Word: slowes
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...chronic malnutrition before prices went up. Yet none of the invited speakers at Harvard’s session on food had much interest in this larger problem, or any academic standing to address it. One was a celebrity restaurant owner from San Francisco, the second led an organization called Slow Food USA, and the third was a noted playwright and actress from New York. Apparently Harvard had found no reason to seek the opinion of a trained nutritionist, or a demographer, or an agroecologist. Not even an historian...
...message from this panel of non-scholars fit perfectly with bi-coastal elite fashion: Our food should be organic, local, and slow. These ideas have no scholarly pedigree. The assertion that food should be grown without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (“organically”) can be traced back nearly a century to an Austrian mystic named Rudolf Steiner who also believed in cosmic rhythms, human reincarnation, and the lost city of Atlantis. The idea of eating locally comes from the founder of a community-supported kitchen in Berkeley, California. The idea of slow food was first popularized...
...take these ideas seriously for the moment, what might a fully organic, local, and slow food system actually look like? The closest approximation we have is not New York City or Berkeley, California, but rural Africa, where 60 percent of all citizens are small farmers growing food without chemicals, for local consumption, and still preparing meals in a traditional fashion. The downside? Average income in rural Africa is only $1 a day and one third of these people are malnourished...
...Food systems in rural Africa are also painfully slow, especially for the women who prepare the meals. In order to serve a meal of nsima (maize), African women must first spend a season planting, weeding, harvesting, and storing their corn, then they must strip it, then winnow it, then soak it, then lay it out to dry, then carry it to a grinder or pound it by hand, then dry it again, and then finally—after walking to gather fuel wood and water—build a fire and cook...
These organic, local, and slow African food systems are also bad for the natural environment. Attempting to grow more food to keep pace with an increasing population, Africa’s farmers have shortened their fallow times, which exhausts soil nutrients. They also expand cropping and grazing onto more erodible lands, cutting more trees and destroying more wildlife habitat. Roughly 70 percent of all deforestation in Africa comes from this expansion of low-yield farming. It would be better if these farmers increased crop yields on land already cleared by applying some nitrogen fertilizer, but that would violate the mystical...