What is SLOW FOOD? SLOW TRAVEL? SLOW LIVING?

Slow Food 慢食

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The Slow Food movement aims to preserve cultural cuisine and in so doing to preserve the food plants and seeds, domestic animals and farming within an ecoregion. The slow food movement has become a social and political movement capable of resisting the dehumanising effects of large-scale, commercial food production

Connect over food and the fast-food industry. If you are interested knowing more about slow food and how it sits within the slow movement, In Praise of Slow : How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore will give you what you are after. Honore was a self-professed speedaholic and his book will make you rethink your relationship with time.

The Slow Food movement has its origins in the 1980s in Italy. When McDonald’s planned to build an franchise outlet near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome in 1986, Carlo Petrini organised a demonstration in which he and his followers brandished bowls of penne as weapons of protest. Their demonstration was successful and soon after, Carlo founded the International Slow Food Movement which runs counter to the fast food, fast life, non-sustainable food production and the eroding of local economies.

The time was right for this movement and by the 1990s Slow Food had grown hugely and was developing a new political dimension, lobbying the EU on trade and agricultural policy and working to save endangered foods. This expansion in focus is one reason for the organisation’s growth since 1995 – growing from 20,000 to 65,000 members in 42 countries. Carlo Petrini has written a number of books on Slow Food. Perhaps the most readable and interesting is Slow Food (The Case For Taste) which provides a philosophical understanding and a history of the movement. Sounds dry but it isn't. The book give convincing arguments to persuade us to take care in what, and how, we consume.

Recent developments include the establishment of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, whose mission is to organise and fund projects that defend our world’s heritage of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions. The foundation envisions a new agricultural system that respects local cultural identities, the earth’s resources, sustainable animal husbandry, and the health of individual consumers.

One of the key tenets of Slow Food is the belief in the right to pleasure. The Slow Food Manifesto declares that:
 

A firm defence of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life We have lost many of the traditionsl and artisan recipies that create the pleasures of dining socially. The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and Recipes is dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional foods, recipies and the pleasures of eating well. This book includes 40 traditional and easily doable recipies that excite us to put aside the time to produce truly gratifying food.

The slow food movement challenges us to think about how consumption choices we make form part of on interdependent network within a social economy – the pleasures of food preparation and consumption among friends and family helps develop social and cultural capital. Some places are setting out to be known as slow food destinations. Stradbroke Island off the Queensland coast has recently been recognised as the world's first Slow Island

An important component of the Slow Food movement is the commitment to educate children about the origins and taste of food – to help them to have a connection to the food they eat. It aims to help children develop their senses and their appreciation of food and the pleasure of eating as a gastronomic and social event.

Slow Travel 慢游

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One of the defining elements of slow travel is the opportunity to become part of local life and to connect to a place and its people. Slow travel is also about connection to culture. Gone are the hectic holiday tours where you flit from one ‘must see’ to another, and arrive home feeling like you need a holiday.

Joining in local happenings

Slow travellers stay in one place for at least a week. They usually choose holiday rentals ie houses, cottages, apartments, and villas that are a ‘home away from home’ – you shop and cook just as you would at home.

By living as opposed to ‘staying’ at your destination, you can experience the place more intensely. Not only do you have the opportunity to shop for your groceries, you see people in your community or village every day. You can go for a run each morning and stop at the same café for a coffee – meet the locals.

One of the pleasures of slow travel is the slow and thorough exploration of the local area – it is like an immersion process. Most slow travellers start by exploring everything within a couple of hundred metres of where they are living. This can easily be done on foot and is the area that is given most time and attention. Next they explore out to a few kilometres – this can easily be done on a bike. If there is time slow travellers then explore further afield, perhaps by train or hire car.

This slow exploration is in direct contrast to conventional travel that seeks to ‘hit’ the major tourist features in a 20 km radius. Slow travellers are freed from these tedious pressures of standard tourism. By exploring on foot and by bike there are Traditional ways of doing things opportunities to talk to people and find out the points of interest from their perspective.

If there is time, you can become involved in local activities eg take a language or cooking course, volunteer for a local organization or group, study Buddhism, volunteer at a local school to teach English or another language you know, or try wwoofing (willing workers on organic farms).

Slow travel is comfortable – you have your own home where you can spread out. You can have a day off too, if you want to.

You could design your slow travel around working to support the disadvantaged. Check out what you could do to help in a developing country such as India or Vietnam. Use your skills to help others. In the process you will get to know another culture and its people. You will be working and living at the local level and so will develop relationships with local traders and local people. A new word has been coined to describe this kind of slow travel – voluntourism.
 

Mindful Living (Slow Living) 慢活/乐活

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Many of us, professionals and regular people, alike are feeling their lives are overly hectic or emotionally out of kilter, and are looking for ways to restore the balance. We are looking to leading a mindful life.

Living a mindful life seems more difficult now than it was in the past. The fast life is all around us – fast food, fast cars, fast conversations, fast families, fast holidays. We may be living great lives but we aren’t ‘there’ for them. We don’t take the time to linger over food, over friends, over our family etc. We are not savouring our life and are starving of the real connection to our life.

The solution is self-explanatory. We slow down and connect with our life. But often it is easier said than done. Each fast aspect of our life is necessary for other fast aspects to happen, and we have been fooled into thinking we need, or even must, be fast and have what the ‘fast life’ gives us.

If we don’t listen to our bodies and to that little voice in our head that is telling us to slow down we may succumb to the myriad of health conditions that are a result of leading fast, stressful lives. The biological costs of ignoring stress are staggering, manifesting in cardiovascular and other systemic diseases and even, new research shows, in accelerated aging. The psychological costs are equally large with anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other emotional illnesses associated with unmanaged stress.

To be simplistic, the solution is to pay attention, on purpose, in a systematic way, in the present moment. That is, we need to be mindful. This is the answer. We can develop a wise relationship with our sensory experience through mindful meditation. Mindful living is a way of life that urges people to find calm by connecting with the present moment.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has spent much of his professional life bringing the medical world’s attention to the wisdom of the body and the healing that can happen when we get in touch with our senses and our mind. He has been a proponent of mindfulness – a Buddhist concept that can be best described as awareness. Awareness of everything, awareness of our senses, our body, our mind. Jon believes in using that awareness to learn to open up new dimensions of well-being and integrity, of wisdom and compassion and kindness in ourself.

He says: “Mindfulness is a certain way of paying attention that is healing, that is restorative, that is reminding you of who you actually are so that you don’t wind up getting entrained into being a human doing rather than a human being.”

When we practice mindfulness in our everyday life we are less caught up in and at the mercy of our destructive emotions, and we are then predisposed to greater emotional intelligence and balance and therefore to greater happiness because living mindfully gives us more satisfaction in our job, in our family and in our life in general.