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Slow Food for Fast Times!
by Dawn Dennison

In my work as a gardener and landscaper, I am privileged to work alongside a Mexican immigrant named Guillermo. Years ago, on my first day working with him, at twelve noon, he asked me if I was ready to eat lunch. I told him I was going to finish whatever I was working on, and maybe eat around one o'clock. "OK," he said, as he put on his headphones and went back to work. It wasn't until I stopped later on, that he walked to his truck to get his Igloo cooler. I realized that I had unknowingly delayed his lunch-he wasn't going to eat until I did.

In his culture, people eat together. They don't have a yogurt while sitting at their desk, or eat a hamburger from a drive through while they run errands on their lunch hour. He sat down across from me and offered me one of his tacos de barbacoa. I shared my tuna sandwich. I hadn't traded lunch since grade school. From then on, I stop work at noon and we eat together. Guillermo taught me to slow down, to honor time spent with another human being, to pay attention to my food.

In 1986, an Italian named Carlo Perini founded the Slow Food movement. He recognized that the industrialization of food was standardizing taste and leading to the annihilation of food varieties and flavors. Petrini encouraged consumers to rise up against supermarket homogenization and showed them that they have choices in what they eat.

The Slow Food movement, now active in over 50 countries, was born with a mission to create a robust, active movement that protects taste, culture, and the environment as universal social values. Slow Food programs are dedicated to the mingling of taste, culture, and the environment. You already live the Slow Life if you shop at a farmers market. Simple choices like making your own pasta or eating your lunch sitting down (driving doesn't count), are also Slow Food actions.

Here are a few more easy ways to put a little "Slow" into your life:
  • Try to eat at least one local food at every meal. That could be as extravagant as pork from a local farm, to cheese from a local goat dairy, to something as seemingly small as pouring local honey onto homemade vanilla ice cream.
  • It's not too early to begin planning a local Thanksgiving. You can store produce from your own garden or from the farmers market. Squash, beets, potatoes, and onions all keep very well. Source a local turkey ranch. Make your own mead.
  • Host an "Invite a Farmer to Dinner" night. In the winter, when farmers aren't as busy, invite your friends and neighbors over to a get-to-know-a-farmer pot luck and food talk. Learn about local farm practices and food issues. Gain valuable gardening advice.
  • Hold a canning exchange party. You could can a big batch of tomatoes and each of your friends could pick something else to can in big quantities: pickles, beets, peaches. Have a big dinner where everyone exchanges canned goods. Now you've all got a whole winter's worth of harvest time variety.
  • Educate yourself. Join the local Slow Food Convivium. Attend a slow food festival like Slow on the Planet, being held in conjunction with the A RENAISSANCE OF LOCAL! on September 30 at Planet Bluegrass in Lyons. It will feature cooking demonstrations, advice on goat keeping, bee keeping, chicken keeping, and gardening, along with a Slow Food feast in a beautiful field next to the river.

To find out more about Boulder's Slow Food chapter, visit www.slowfoodboulder.org. And tomorrow, see if you can get all of your co-workers to take their lunch break at the same time. Sit down together and enjoy your food and each other. You might even be able to trade up from that turkey and cheese sandwich you brought.


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