Read Online Best Food Writing 2013 by Holly Hughes - Free Book Online Page A

intellectuals in the gastronomically and vinously rich Italian region of Piedmont. (Right away I have to pause and say that I work with people who do or did work for Slow Food, but I’m not much of a joiner, and a few years ago I let my brief membership lapse.) The immediate cause for starting Slow Food was the opening of the first McDonald’s in Italy, near theSpanish Steps in Rome. A few years later, in 1989, the Slow Food movement went international when delegates from 15 countries met in Paris to sign the Slow Food Manifesto.
    This short document is rather wonderful. It says: “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes, and forces us to eat Fast Foods.” The manifesto contains a large element of hope: “May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.” And the manifesto proposes just that single solution to the problem: “A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.”
    As slogans go, the meaning of “slow food” is perfectly clear. It’s the opposite of fast food. The Slow Food mother organization in Italy celebrates the country’s traditional regional food, publicizing and arranging support for many individual foods. Those include lardo di Colonnata and alici di menaica. The first is cured fat back, as prepared in marble coffers in a particular quarrying village above Carrara in Tuscany; the second is cured anchovies, caught in an ancient design of net in just one fishing port 100 miles south of Naples. The symbol of Slow Food is the snail. Slow Food opposes mass production and a high-speed life. It supports what I would call a civilized life.
    These days Slow Food talks about Slow everything—even Slow Fish, meaning fish that have been caught in ways that don’t result in overfishing or other damage to the environment. But “slow food” also has a lower-case meaning. And a slow life doesn’t revolve just around food.
    You’re living a slow life when you gather seashells along the shore, feed a campfire, visit a nearly empty museum on a weekday morning, talk late into the night, read an ink-on-paper book cover to cover without stopping to do much else, and, I would say, if you take the time to be bored. Part of being civilized is not just being slow but occasionally coming to a stop, establishing a point of reference for the moment when you start moving again. When you stop you aren’t really stopping, of course, because that’s often when good ideas rise to the surface.
    Coincidentally, I started writing and publishing about food in thesame year, 1986, that Slow Food started, although at the time I was unaware of the organization. I believed in pretty much the same things: traditional ingredients, traditional methods, traditional dishes. Then as now, I was focused on taste, not on health, entertaining, or some other aspect of food. I was on a back-to-the-land wavelength that assumed superior results came from hand methods and generally from old ways of doing things, which are of course typically somewhat slow. I was opposed to the cheapening effects of industrial production. Yet I had no conscious thought about the importance of speed, fast or slow. If anyone had asked me, I would have said it was pretty self-evident that good work as a rule takes time. I’ve learned since then, after many visits to cheese makers, bread bakers, charcutiers, market gardeners, olive growers and grape growers and all sorts of farmers, that good work comes from experience and repetition, years if not decades of it.
    Some proof that good work takes time lies in traditional hand-crafted foods. The best, for instance certain wheels of Gruyère cheese, are still the point of reference