Shared Meals, Shared Knowledge

[SecularMotion]

This year, Slow Food USA, which defines “slow food” as good for its eaters, its producers and the environment — a definition anyone can get behind — set out to demonstrate that slow food can also be affordable, not only a better alternative to fast food but a less expensive one. The organization issued a $5 Challenge with the inspired rallying cry of “take back the ‘value meal’,” which in most fast food restaurants runs somewhere around five bucks.

Under the leadership of its president, Josh Viertel, Slow Food has moved from a group of rah-rah supporters of artisanal foods to become a determined booster of sustainability and of real food for everyone. Last month it called for people to cook pot luck and community dinners for no more than $5 per person. “We gave ourselves a month to launch the first big public day of action in what we hoped would become an ongoing challenge,” says Viertel. “In those four weeks we hoped to organize 500 people to host meals on Sept. 17. Our dream was to have 20,000 people participate.”

They did far better than the 500-meal mark; more than 5,500 people hosted dinners, and more than 30,000 enjoyed the new value meal. Slow Food intends to make this an ongoing project, and is calling for a repeat performance of the $5 Challenge for Oct. 24, which not coincidentally is Food Day. (That’s another subject, but I encourage you to click that link; the six goals on Food Day’s home page succinctly sum up the current issues in food.)

Frugality in cooking has a long and powerful history and a pathetic present. With the exuberant abundance of the post-war half-century, many Americans forgot the lessons brought over from the old countries, honed during the rapid but harsh development of the 19th century, the lean years of the Depression, the rationing of the 1940s. Old-timers made soup from scraps, saw potatoes as a main course and considered three squares the pinnacle of good living.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/shared-meals-shared-knowledge/

[jwirr]

1. I was born in 1941 and remember those days: I remember canning

and cooking that it so different from today. I think the first thing I remember was going to the grocery store with my father and buying a bottle of pop. Just one each time we went to the store - which was a monthly thing not a daily stop like it is so often today. I also remember my mother canning corn and looking up at my father and saying "we can buy this for a lot cheaper than we can preserve it." That is how the slippery slope started.