Eat slowly, not just because in this way you will better know when to stop. When I say “slowly” I refer to the a quiet, cozy meal that is promoted by SLOW FOOD, an Italian movement build up around the idea that the only way to fight against the madness of our fast life, is trough a stern defense for the pleasure of a cozy life. Created as a reaction of the American Fast-foods in Rome, in 1980, this organization tries to rediscover (or for some of us to discover) the joy of meals taken together and the pleasure for properly grown and cooked food.
Sounds like an elite club for choosy people, but the SLOW FOOD movement is actually a coherent protest and an alternative for nourishment, for the occidental way to eat and the whole occidental lifestyle, which is crazy more and more, day by day. Slow food aims to return the supremacy of the quality over the quantity. For this it’s necessary to propagate a sense of taste and to recreate the relationship between the producers and consumer, which is now destroyed because of the food industrialization. Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, sustained “The food quality depends on the consumers which value the work of farmers and are willing to train their sense”. In this way “consumers become producer’s allies”.
There is also a consumer policy, which encourages us to value the work of those who produce food and discouraged the superficial pleasure of eating. This movement wasn’t born accidentally in Italy. That’s why we should ask our selves if the American way of eating can be changed whiteout changing the whole American lifestyle. The fast food is the way of eating for people that have the main value and the main goal, the success, for people which have just 2 weeks vacation per year and can not rely on a social protection for unexpected cases.
But the assurance of the Slow Food movement is that this whole edifice of fast food will start to collapse as soon as we make time for slowly silent lunches three times a day. To eat slowly, means to be fully aware of everything that involves the whole cycle, the food trail, from the ground to our plate. No doubt, some culinary pleasures are based exactly on the opposite- to know less
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