Slow Down ..... Eat. What Italy has to teach us about cooking, eating and living in a fast-paced world

Slow down ... eat: What Italy
has to teach us about cooking, eating and living in a fast-paced world

Randy
Shore, Vancouver
Sun

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Stop.

Just stop for one minute. Turn off your cell phone, the television, the
computer, your BlackBerry and whatever else you might be using to stay connected
to every other living being on the planet. Eat a strawberry or an apple or a
crusty piece of fresh bread and taste it, feel it in your mouth and think about
where it came from.

Through this revolutionary act, you have just joined the slow food movement.
And it is a movement. When newspaper reporters cotton to the idea of living
more slowly, you can bet that the message is starting to penetrate the world's
consciousness.

Slow food isn't necessarily about slow cooking and it isn't about laziness, because
it might be a little more work, Stelio Smotlak said in an interview in Italian,
translated by University
of Toronto professor Olga
Pugliese for The Vancouver Sun.

Smotlak, a University of Trieste professor, spoke on the geopolitics of food
at the 2008 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, this week at the University of B.C.

Slow food is about taking a little more time to choose what you eat and
connecting with the land and the rain and the sun.

If that sounds a bit poetic, that's no accident. Poetry makes you feel
things and that's what food should do, too.

The modern age of mechanization and computerization promised us a better
life, in which machines would do the work and people would be freer than ever
to pursue leisure, art and meaningful living. It has not happened.

"We have surrendered leadership to machines," Smotlak explained.
"We've lost our way."

The enemy is haste.

"Slow culture is an eminently humanistic value," he said.
"Slow living is a profound form of participating and experiencing. It goes
beyond superficiality and haste. It is a search for the authentic."

Globalization promised more choice than ever and it has delivered -- but not
completely for the better.

Globalization has at its heart commerce, which has led to an erosion of
local identity and culture especially in terms of the food that we eat, Smotlak
said.

Strawberries and grapes in December are considered a birthright by the
modern shopper, but it is a luxury we have enjoyed only in the past few decades
-- a heartbeat in the history of humankind.

Shopping thoughtlessly at the grocery store is like laying a beating on
Mother Earth. Think about the carbon footprint of a California strawberry that has traveled
thousands of kilometres.

The same cannot be said for a B.C. apple or raspberry. And buying locally
and seasonally not only benefits the local economy, it is easier on the wallet,
Smotlak said. Artisanal cheeses may not be cheaper than the product marketed by
food conglomerates, but a little really good cheese does go a long way,
satisfaction-wise.

Local food tastes like the place where it is grown, a guiding principle for
professional and home cooks in the old country.

That knowledge and its modern practice is why Italy has a major role to play in
teaching people how to live again, Smotlak said.

"A complex process of rethinking is urgently needed: a renewal that is
anthropological and at the same time political," he said.

The idea that good food is local and fresh from the garden, the ocean, or
the forest is innate to the Italian view of food and reflected in Italians'
love of simple preparations, game meat and regional flavours.

Every village has its own ragu. What that means is that people pay attention
to what is good about the produce in their neighbourhoods, and then use it.

B.C.'s fast-growing organic farming sector is an indication of how far we
have come, said chef Pino Posteraro, owner of Cioppino's Mediterranean Grill
and Enoteca.

"I come from a small town of only 5,000 souls," he explained.
"This is idea of biodynamic, organic farming. We did it because it was the
only way.

"Finally in Vancouver,
we understand that when we go to a restaurant we must embrace the philosophy of
the restaurant, we have to sit down and enjoy not always go, go, go, fast,
fast, fast."

To that end, Posteraro now serves lunch at the Mediterranean grill only
three months of the year and it is a four-course affair. No sandwiches.

"People want to be in and out and go back to school or work and that's
fine," he said. "There are other restaurants for that."

Real food cannot be rushed, he said.

"Things have changed in Italy,
too, with modern life, but they still understand the chain, the
connections," he said. "In B.C. we are getting this message too, more
than any place in Canada."

"We are more in touch with nature, with the origins of products and
humane ways of doing things," he said.

Posteraro began sourcing free-range meats and naturally grown veggies 10
years ago when it was a real chore to find products in sufficient quantities.
Today, nearly every chef who cares to can find quality local produce, though
not everything and not necessarily year-round, Posteraro said. "But from
May to September, I am in heaven."

There are no local substitutes for Parmigiano, Reggiano or olive oil, and,
even though Canadian wheat is used to make dried pasta in Italy, Canadian
manufacturers have not yet mastered the art of making it. Posteraro brings it
in from Italy
without apology.

"I don't think it is possible to eat a 100-mile diet in Vancouver," he said.
"But we can pay attention to what the seasons and what nature tells
us."

He emphasizes simplicity and natural flavour in his restaurant preparations
and in what he cooks at home. Posteraro avoids adding fats and flour to his
sauces, many of which are reductions that amplify flavour without distorting
the food's natural essence.

