Slow Food

From an email I sent on January 18, 2010, but still the gospel.

"I would consider myself and most of my friends unofficial members of the "slow food" movement. For us, it’s less about getting the food quickly into the belly (although there are those moments), and more about the experience of cooking, eating and sharing the food with each other. We all know that home cooked food far exceeds the taste and quality of fast food. But if we stop to think about it, home cooking our food also provides the opportunity for us to slow down, enjoy the way food is prepared, enjoy the taste of the food, and enjoy the communion of sharing the food with family and friends. Food is far too important to us as a culture (continentally, regionally, etc.) to waste all of our calories on the emptiness of a Value Meal. Give me those hours in the backyard of a friend’s house, digging a pit in which to roast a pig (not to mention the hours of roasting after basting, spice rubbing and wrapping the pig)! Give me even more hours sitting knee to knee at a small dining room table eating food that was cooked as part of a local Iron Chef Cajun contest, swapping stories about Lord-knows-what at a dinner party that will end at who-knows-what hour! Give me those moments of staging drive-by-dinner attacks on each other, using made-up recipes that rely heavily upon the cleaning out of the freezer. And give me those moments at friends’ houses, late in the evening when kids are safely tucked away, and the adults are sitting at the dining room table (or the kid’s table, depending upon whose house I’m remembering), testing out a bottle of someone’s homebrew or eating home-brined olives…Yep, food should be slow, not fast."