Slow Food/Fast Food

Slow Food/Fast Food

One Saturday last month I called my mom so she could tell me what to
cook for dinner. I was uninspired. I also had no food in the house
and no time to go to the grocery store. It was still hot, and all I
felt like eating was Cheerios, but we'd had Cheerios for breakfast. Also
possibly for lunch. And I have a two-year-old and all the nutrition
guilt that comes with that. So I called my mom, thinking she'd say
something like, “scrabbled eggs,” which I had the ingredients for and could
probably handle.

Anyway, I called, and my dad said she'd have to call me back--her hands
were full of chicken. Later she called and explained that she'd
been chopping the heads off chickens. I asked her what brought that on.

It turns out that my parents’ church is sponsoring a family of recent Iraqi immigrants. Lompoc, California has a very nice federal prison and an Air Force base, but no halal butcher, so this family has been eating vegetarian and longing for meat. They live in an apartment which has no slaughtering facilities. So my parents invited them over to butcher chickens in the proper way, and this project naturally blossomed into preparing a fabulous Iraqi feast. All this is incredibly admirable, and I'm really glad they're doing it and even more glad that I don't have to. I don’t want to look a fowl in the eye before eating him or her.

As far as I know this was my mom’s first slaughtering experience, but she was doing slow food before it was invented. When I was a kid she cured her own olives. She made goat cheese, and yes, they were our goats. She plucked grape leaves and stuffed them. She’d put a grenade in your lunch box before a Twinkie. We complained constantly.

And this brings me to the slow food movement—another example of something I totally admire and I’m really glad they’re doing it and even more glad that I don’t have to. I want to be the person that plants an assortment of gourmet lettuces and then at dinner time wanders out to the garden to pluck a few choice baby leaves, then washes them in several changes of cold water and finally eats them with extra virgin olive oil and just a sprinkling of the very best parmesan. I would like to have a smaller footprint. Also a smaller butt print. I would also like to have the goat or cow for the parmesan in my backyard. And I would like to live wherever you have to live to make real parmigiano reggiano cheese. I’ll bet it’s really nice there.

But I am an American. We work too hard. We indulge our children. We eat fast food. We also eat pre-washed lettuce from a bag, which I consider to be one of major advances of the 20th century, along with the wide availability of good bread. And where would we be without frozen orange juice and chicken pot pies? My whole family would have scurvy—that’s where we’d be.

I’m not sure where this fits into the fast food/slow food discussion, but I have a piece of salt pork in my refrigerator that is older than my son. It may outlive my son. That's the beauty of nitrates and sealed plastic packaging. There is something very comforting about having a few bags of dried beans and some salt pork on hand. Isn’t that the meal that won the West? We could eat that for a week if we really needed to—hunched in the attic while the flood waters rise, waiting for the rescue helicopter, eating our beans and salt pork—full of fear, full of hope, and full of beans.