Dave Garcia research

Dave Garcia, 11/10/09, research
Dave Garcia
Slow Food Research Paper
The Slow Food Movement is inspired by the growing and dominance of fast food lifestyle around the world. It is an “idea, a way of living and a way of eating.” Other than a lifestyle, it is also mainly friendly to the environment and the community because many people believe that food should be organic and locally grown; factory farms are not a good idea and family owned farms should be preserved. Animal cruelty is an issue for this movement and that is the reason why factory farms are evil. Slow foods taste good and are produced in a sanitary manner. A very famous book back in the early 1900s entitled The Jungle by Upton Sinclair may have been a reference for the movement. The books talks about how unsanitary the meatpacking industry was and how workers were endangering their lives when they are cutting meat. It was a horrifying job for these workers and slow food is not all about that. Workers should be paid for their work fairly.
I first heard about slow food last year in my Human Geography class. I thought about it for a second and it is true that people today prefer to live the fast life and not appreciate good food anymore; as long as they are quickly served is all we care about because we are always in a hurry and we have busy schedules. As a result, many traditional foods are not eaten daily like they used to. Many ingredients such as grains, vegetables, fruits and animal products are disappearing because of the popularity of convenience food and industrial business. I remember growing up in the Philippines, a third world country, and my parents used to tell me that fast food is not good for anyone’s health. We used to have slow food daily (at least that is what I thought back then). My mother cooks food for at least 2 hours because she believes that slow cooking brings out the real taste of the food; she even used to cook with firewood that she buys from the market. Because we could not afford refrigeration, she used to go to the local market to buy locally grown vegetables, meat, fish, poultry and other ingredients. This also means that we have to consume the food in one day or else it is going to rot. In addition, microwaves are still in development to perfection. Learning from that experience, I do not take things for granted especially food. The Slow Food Movement has a point that needs to be brought out there for the people to understand how the fast life is slowly changing the world.