Just wondering.

I read in the paper yesterday that 100 years ago, people spent approximately six hours each day cooking and eating. In the 1950s, it took about 2 hours. Several years ago we were down to 30 minutes and today people spend about 20 minutes preparing and eating their evening meal.

The article focused on ready-to-eat food from Safeway and other grocery stores. It talked about 'healthy meals in minutes!' It's hard for me to imagine that something that was prepared miles and miles away, and preserved, and bagged, and shipped, and then chilled or warmed up at the Safeway deli could really be healthy.

I'm just skeptical, I suppose. I see their salads dripping in heavy dressings, and the meat always seems heavily sauced, as well. (What are they hiding under all that goop?) I know that whenever I eat that kind of food I wake up so thirsty my tongue feels inside out. It must have scads of sodium.

What is healthy, anyway? What does it mean to enjoy a healthy meal? Can any lifestyle that demands 20 minute suppers every night really be healthy, over-all? I know that some nights are busier than others, and some nights we have a 20 minute dinner, but I wonder if your life is on that kind of treadmill every single day, how healthy can that be?

I'm just wondering.

Slow Food

The first time I heard about the Slow Food movement, I was hooked. It didn't sound that radical to me... it sounded like the kind of food I was raised on.

When I was a kid, locally produced didn't mean much because that is what you always had. I remember the first time we saw broccoli at the grocery store when it was out of season. I also remember the first strawberries. And when they started selling asparagus year round, I felt like spring had gotten ripped off, somehow. If local grocers dared to sell fruit from other countries when that fruit was in season in the orchards all around us, my mother let them know she thought it was a stupid thing to do.

Slow Food celebrates what the local growers have to offer, it celebrates the process of cooking and preparing that food, and it celebrates eating together in community. On their website, they say that food should be good, clean, and fair.

I like that.

It's true that I sometimes get sucked in by those strawberry-like offerings sold in January, and I've eaten asparagus out of season, but slow food is much more about celebration, and moving in the right direction, rather than following a rigid set of legalistic rules about food.

I like that, too.