Slow Food: More than a Culinary Trend

by AJ Fanter
ajfanter@careerschoolguide.com
Career School Guide Columnist

If you’re familiar with the culinary trend known as Slow Food, chances are you’re either a lifelong foodie or someone who works in, or wants to work in, the culinary arts. While Slow Food has been around since 1989, most Americans are unfamiliar with this international culinary movement.

In fact, even those who have a passing familiarity with the movement, tend to think of it as the “anti-fast-food” culinary trend or something that’s reserved exclusively for those who patronize fine dining establishments. In reality though, the Slow Food movement is more than just some culinary fad reserved for the wealthy and those who live and breathe the culinary arts. In fact, at Terra Madre 2006, a recent Slow Food networking event in Turin, Italy, it was clear that the movement is, in many ways, a culinary arts revolution.

Culinary Trend as Anti-Industrial Revolution

From promoting sustainable agriculture and preserving biodiversity to teaching those who prepare food to choose high quality, locally produced, non-GMO foods, the Slow Food movement is clearly about more than just avoiding the drive-thru window. Along with “counteracting fast food” the member-supported organization has as it’s goals to end “the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”

Slow Cooking and Your Culinary Career

One of the key ways the movement is affecting this culinary arts revolution is by bringing together like-minded farmers and chefs from across the globe at such events as the Terra Madre 2006. The chefs who participated not only pledged to avoid certain kinds of industrialized food products, but to act as spokespeople for small producers and pay attention to the provenance of ingredients. Another thing that Slow Food chefs must do is something that comes naturally to those who’ve studied the culinary arts … choosing top quality ingredients, that are produced locally.

If you love cooking and want to be a part of the latest culinary trends, including the Slow Food movement, then maybe it’s to get a degree in the culinary arts.

Sources

San Francisco Chronicle
Slow Food

About the Author

AJ Fanter is a freelance writer based in Reno, Nevada.