A Few Tastes of Slow
On Tuesday, August 1, The Melbourne Food and Wine organization will unveil the schedule for one of Australia’s biggest annual food festivals: A Taste of Slow. During the two-week lineup of events, local farmers, restauranteurs, winemakers, and cheesemongers will toast the international Slow Food movement, celebrating the relaxed pace and enriched taste of regionally-produced ingredients. A few highlights to look out for include a workshop on how to build your own wood-fired pizza oven, a lecture by British guest Fergus Henderson (of St. John restaurant) on how to cook every appendage and organ of an animal, and a gala dinner where six courses are matched with the most diligently-chosen Australian wines.
But what exactly is Slow Food? In his introduction to the book, Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food, the twenty-five-year-old movement’s founder Carlo Petrini writes that “the cultural goals of the international Slow Food movement are: to defeat all forms of chauvinism, to re-appropriate diversity, and to indulge in a healthy dose of cultural relativism.” That’s a difficult bill for human rights activists to fill, let alone cafe owners and supermarket shoppers. Slow Food is one of those multidimensional, multidisciplinary concepts that’s incredibly inspiring until the ideological riff you’re riding starts to disappear into itself like a snake (or, in this case, a snail) swallowing its own tail. Some people consider the ethics of Slow Food to be the epitome of rustic, while others dismiss the whole thing as elitist. It can be hard for potential Slow Food supporters to know which way to look. One way to learn more about the school of thought (which is equal parts academic and culinary) is to hit the books. In addition to the collection of essays mentioned above, there are several authoritative texts on the subject. Consider picking up Slow Food: The Case for Taste, also by Petrini with a forward by Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. For an exploration of the concept of “Slow” as it applies not only to food but to several other aspects of daily life, pick up In Praise of Slowness: How A Worldwide Moviement is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore.
For further information on Slow Food events, the original Slow Food website (based in Italy) and its Slow Food USA counterpart are excellent resources. Australia’s Taste of Slow festival begins in Melbourne on August 28th.
