Hello, Bay Area folks. If you are wondering what to do with your Labor Day weekend because Worldcon is early this year, how about doing some serious eating?
I my news feeds this morning I spotted an article in the Chronicle about a big Slow Food event coming to The City in August. Slow Food is something I have blogged about before, because I’m a foodie and I love cooking. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to see comments on the Chronicle article effectively dismissing the event as a middle-class, liberal nonsense, because to a large extent it is. The Slow Food movement won’t do much for the nutrition of poor Americans, or world food prices. But hey, if it gets middle-class liberals spending money on (expensive) quality food instead of spending it on SUVs, that’s probably a good thing.
What’s more, I suspect that most of the readers of this blog are middle-class liberals, so Slow Food is a good thing for me to be writing about. Unless I’ve forgotten something that Kevin and I had planned to do that weekend, I expect to be checking out some of the events and blogging about them. If you want to go along, here’s the web site.
Slow food isn’t necessarily expensive. It’s quick cooking that demands expensive, tender cuts of meat, for example: with long slow cooking the cheaper stuff actually works better.
Indeed, as anyone who has tried Mexican cooking should know.
But Slow Food isn’t just about the speed of cooking. It is about how it is grown and transported and sold as well. All that tends to make it more expensive, especially in a big city.
Yes. I didn’t put that very well at all. It’s more that slow food has such a reputation as an elitist thing that I like to give it a boost whenever it involves something that might actually be more accessible cost-wise than, er, quick food. Although since the “cheap” option in this case should although a cheaper cut also be locally produced and organic, the point is no doubt moot.
I like to think, though, that this is a way of eating that isn’t *entirely* limited to the middle classes. One of Auckland’s farmer’s markets, for example, is held in the poorest part of Auckland, and the locals buy from it simply because the food is better and cheaper than in the supermarkets. That’s not always possible, but it’s nice when it is.
That’s impressive. We used to have some good markets here in Darkest Somerset, and I can still buy really good cheese very cheaply. But the local council had the market building redeveloped, mainly to include a trendy restaurant, and all of the fruit and veg stalls have gone. Now all we get is a once-a-month farmer’s market in the main street where all of the food is much more expensive than in the supermarkets. And we are out in the country. Big cities are generally much worse, although of course you can get really good specialty food in big cities, which is great for a foodie like me.
In the UK I suspect that much of the problem is the result of draconian health and safety laws that make it prohibitively expensive, and quite dangerous, to sell food outside of big industry.