Giving Thanks for Culturally-Sustainable Food

By P. Justin Rossi

In a few short days, many of us will take a brief hiatus from the rigors and recreation of college life to visit hearth and home—to rejoin our families and to celebrate that quintessential of American holidays, Thanksgiving. It is at this time of year that our thoughts turn to things like family, football, pilgrims, and parades. But let’s face it: the real thing on everyone’s mind is, of course, food. For the first-year Harvard student pining for a homemade meal after three months of Annenberg’s six variations on Saigon beef, the young professional whose every meal seems to end at the bottom of a take-out carton, and the busy parent who can’t quite seem to break the family cycle of McDonald’s and Kraft macaroni and cheese, Thanksgiving offers a return to a more wholesome, delicious, and—dare I say it—civilized approach to eating, that necessary action in human life that today seems to serve more as an interruption in our lives than a pleasurable and tranquil occasion to build friendships and strengthen family bonds, to engage in one’s culture, to educate oneself in manners and gastronomy, even to inspire values. 

Sadly, so many individuals who today call themselves proponents of family values will bemoan some public policy that threatens the family or denigrates some aspect of our cultural heritage and in the same breath take enormous, unsightly bites of a Big Mac—without the slightest thought to their complicity in the contemporary culinary culture of fast food and poor taste that is destroying family values and our culture from the inside out. In light of the addiction to industrially-produced, overly-processed, and unsavory food which I have not only witnessed but have struggled with personally, this Thanksgiving I will be thankful not only for the meal itself but for a different type of culinary culture that is gaining in popularity, what has been called “slow food.”

The official “Slow Food” movement was the brainchild of Italian chef and writer Carlo Petrini, who founded the movement in the 1980s after campaigning against the opening of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Since then, Slow Food has grown to a membership of 83,000 in 122 countries. Slow food advocates the preservation of cultural cuisine and, in tandem, the local cultivation of edible plants and domestic animals native to a region and integral to the local culinary patrimony. 

I came into contact with slow food this summer while living in Italy and Spain. The slow food I experienced was not really a result of the aforementioned movement but rather the unadulterated daily meals of families who had maintained a tradition of locally growing and consuming. I stayed with four different families throughout my stay in Europe. In Umbria, I drank wine hand made by Uncle Romolo from grapes purchased from a friend whose vineyard lay just outside the village. I spent one afternoon shucking hundreds of beans picked from a personal garden with elderly Italian women. In the Basque country I enjoyed a homemade wine fermented from locally grown apples and at each meal consumed a diverse array of vegetables—peppers, beans, potatoes, and onions—that my host had cultivated in a small but productive garden he had carved into a hill behind one of the town’s apartment buildings. My most memorable “slow food” experience, however, occurred in Galicia, where I was surprised to find out that the even the chicken came from the family’s small quarter acre plot of land outside the city where they kept a miniature farm—complete with a chicken coop, fruit and vegetable gardens, and a free-roaming turkey being fattened for the Christmas feast. This quarter acre plot was not unique; in fact, neighboring my hosts’ grange were dozens of other agricultural plots owned by other families residing in urban areas. To boot, the family spent an average of only one hour per day taking care of their farm; feeding the animals, collecting eggs, meat, and produce, and doing a bit of cleaning—certainly less time than the average American spends watching television daily or in line in fluorescent-lit supermarkets, where responsible parents have to spend considerable energy shielding their children from Cosmopolitan’s 99 ways to pleasure your lover. 

Slow food’s promotion of gardening should sit well with conservatives, as small-scale agriculture ranks among the most traditional of activities. Gardening brings families outdoors and it brings them together. It forces us to take the time to marvel at the beauty of nature. It teaches self-reliance and the intrinsic reward for hard work. It forces us to balance the contempt and respect we should have for modern society. We can feel united with our ancestors in an activity that intrinsically reminds us of man’s abilities as well as his limitations.

Slow food is not, of course, limited to gardening. The maintenance of regional varieties of food by simply purchasing locally cultivated products is a perfectly noble way to help preserve culinary traditions. Getting recipes from relatives is another place to start. Of course, preparing the turkey stuffing Aunt Joan’s way will probably take three times as long as it would with Stove Top. Just take heart in your small victory on the side of tradition in the modern culinary culture war.