Q: What is the Slow Food movement?
A: Slow Food is all about supporting small scale agriculture and artisan food producers. I really like the way that it combines a sense of mission—acquainting people with an alternative food system, one that is focused on locally grown, organic, small scale agriculture—with lots of fun—taking field trips to visit food producers all over the province.
Q: What is your role within Slow Food?
A: I’m the leader of the local convivium. Slow Food groups around the world tend to be very loosely organized, but here, we are working to become incorporated under the provincial societies act, so that we can have a larger role in the political arena.
Q: What sort of role?
A: We have a number of projects we’d like to launch. One example is the Edible Schoolyards project: A school builds and maintains a vegetable garden on school property. The students are involved in all aspects of the building, maintenance and harvest, and then they eat what they grow. It’s a great way to promote healthier eating, and to help educate kids about where the food they eat actually comes from.
Q: But Slow Food isn’t just about teaching kids about food, is it?
A: No. One of the next big Slow Food events is the upcoming Terra Madre conference, which will be held in Turin, Italy, next October. That conference will bring farmers and chefs from around the world together to talk about ways that the chefs can promote locally grown, artisan foods in their cooking.
Q: What is the role of the chef in the Slow Food movement?
A: I like to say that chefs are the grandmothers of the 21st century. The world’s great cuisines evolved as cooks, usually women, looked at their local produce and gradually developed recipes that satisfied hunger and tasted good. Those recipes were eventually codified in the various local cuisines you see around the world, and they were passed down through what I call a “grandmother’s culture.” But in the modern world, where people tend to eat out more, chefs have taken over the role of the grandmother. They are the ones in position to retain local traditional cuisines and to promote local farmers. And they have a responsibility to do that.
Q: What’s one way that everyone could work a bit of Slow Food into their lives?
A: Support local farmers. It doesn’t have to be expensive, and it’s very rewarding. Nova Scotia has such a rich historical tradition of small scale agriculture—it defines us, defines our communities. If we don’t support local farmers, and we lose those farms and farmlands, it will have a huge impact on life in this province.
To find out more, visit www.slowfoodns.ca
This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2006.