Slow Food

While in college, I have grown accustomed to picking up meals on the go and spending little to no time actually preparing them. Yesterday, I visited my boyfriend's parents house in Vancouver, WA and had a lesson in Slow Food. Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma defines the mission of slow food "to remind a generation of industrial eaters of their connection to farmers and farm, and to the plants and animals we depend on" (259).

The menu for the night was salmon burgers with corn on the cob, salad, whole potatoes, and bread, all followed by blackberry pie. Getting the meal together was a full family effort. My first duty was making the salad for the family of 5. When first assigned the task, I thought I would be pulling leaves from a polyethylene bag similar to those that Pollan discusses on page 176- precut, prewashed "summer greens." But then I was handed a bowl of gigantic leaves of lettuce and spinach still attached to each other. I had not realized how mammoth a spinach leaf was; I was indoctrinated to believe that golf-ball sized spinach leaves from the bags were standard while these extended the length of my hand (not including the stem!). The salad alone took 25 minutes for me to complete. I had to wash the leaves, remove the rotty areas, hand tear them into bite sized pieces, as well as gather all the toppings of cut up pear, sunflower seeds, cranberries, chopped walnuts, and shredded asiago cheese.

It took a considerable more amount of time to create this salad, compared to a bagged one with separate packets for the toppings and dressings that I had grown used to. It was definitely a job I'd only have time to do on a lazy weekend, not a normal hectic school day. But the act of preparing the meal in the kitchen with the other members of the family made for quite a social occasion. My boyfriend was removing the skin from the salmon fillets, while his brother was rolling out the homemade crust for the frozen blackberries that had been picked from the vines around the perimeter of their house last summer.

When I finally sat down to eat the meal, I realized that this is what Whole Food meant by "whole foods." Nothing contained more than a handful ingredients and everything had originated from somewhere relatively local- even the wine we drank it down with. It was all a fine lesson in eating slow food and "local" whole foods, but certainly something that can only happen only infrequently because of time permitting.