(Now is as bad a place as any to say that I have no idea why WordPress capitalizes odd things in my subject lines. It’s not me, I promise! If you know how to fix it, please tell me.) (Meh. I figured it out. It’s dumb.)
In the past few years I have watched the Slow Food movement’s rise with a mix of happiness and outrage, and it’s time to boil down exactly why it boils my blood so. First, read a little about the Slow Food movement if you are not familiar with what we’re talking about.
I love Slow Food, really I do. How could I not agree that “we are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods….A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.” I like quiet material pleasure. I hate fast food. I’m down!
Except when I’m not. Except when I hate Slow Food. Fucking richie white people’s movement – count me out! Fucking European elitists who only want to “save” “heritage breeds” of animals so they can eat them.
Isn’t there something sickening about that? I know I’m supposed to say that yes, people are going to eat meat, and since they are I should be happy that they are eating them in responsible ways, blah blah. Of course a part of me believes that, but this is my primary beef (um.) with Slow Food – they are stealing vegetarians! Both practicing and could-easily-become vegetarians are being lured away by this whole “ethical meat” michegas bullshit and it’s time that us passionate vegan foodies stand up to be counted in the Slow Food movement so we can change it from the inside.
There are so many wonderful things about the Slow Food thing – better quality food, fair wages for farmers, producers, pickers, etc etc, environmental sustainability – all the shit that vegans are totally down with. But the truth is that Slow Foodies are fucking snobs and look down on vegans because they think they have found The Secret: you can eat as many dead rotting animals as you want if you just find Slow Food-approved ones. They cost a lot more and there’s no way that everyone will be able to eat a Naragansett turkey for Thanksgiving ($4 per lb, which I understand is a lot for a dead turkey. I hope when I die my flesh gets sold by the pound, fun fun fun.), but that’s a small matter. Rich people can eat meat with impunity! Phew!
Not so fast, richie whitie snobs. Vegans aren’t vegan because we want animals to be treated better. You’ve got us all wrong (notice how I hesitate not at all to speak for all vegans) – we don’t think people should be eating animals. Period. It’s a stupid and backwards thing to do, and you’re stupid and backwards if you do it. Vegans work for the abolishment of factory farms only as an intermediary step toward vegan nirvana.
Oh fuck, and now I hear those little voices in my head going on about how people are always going to eat meat and all that shit. It’s just like gay marriage. Or Dennis Kucinich. Gay marriage is a horrible idea, and…well, this is going to take a while to explain. I’ll save it for a separate post.
But Kucinich. Everyone I know likes him the best out all the Democrats (I’ve done a great job weeding people out of my life solely based on overly simplistic political positions, hooray!) – but most of them won’t admit it, because of some stupid word: “electability.” Oh enough with fucking electability already. Why don’t people see that (in the past at least) we are the ones who decides who gets elected, so if we stop whining about “electability” and instead focus on “electing” the person who best fits our values, there would be a real chance that that person could get “elected.”
Same with the damn dead turkeys. We’re so busy finding “better” dead animals to eat that we’re ignoring the larger issue, which is of course that we shouldn’t be eating animals. Simple! No one should get married, Kucinich should get elected, and we shouldn’t be eating animals. Done! What else can we work on today?
Well, that’s the Slow Food thing. Prime examples of the Slow Food problem can be found in several recent books. Let’s talk about them a little bit.
Michael Pollan, I know you know him. He’s a really wonderful writer, and has a lot of excellent points to make about what’s wrong with how we eat today. He just wrote an amazing piece about the Farm Bill for the New York Times Magazine. The Botany of Desire was awesome. That book about building his own house was just fine. Then we got An Omnivore’s Dilemma. Most of it is pretty wonderful. Then he goes into this whole long-ass part about whether or not its ethical to kill and eat animals – and of course he ends up in the Slow Food camp, and here is where I heave a big giant annoyed sigh move on.
(potato tasting – how much more Slow Foodie could you get?)
And so we move on to the lovely and brilliant Barbara Kingsolver. You’ve definitely heard of this Animal, Vegetable, Miracle book. (There are two annoyances already right there in the title, aren’t there?) There are a lot of fascinating tidbits in this tale of the year she spent growing her own food with her (breeder alert!) husband and kids who contribute to the book as well. I of course adore her other books, so this whole let’s-kill-our-own-hogs thing comes as somewhat of a slap in the face. Sadness.
Two more examples and we’ll be done. Slow Foodies love this Nourishing Traditions book, by Sally Fallon. If you fall in with a certain group of Slow Foodies and admit you’re vegan, they will push Nourishing Traditions at you faster than my group will push extra garden zucchini on you in July. The sad thing is that there is a lot I like in the book – it teaches you why fat is your friend, it explains the dangers of too many overly processed soy foods, it really pushes coconut oil. But they seem to think that just because traditional foods like lard can be healthy, no one should be vegetarian. I actually do believe that lard is most likely healthier than trans fat-laden shortenings. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to eat either one!
Update. The perennially perfect John Robbins has a great article explaining how crazy the Nourishing Traditions/Weston A. Price people are – check it out. The best part is at the end!
And finally, my friend Sandor Katz, who wrote the bible on fermented foods. He’s also written a great book called The Revolution Won’t be Microwaved. As a lovely reader recently pointed out to me, this book has a truly horrifying chapter on the virtues of meat. While I’ve been busily praising the book I had totally forgotten about this chapter because I didn’t read a word of it. I did, however, notice that the chapter is called “Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat” and the first two references are to my pal/hero Carol Adams and my pals/heros from the Bloodroot Collective, a feminist-vegetarian collective restaurant owned by friend of mine and where I’ve worked for years. So I know that Sandor is veggie-friendly and not hostile, unlike so many other Slow Foodies. He’s maybe just lost his way a little.
All these books (except for Sandor’s) are just incomprehensible to me. So many smart people, who are ordinarily so right on. How could they have failed to see this super simple thing, something I saw with absolute certainty when I was twelve, though I am clearly so much less brilliant then they are?
I am afraid it comes down to laziness (wanting to eat the foods you think you like), and some vague Christian idea of dominion. How sad when people you have so much in common with don’t share deep, fundamental values with you.