To understand how radically different that kind of cooking is from the North
American standard, take any prepared packaged food out of your cupboard and
read the ingredients.

Changing popular food culture is like steering a battleship with a spoon
when the currents of mass-marketed convenience culture and major corporations
that run large-scale agribusiness are running against you.

James Beard began trying to convince North Americans that great food could
be local as early as 1940. Though Beard favoured French technique -- as did
fellow foodie Julia Child -- he insisted that great food must be a local
phenomenon and wrote dozens of popular cookbooks.

And, though Beard and Child did alert the upper classes and gastronomists to
the value of food culture, their influence among the great unwashed proved
minimal beyond those who tried a few French techniques in the home kitchen.

Alice Waters took Beard's idea one step further by sourcing ingredients
directly from farmers and artisanal dairy producers for her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. Her simple
preparations and religious reverence for great local ingredients sparked California cuisine,
which is practised with varying degrees of skill in thousands of restaurants
today.

Waters has been a tireless evangelist for home gardening, community gardens
and school gardens to help people reconnect with the Earth's rhythms.

Food is the fuel for one's inner spirit, Smotlak said, and there is comfort
in ritual. Feasts and ceremonies are often used to mark religious occasions,
but the sacred rituals of food can be much smaller events.

"After one's daily work one must reserve a moment of respite," he
said. "I close the door and begin to peel potatoes."

Posteraro takes that idea even further, emphasizing the ritual not only in
preparing food, but in eating it.

"If you prepare a braised dish that takes hours to cook, you anticipate
it, then you want to sit down, you want to savour it, see the back-palate
flavour, you want to try the wine," he explained. "You don't want
just shove it in your mouth and send it down."

In the book Bread Body Spirit, Alice Peck laments the moments missed by "not
paying attention to the poetry of the ordinary."

Taking note of the food we eat and who we share it with makes what can be a
mundane event a sacred event, she writes. Even planting a seed is spiritual, an
act of faith.

The pervasive message of corporate advertising is that you can eat quickly
and have more time to go a make more money and the pace of modern life can make
that sound attractive, said Barbara-Jo McIntosh, who like Pino Posteraro is a
former employee of Vancouver's
Italian dining godfather, Umberto Menghi.

But money isn't everything and you don't have to be rich to eat thoughtfully
and purposefully, said McIntosh, owner of Barbara-Jo's Books to Cooks.

"In fact it's easier when you are poor because prepared foods usually
cost more than fresh produce," she said. "Just spend a little more
time in the produce aisle imagining the possibilities."

McIntosh, who owns neither a cellular phone nor a microwave oven, worries
that people are so plugged in to technology and work that they are losing contact
with each other and with food. Without a connection to what we eat, we are out
of touch with the earth that nourishes us, she said.

"Everything always comes back to food," she said. "It's
wonderful to share a meal."

Smotlak argues that eating should bring us into contact with the earth that
provides vital energy, what St. Francis of Assisi praised as "Sister, Mother Earth
who sustains and governs us."

You don't have to go to church to be more spiritual, he said. An Italian
trattoria or a winery will do.

Posteraro agrees.

"Italians embrace good food as a way of living," said Posteraro.
"That's what we have to share with the world."

rshore [at] png [dot] canwest [dot] com

BABY STEPS TO SLOWER EATING

Grow something and eat it. Parsley will grow in a tin can full of dirt at
any time of year. Mint too. A tomato plant costs $3 and will produce $20 to $40
worth of fruit in a pot on the balcony.

Skip one CSI rerun and spend a full hour eating dinner with your spouse
and/or children. Have a glass of wine. Talk about the food.

Cook a meal with your partner. Put on a CD and have a glass of wine.

Teach your children to cook. We put a lot of effort into driving children to
soccer, baseball, ballet, piano but they will probably cook nearly every day of
their adult lives. The same cannot be said of ballet.

Go to a farm. The Circle Farm Tour is a circuit of farms that are open to
the public in Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Maple
Ridge, Langley and Agassiz.
Check the web at www.circlefarmtour.com, get in your car and go. They let you
taste things.

Academia Italiana della Cucina presents Lessons in Slow Food, a presentation
by the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo and Colorno Italy
Wednesday, June 18, 6 p.m. at the Istituto Italiano Cuiltura, #500-510 W.
Hastings St. The event is free but registration is required. Call 604-688-0809
ext. 23 or e-mail iicvancouver [at] esteri [dot] it.

Check out Slow Food Vancouver at www.slowfoodvancouver.com.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

CREDIT: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun

Chef Pino Posteraro (right) goes over a delivery of
fresh-from-the-garden salad greens in the kitchen at Cioppino's Wednesday with
supplier Paul Healey of Hanna Brook Farm.

CREDIT: Darren Stone, Victoria Times Colonist

Get in touch with food again with a front yard garden like
this one in Victoria.
The kids will love it.