Slow Food --- Life Lived Well

In Australia at the moment, farmers are dumping oranges or leaving them to rot on the trees and leaving their farms because the Government's free trade agreements allow oranges to be imported from Asia and elsewhere at lower cost than the farmers here can produce them. The same thing is happening with almost every crop. Looking for short-term economic benefits, Australia's Government seems oblivious to the damage they're doing. The focus is always on the economy, as if money was all that mattered.

The Slow Food Movement knows there's more to life than money. It promotes sustainable agriculture and celebrates local traditions and variations in food, rather than the global mediocrity and sameness of fast food. Eating "slow" means eating food in season locally. So slow food menus change with the season (and location). It is utterly opposed to the fast food philosophy of every (insert fast food chain name) restaurant having the same menu throughout the year, and even throughout the planet!

An extension of the Slow Food Movement is the Slow Cities movement (Citta Slow in Italy). This movement aims to extend the principles of Slow Food to protect the pleasures of life in general, and to oppose the global mediocrity and an insistence on speed in everything that is currently engulfing much of the world. Slow Cities aim to protect their heritage and make the living environment one to be truly lived in, and protect the values that many people see as being threatened by the ever accelerating pace of modern life.

Apart from the aspect of the speed of living, the Slow Cities movement also encourages more environmentally sensible and sustainable building practices and encourages recycling.

See my course Saving Money and the Earth lesson 3 for more about the Slow Food and Slow Cities movements.

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