I'm flying into Little Rock at the end of a brief vacation and have just been served the worst of the worst fast food ever, a little brown box with plastic containers of tasteless stuff. If that is where fast food is heading, I don't want to go there.
I prefer Authentic Slow Food, the products of a global grassroots organization founded in 1989 to slow the disappearance of locally grown food and traditional cooking and to battle the rise of fast food. Another of its goals is to counter people's dwindling interest in the food they eat.
Slow Food's goal is to ensure everyone has access to good, well prepared food. Food links us to culture, politics, agriculture, and the environment. The movement is based on food choices, which influence how food is cultivated, produced and distributed. If enough people support Slow Food, it can change food service and the quality of our food for the better.
The Slow Food movement began in Italy in the mid-1980s when McDonald's was about to open a restaurant in the center of Rome near the historic Spanish Steps. Italian activist Carlo Petrini, who was already working to preserve food traditions in Italy, was convinced that the world didn't need faster food, but slower food.
From that protest against McDonald's (which failed to stop the restaurant from coming), a movement grew. A nonprofit organization emerged first in Europe and now in more than 100 countries. Today, the Slow Food movement has over 850 chapters with more than 80,000 members worldwide.
We have all seen examples of a Slow Food attitude applied to foods from white table-cloth restaurants to pub grub, including some sandwich chains. Not all fast food is terrible, and many times for lunch Vertis and I will pick up a burger or something similar just to get by.
Occasionally, for breakfast, we will enjoy some warm Spudnuts, which are excellent, and they would fit both categories. Slow Food is available in a lot of localities, but you have to look for it.
I remember meals that were simple but memorable that easily fit the Slow Food category. My mother's pot roast with garden-fresh carrots and new potatoes, put in the oven to cook while we were in church, was absolutely delicious, and halfway around the world I had a similarly vivid meal in central Libya.
I was working on a well for Esso in the central Libyan Desert. One morning, without anything else to do, I decided to drive to the Kufra Oasis, arriving at 11 a.m. They don't get many tourists 200 miles into the desert, so I was immediately surrounded by kids, then the elders of the village came out to welcome me.
They invited me to share their midday meal. Meat from a young camel had been cooking all morning, surrounded by carrots, potatoes, and other vegetables. Then, as a large pan was set in an area near where the dish was cooked, a young girl passed out a thin bread that we dipped in the communal pan to scoop up the meat and vegetables. That combination of meat and vegetables is called tagine, and is similar to my mother's pot roast with vegetables.
Not all slow cooking is as tasty as pot roast or tagine, and just because something takes a long time to cook doesn't make it good. I had a trap line when I was around 15, and possums were a frequent catch. One afternoon when I had just finished skinning two young possums, my grandma, who was living with us then, came over and said, "Richard, bring me those two skinned possums, and I'll cook up some possum and taters."
I watched Grandma cut up sweet potatoes, putting them and the whole possums in a deep pan. She cooked those possums all afternoon, and then at supper put the pan on the center of the table. After several hours of cooking, those two small possums were almost floating in grease.
"Just fork off a piece of possum and let it soak in the drippings," Grandma said. I did and managed to choke down a few bites, then handed my dog Sniffer a possum leg under the table. Later I had to slip back in the kitchen and get some cornbread and buttermilk for supper.
That possum didn't fit as Slow Food, but other meals did. When we were living in south Texas, a trip to Joe Cotten's Barbecue in Robstown was a true Slow Food experience. It featured ribs slow-cooked over mesquite, and served them on wax paper.
Another goal in the Slow Food movement is focused on stopping the loss of traditional quality food. When we moved back from Texas, we bought some land to build on, and the old abandoned Palace Drive-in Restaurant was on the property. Over the years it had quit serving slow-cooked barbecue, which my dad and I enjoyed, and had become a beer joint.
We leveled the old shell of the building and left the brick barbecue grill behind it. It is still sitting back in the trees where it was built some 80 years ago, a symbol of our lost heritage of Slow Food.
There is a vast difference in a quarter-inch-thick meat patty slapped between two pieces of bread and barbecue ribs cooked in an old brick grill smoked with green hickory.
A Google search for official Slow Food members in Arkansas turned up Ozark Slow Food, and I quote in part, "A celebration of good, clean, and fair food. We believe that our food should be fresh, high quality and taste good ...".
If we will limit eating on the go and instead seek out quality Slow Food, we will enjoy dining and advance sustainability at the same time. Support of farmers markets featuring Southern agricultural varieties will help us re-establish meals as social events.
It all depends on a commitment from each of us to seek out and encourage local food providers to serve top-quality Slow Food.
Email Richard Mason at richard@gibraltarenergy.com.