An Antidote to Fast Food: Slow It Down

An explanation of the Slow Food Movement and what it actually looks like in everyday life

4 min readFeb 20, 2021

I picked up a book about food out of vague interest and, truthfully, pandemic boredom.

Suddenly my seemingly aimless attempts to “be more sustainable” had a clear path forward, one that I love and one that every human partakes in.

Food. But make it slow.

The book was In Defence of Food by journalist Michael Pollan and it opened the floodgates to other authors, activists, and the Slow Food Movement centering on food as the intervention-point to make real change for the health of the planet.

What is “Slow Food?”

It’s a global movement. Here’s what you need to know:

Slow Food is a general movement, but also a global non-profit which promotes local food and traditional cooking as a means to combat the rise of fast food and reclaim a changing food system.

The organization’s core message is “that everyone has a fundamental right to the pleasure of quality food and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage of biodiversity, culture, and knowledge that make this pleasure possible.” It has active branches in more than 150 countries.

Slow Food’s founder, Carlo Petrini, is a dedicated food activist of more than 25 years. His most notable early appearance as an activist was when Mcdonald’s was vying for a spot at the bottom of the Spanish Steps in Rome in the 1980s. This rejection of Mcdonald’s request wasn’t because red and yellow at the foot of this historic, beautiful Italian architecture was an eye-sore, it was a symbol of rebellion against the destruction of local food production, creation, and culture.

Slow Food is in every way the rival of fast food.

In a 2017 speech, Petrini calls the current global food system “a criminal system” and warns of impending climate crises that could be averted by posturing ourselves towards food as a solution. He explains that a new food system involves “co-producers” rather than “consumers.”

To be a co-producer doesn’t mean retiring from your day job to become a farmer (unless of course, that’s what you truly want to do), but it does mean taking up your role as a participant in a global food system into your own hands and out of the hands of mass-producers. Petrini continues by laying out a few suggestions to becoming a co-producer in a new sort of food system.

Study food; seek a basic understanding of how and where food comes from.
Know the farmers who grow your food if you can and be in close enough proximity to them to have met them in person before.
Know the cooks, and more accurately, know the difficulties of cooking.
Lastly, understand how food pricing works. Local produce may be more expensive if it isn’t in season, but choosing foods that are in season will keep prices low and it means your eating habits are adapting with what the planet can give you at that time of year.

Oftentimes eating sustainably has to do with proximity and small farming practices. Research indicates that people believe local food is more expensive than supermarket food, but the evidence suggests this is false. 66.66% of local food prices when compared had a significant price difference, meaning the difference would likely withstand the test of time and is not due to chance. Of those significant results, all but 1 food (bread) was less expensive at the farmer’s market than at the supermarket.

What does this look like in real life?

There are fun and increasingly accessible ways to orient yourself toward the local, in-season, small farm, ethical eating.

Slow Food in my life looks like curiosity. Through google searches and asking around I have found pieces of the Irish Slow Food Movement all around me. It wasn’t obvious without looking, but now I know that there is a Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings just down the road, there is a re-fill store that sources all of their products from local vendors, there is a slowly growing commitment to small farmers and ways to purchase boxes of fresh produce from them every month.

I haven’t stopped going to the grocery store, it isn’t fully practical or realistic for my life. But when I go, I now take a second look to see which products are local and when the option is there I choose it. The only thing I have stopped is apathy toward what food I’m eating and where it comes from. This has revealed a sense of gratitude and intentionality that just wasn’t there before.

If you’re interested in learning more about this subject, here are some of the resources I found helpful:

An Antidote to Fast Food: Slow It Down

An explanation of the Slow Food Movement and what it actually looks like in everyday life

Written by Jenna Fuerst