By: Stefan Mionolli
The Slow Food Movement was a response to McDonald’s building a franchise in Rome, Italy back in 1986, which was seen as an affront to Rome’s cultural heritage, as well as Americanism spreading its tentacles too far into foreign soil. While some members of the Slow Food Movement might tell you that’s their cause is much deeper than anti-McDonaldization, it really boils down to them not liking McDonald’s.
But beyond that, the Slow Food Movement continues on in to this day with the philosophy that food should be prepared slow, as it was traditionally. So, oddly enough, it’s a conservative movement in the dress of a progressive movement. It’s progressive in the sense that it wants to fight major corporate control on the dialogue of food production, but conservative in that its sole purpose is to return to how our ancestors used to cook and prepare traditional, home-grown food.
Ultimately, if the Slow Food Movement were to get their way, then food would only be grown locally, there wouldn’t be any sort of genetic modification, and one would have to travel to Italy or Mexico in order to eat Italian or Mexican food respectively. It’s about pace, really, and, as opposed to fast food, Slow Food means a movement away from industrialism, since invariably the industrialism of the 19th-century that carried on into this century has produced a society that is constantly on the move, constantly needing everything to be fast, especially food, because if food wasn’t made fast then the system would grind to a halt. If food wasn’t fast pace, then we’d have to cut our work hours, or the amount of leisure and/or family time, which would then produce a horribly depressed, poverty-stricken world, and that simply can’t happen. Industry requires fast food, and the Slow Food Movement, while recognizing the problem as resonating from food preparation, does propose a radical transition that de-emphasizes the industry of modern society.
There in lies much of the problem with the Slow Food Movement. Anything that even resembles the faint outline of an ideology that can be misconstrued as anti-business or anti-industry will forever be marginalized and demonized with Western, especially American, culture. It’s unlikely that the Slow Food Movement is to ever find dominance in the rhetoric on how our food is being prepared unless some horrific event occurs in which industrial society implodes, which would leave thousands, if not millions, of people to die. Thus, if Slow Food Movement were to ever succeed, it would mean the destruction of society as we know it, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—and it definitely doesn’t mean that the Slow Food Movement caused it.
No, a fast food society will inevitably fail. It’s an absolute certainty that any society that bases its nutritional and food security on a dancing clown with red hair to match his shoes, accompanied by an assortment of other indoctrinal characters based on a 1960s bad acid trip, will destroy itself on the sheer weight—becoming too big to succeed. And so ultimately it will become the responsibility of groups like the Slow Food Movement to pick up the pieces of society and recreate the agricultural infrastructure that industrialism has been expeditiously hacking away at for these nigh two-hundred years.
But there are points of contention that the Slow Food Movement often overlooks in their festishization of the meaning of local. More times than naught, local ecologies contain their own unique politics that favor elite groups that destroy the infrastructure in the same way that global industries like McDonald’s does. It is not enough to simply state that we need to grow and buy food locally, but rather to address first why it was that society shifted away from local and into global. Perhaps it had mostly to do with local economies degrading, forcing indigenous people to stray from their localities in search for jobs, and ultimately bringing with them their culture, which required that they buy non-local foods since local crops didn’t support their cultural diets.
To go even further, there is this mystification that simply going local will solve everything, as if there weren’t issues of soil degradation in certain areas, as well as other lands completely destroyed by biotechnological food manufacturing that has forever altered the earth’s ability to produce certain types of foods. The implication of growing local by the Slow Food Movement lacks common sense in actually tackling significant problems within each local environment, assuming universal tenets and principles on a variegated sociological issue.
If we are to address the issues within the food system, then it is best we address them comprehensively rather than glossing over certain issues while emphasizing less important issues. The Slow Food Movement highlights some of these issues of how fast food is degrading and dehumanizing the process in which we eat food, creating an ecology of mindless consumers on an endless string of production value. But there are instances in which simply buying locally and cooking slower will not solve, or even attempt to solve (and at times ignore), the vast amount of issues that allowed fast food to become endemic within our society in the first place.
