Is Fast Food Becoming Slow?

In his article "Easy Does It: the Slow Food Movement Takes On The Fast Food Culture," Benjamin Chadwick explains how the Slow Food movement is slowly gaining steam across the world due to its concern for quality food, environmental causes, and political activity in regards to the agriculture and food industries. Furthermore, there are groups which meet around the world that spread the concept of Slow Food, creating a greater awareness of the movement.

Everyone is highly familiar with the term Fast Food. Fast Food means you can get your meal on the go, with processed food wrapped in some kind of material, produced at the cheap cost to you, the consumer. Slow Food, however, is not about dining in a more expensive restaurant and waiting forty-five minutes for your food. Slow Food is a movement based on preserving the finer points of the world's cuisine, such as a hard to find type of chicken, or a certain way to cooking such as Creole. The movement is against cheaply made industrial food such as a double cheeseburger from McDonald's.

Slow Food does not aim to take away the taste or pleasure of food by opting for higher quality meats or vegetables. In fact, it looks after the environmental effects such as how the food is grown, preserved, and produced, so the way you eat your food can be enjoyed to a greater extent. The founder of Slow Food, Carlo Petrini, stated that in order to be experts at good, clean, and safe cooking, we must care about our environment (Chadwick 2).

Like everything else in this world, Slow Food has its critics. Chadwick suggests that Slow Food is a movement that believes it is for the elite, or that today's society is too busy to stop being so consumed with the fast food lifestyle. Slow Food battles this criticism by informing people with classes, special speakers, and even camps. Most of all, they feel as if people are misinformed and misled by the society in which we live. People want cheap food, but the producers of the food do not see what that is doing to our environment, such as the deforestation of woodland leading into urban areas (4). However, Slow Food is ready to hunker down for the long run and come out on top in their battle with the fast food industry. They will just have to take it slow.

Chadwick, Benjamin. "East Does It: The Slow Food Movement Takes On The Fast Food Culture." The Environmental Magazine. Sept/October 2002: 1-5