For most American lifestyles, the slow food movement seems inapplicable. If mom works at the office for eight hours a day, and dad can’t get home until nine, then that makes meals short, quick, and more of a chore than an engaging experience. This, I believe, is a sad thing. Really it’s because there’s so much about preparing a meal that is (crazily enough) satisfying and almost spiritual.
Recall the last time you cooked a meal. Was it frustrating? Would you rather have eaten out? Sometimes, eating out can help us unwind. But if we eat out because of urgency, necessity, and expediency, we’re losing something. Food starts becoming empty calories, or tasteless material that goes straight from lips to stomach. The slow food movement I feel is incredibly positive in this respect. True, cooking food can sometimes be a chore, but eating it? When is eating ever a chore? If we have the capacity to savor our food, why don’t we do it more often?
This is why we are encouraged to eat slowly. Historically, many cultures have devised some sort of ritual around the act of savoring meals. In America, we have Thanksgiving, which emphasizes family and communion. Tea ceremonies in Asia are very dedicated, precise, and time-consuming affairs in which one batch of tea leaves is often brewed six times just to release every last flavor. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to, but despite this, mealtimes have always been a means for humans to relax and interact.I do personally think this is extremely important. We can’t survive without eating, and if we don’t care for it then we’re losing a part of our history that’s been thousands of years in the making.
This is why tea has become a pivotal component of the slow food movement. There’s already a historical precedent for people to take their time with tea brewing, and also an extensive material culture associated with it. People in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have all skillfully crafted carafes, pots, and cups to enhance their tea experience. It’s because of these objects that tea can persist and remain physically interactive. If a person can see a beautiful teapot, then he can appreciate its craft and maybe even appreciate the tea inside even more.
A flip side to this is that tea is a luxury item. It might be cherished, but it’s not necessary. It’s not necessary to make good, complex meals if a simple box of take-out will do. Busy people might see meal making as expensive and superfluous. This is definitely true of tea – it is expensive to keep up a regular tea habit. Tea fans tend to collect all different varieties, and even today being a tea-drinker has a somewhat aristocratic connotation. This is probably why many Americans choose a quick cup of coffee over tea, because culturally tea is viewed as less accessible than a plain old cup o’Joe.
America’s coffee consumption is very indicative of its culture. Its morning drink of choice can be gulped down as a magical cure-all for hangover or exhaustion – and if we can factor in the number of Starbucks floating around, we see that the coffee industry is booming. Coffee has become synonymous with a hardworking, active lifestyle. Coffee houses make it an accessible, on-the-go perk that literally is our modern-day version of the elixir of life.
But when is coffee not any of these things? It has its own, very different ritual when drunk with dessert. Then it can almost be compared with an Asian tea ceremony, in the way it is brewed at home in small doses and poured into dessert cups with fancy saucers. The dessert coffee is America’s tea ceremony, and if the slow food movement is to find a niche in the American market, it should do so not with tea but with coffee. America has already fallen in love with coffee beans, and long since taken a preference to them over tea leaves. I can vividly envision an American family sitting down to evening coffee and dessert – far more readily than I can picture everyone halting at lunch to sit down and enjoy a Victorian high tea.
But because our response to this movement must be in the form of a tea strainer, tea will be the focus of my design. If I could describe the slow food movement in words, they would be thus: bizarre, surreal, hypnotic, lethargic, reflective, anti-caffeinated, and savory. Bizarre and surreal because high art has taken slow food under its wing and produced some truly strange experiences. At a slow food café one might be expected to see elderly folks serving the food with painstakingly slow and fragile motions. And the portions are arranged minimally, with a concentration on the purity of the food to be eaten. It can be hypnotic, too, watching tea leaves unfurl as they slowly tint the water in myriad shades of red, brown, green, or yellow.
During this hypnosis one might feel lethargic and prone to reflect on his day, or even be spurred to talk to fellow tea-drinkers about theirs. The whole reflection process is helped along if the tea is not caffeinated, because then there won’t be any adrenaline kicking in to make a person rush to guzzle down his tea. The process sets us up to savor our tea at precisely the moment when its flavor has peaked.
I’d like to create a tea strainer that is hypnotic. Its pieces will swirl together and interlock so that people are encouraged to look around it in a continuous circuit. If they are mesmerized by it, they’ll be more inclined to take the time to enjoy their tea.
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