they used to be, a
countervailing force to the dominance of fast food in the time-deprived
environment in which most Americans live.

For one thing, there is growing concern about the safety and composition of
the nation's food supply. Eric Schlossar, in his recent best-selling book,
"Fast Food Nation," aptly put his finger on the issues from unfit meat
processing plants to cholesterol-clogging hamburgers to antibiotic-drenched
meats and poultry. Tie that together with a growing fear of pesticides, and
it becomes understandable that purer foods, like organic produce, are being
consumed at an unheard-of rate

Slow Food is a fast-growing international organization with 65,000 members
in 50 countries, 5,000 of which are scattered among 62 chapters in the U.S.,
where membership has grown 20 times in the last three years alone. "Slow
Foodies" find each other through mutual disenchantment with supermarket
produce aisles and fast-food strips. Chapters exist in every major market --
and the smaller ones too -- from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Bozeman, Montana.
Unlike politics and religion the desire for good-tasting food always manages
to transcend region, race and class.

Slow Food USA professes not to be an elitist organization for the wine and
cheese crowd, populated by pompous gourmands, insufferable food snobs and
chefs to the affluent. Although the demographics skew upscale, membership is
drawn equally from the ranks of the common people -- students, farmers, and
good middle-class stock. Slow Food USA bills itself "as a non-profit
organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating the food traditions of
North America. From the spice of Cajun cooking to the purity of the organic
movement; from animal breeds and heirloom varieties of fruit and vegetables
to handcrafted wine and beer, farmhouse cheeses and other artisanal
products."

The organization believes that many of these foods, relics of small-farm
America, are at growing risk of succumbing to the effects of the fast life,
which is evident in the industrialization and homogenization of the nation's
food supply.

Inspired by Noah's Ark, the organization's ArkUSA seeks to identify, promote
and protect foods in danger of extinction, such as the Delaware Bay Oyster;
the Bourbon Red Turkey (first bred in Tennessee); Aged Dry Jack Cheese; and
naturally grown, hand-parched wild rice from the lake regions of Minnesota
and Wisconsin. Members are kept current with publications including "Slow,"
a quarterly journal devoted to food culture around the world and "Snail," a
newsletter dealing specifically with the U.S. marketplace.

Ironically, as Patricia Unterman notes in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Slow
Food started years ago as a response to the arrival of the first McDonald's
on the Spanish steps in Rome by Carlo Petrini, a northern Italian food
journalist lamenting the erosion of civilized dining." Continues Unterman,
"the growth of Slow Food is a cry against the indignities of modernization
-- the irresponsible use of technology, the homogenization and
standardization of food and the abandonment of the dinner table."

According to Slow Food leadership, they're more than happy to remain a
micro-economy, providing support where necessary by matching producer with
consumer, albeit on a slow, small scale. The real question is whether Slow
Food will remain a movement or develop into a fully-fledged force to be
reckoned with.