As manager of Bellingham’s Mount Bakery Café, Vince Lalonde proudly offers a slow food menu. But for the time being, he has decided to scratch the words "Slow Food" off the front window, worried that hurried Americans won’t take the time to slow down and enjoy a meal.
"If people know slow food, they are excited and come in, but if they don’t, they might drive by thinking ‘I just don’t have time for that,’" Lalonde said.
He said he hopes to introduce his customers to slow food after they’ve eaten their meal.
"Slow Food" is a relatively new term to describe some very old practices. Imagine a made-from-scratch meal, using unprocessed, fresh ingredients bought at a local market or picked from a friend’s garden. Perhaps the recipe or technique was passed down from a grandmother; a simmering tomato sauce or slow-roasted meat from a local farmer. Slow food connects the place to the plate by prioritizing the source of ingredients, utilizing local and traditional cooking methods and taking time to fully enjoy the meal using all five senses. It is a movement toward a pleasurable and sustainable food system.
As a variety of new Slow Food cookbooks and restaurants begin to emerge on the culinary scene, the movement risks appearing as an elite "wine and cheese" club. But another face to slow food holds true to its activist roots, and a number of residents in the Bellingham community are playing a part in pushing the movement toward environmental change.
In 1986, McDonald’s planned a new branch near Rome’s historic Piazza di Spagna. In protest, native Carlo Petrini organized a demonstration on the landmark. The incident spurred him to found the International Slow Food Movement in response to a growing culture of "fast life" and un-sustainable farming. Today, Slow Food is an international member-supported organization of over 80,000 chefs, businesses and food producers who are involved in 850 convivia (local chapters) worldwide, including Bellingham’s Fourth Corner Slow Food Convivia. Old Town Café, Ciao Thyme Catering and a number of individuals and local farmers join Mount Bakery on the list of local Slow Food members.
Driven by a mission to defend biodiversity in the food supply, educate on taste and connect food producers through events and initiatives, the Slow Food organization founded Terra Madre, a biennial meeting of worldwide producers in Turin, Italy. The Ark of Taste and Presidia are Slow Food initiatives that rediscover, catalog, and publicize forgotten flavors, food heritage and practices.
Crystine Goldberg and Brian Campbell own and operate Uprising Organics, a small farm in Acme, Wash. The couple’s practice of farming heirloom varieties and preserving seeds qualified them as Bellingham’s Fourth Corner Slow Food nomination to attend the Terra Madre symposium in October. The couple said they were surprised to observe how politically charged the movement has grown internationally.
"There were presidents of countries attending this event," Goldberg said. Outside of the United States, preserving food traditions is far more connected to preserving cultures and livelihoods. Farming in Italy is still done by hand and steeped in family tradition, and food preparation and origin is valued more than in America where the tendency is towards processed, packaged and fast food which caters to our hurried schedules, Campbell said.
"Agriculture in Italy is very specific by region," he said.
American industrial farming is designed for intensive, concentrated agriculture, eliminating a sense of regional ecology and variety of plant species. The majority of the world’s food supply depends only on rice, wheat, and maize. Campbell and Goldberg combat this limited dependency by taking the time to research the history here, then planting endangered native and heirloom vegetables specific to the Pacific Northwest. Their goal is to introduce a diverse palette of flavors to local markets and restaurants. They hope to get people excited about the possibility of color and taste on a dinner plate and in family gardens.
Goldberg and Campbell said they experienced Terra Madre less as a part of the Slow Food organization and more as evidence that farmers like themselves are creating and preserving food’s identity.
"This is exactly the intention behind such a gathering," said Makalé Faber, officer of The Renewing America’s Food Traditions Program (RAFT) at Brooklyn-based Slow Food USA. "Bringing producers together encourages a collaborative effort, empowering them to return to their communities with new knowledge and as stronger activists."
Terra Madre is one way the organization is taking "think global, act local" to another level of activism. Faber agrees the "wine and cheese" reputation of the movement is a problem, and she identifies the Slow Food angle as one of celebration, pleasure and a dialogue around the table and farm. Its roots are about the consumer. The Cedar Tree Foundation chose Slow Food as an umbrella organization for biodiversity projects. The hope is for local chapters to introduce communities to the pleasure of new tastes and encourage them to demand heirloom breeds of livestock and agricultural varieties in the supermarkets.
"Tasting events empower people to vote with their dollar," Faber said.
This is ultimately what Fourth Corner Slow Food gatherings encourage: creative potlucks, shared original recipes and traditions, slow meals with friends and community, farmers market cooking demonstrations, harvest dinners and meetings to discuss community food issues.
"The best way to keep it on the planet is to use it," Faber said. "We like to say, ‘eat it to save it."
Faber hopes Slow Food will decentralize and build stronger regional chapters like Fourth Corner. Such chapters are in a better position to expose the consumer to what local farmers’ and producers are attempting to preserve.
"How a species eats is how they interact with their environment," Bellingham fisherman Jeremy Brown said.
He and his friend Anne Mosness, a retired commercial salmon fisher, also attended Terra Madre as Fourth Corner Slow Food members. Mosness and Brown are politically active on issues such as disappearing salmon habitat, the threat of oil and mining industries to commercial fishing and educating the public about the harmful impacts of farmed salmon.
As a mother who raised her family on fishing boats, Mosness said she believes the local fishing industry is deeply rooted in the community. Brown sells to many local businesses and holds a canned tuna project every year.
"It’s a community event where the tuna is caught and canned by hand," Mosness said, who was one of several dozen people at the event.
Mosness echoed Faber’s sentiments on the unique role of Slow Food to create a change in the consumer.
"If you convince people to care for what they eat, they may change their mind more than if an environmentalist tells them what they should be caring about," she said.
Simply appreciating a slow food meal has the power to encourage the consumer to seek out local ingredients and create a culture of connectedness with the community. Reconnecting people with the pleasure of a meal may change their habits of fries and burgers at a drive-thru window to a meal with friends or a bite to eat at a local restaurant.
"In the U.S. we have two components," Brown said. "Things we have lost, and things we have the potential to have and encourage."
The local chinook salmon is listed on the Ark of Taste, and native Lummi reefnetter techniques are now listed on Precidia. Such practices and species are in danger of disappearing under the American system of a homogenized food supply.
"We’re taking a very complex web and collapsing it," Brown said.
Both Mosness and Brown find great value in bringing the tradition of community, family and food together. Hopefully in doing so, the complex web is valued, recognized and fully enjoyed.
Mount Bakery’s Lalonde said he also hopes the movement becomes more active in combating such homogenization.
"Corporate America has a massive interest in us not caring about our diet or where our food originates," he said.
The bakery’s pledge to slow food challenges the corporate interest with its from- scratch methods handed down from owner Olivier Vrambout’s Belgian grandmother. In an environment where chain restaurants serve machine-made sauces from bags shipped from hundreds of miles away, the character and attention to flavorful cuisine is endangered.
"We are always introducing new and strange food combinations to the public." Lalonde said.
On a sunny day, the specials board at Mount Bakery reads: "Duck Crepe with local Chevre and Mango salsa and local Bellewood Acres Apple Cider." The aromas from the open kitchen are a mouthwatering bouquet well worth sitting down for, and just because it’s slow food doesn’t mean customers have to give up their afternoon to enjoy lunch. The intention behind the preparation makes a slow food meal tastier for the individual and the community.