Slow Food For Thought

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before how I feel strongly that my perception of times passing has ratcheted up a rather large notch since leaving University and perhaps another notch upon on my getting settled in England. It’s a scary thing to feel that almost as soon as you have planned what to do in a day, by merit of it having been planned it has now basically happened already and now you must plan the next day. The busier my life gets (and I am pretty bad for piling more onto my plate before I clear something else), the more this sensation intensifies.

Trying to think of a way to deal with this, while still doing the things I want do, my mind was drawn back to the Slow Food Movement. Started in Italy several years ago, the point form edition is that it entails…
- Trying to reverse the trend towards rushed lifestyles where families don’t eat together so much as nuke this and that, eating as a chore in-between tasks, instead of treating dinner time as its own entity.
- Taking pleasure from the process of cooking as much as the eating, often engaging in cooking meals that take several hours to prepare but which pay off for the effort expended. Superior satisfaction follows.
- There is also an element of environmentalism in that the Slow Movement encourages eating locally produced, organic goods instead of chemically sprayed vegetables trucked across half the globe.

I'd love to be able to fully engage in the Slow Food Movement but, like a lot of people, organic foods are a luxury item to me (on my less than epic budget) and I find that sharing a kitchen with house mates makes it very tricky to spend more than an hour on cooking and eating. So I just try to avoid more than one microwavable meal a week and I don't go buying apples from bloody Madagascar when I can get Empire Apples from within the country.

The name may also have something to do with why I purchase those apples, I admit!

From this we come to the lesser known umbrella under which Slow Food rests, the Slow Life Movement. Some of it can come off as what some would dub "fruity hippy crap" but I highly recommend persevering. Entire towns are being planned, on both sides of the Atlantic, around the Slow Movement principles. This grouping of guiding principles stress that you can still live a perfectly modern life and work the job you want while changing the way you engage your life, your job, so that you take greater pleasure from it while losing that terrifying feeling that the days are slipping through your fingers.

My apologies for not getting into a lot of the nitty-gritty, but as the movement seeps into all aspects in life (yes, there is even Slow Sex) I would have a lot of ground to cover if I tried to! So, aside from the web links, I shall direct you all to a great book which I bought Joe for Christmas last year. In Praise of Slow acts as a very good introduction to it all, written from the perspective of a convert as he chronicles the process of his induction to the different aspects of the philosophy. I remember being particularly gripped by the opening, wherein he states the event which made him think that he might be in need of Slow - the evening he seriously considered reading his children one minute bed time stories, so as to save time. I mean, screw bonding with your children when you could be making so many awesome Excel spreadsheets!

He also keeps a blog of new slow developments!

So okay, coming back to the focus - ME, ME, ME (and you, I guess!) - how to integrate any or all of this? Hard to say. I know I've managed to wean myself from looking at my watch while on the bus, train or tube - doing so and getting anxious won't actually get me where I'm going any faster! That I had to do during Uinversity and it seriously helped me get to class in a better state of mind for learning.

I also make a point of waiting until I have an hour to just listen to a new album I've purchased, instead of slapping it on while I write or whatever. That has resulted in some very enjoyable listens where I have definitely noticed subtleties which it might have taken months of background listening to find.

Other than those two, I've generally tried to cut down on multi-tasking and to tell myself that "I will spend x amount of minutes on this task before I consider working on another". Oddly, putting that kind of contstraint onto my writing, drawing etc has in fact left me better able to focus and more relaxed. Before, I found I would rush one task to get to the next and in the end have not lived up to my full capabilities in anything I had done!

Otherwise, it's something I'm still wrestling with and I suspect I'll be wrestling with it for some time, given the deadline driven nature of the film industry. Ah well. In closing, I'll recommend the second last issue (#69) of one of the few magazines worth more than the paper it is printed on - Colors. This particular issue is devoted to Slow Food around the world and, as with every issue, it has a lot of weblinks, books and phone numbers in the back to help readers further explore the topic as well as related topics. If nothing else, this magazine has some of the most beautiful and natural looking photography that I've seen in my many years of devouring media. For my Ottawa readers, you can buy it at Mags & Fags on Elgin St. while for all my other readers (Hello to my new reader in Tokyo!) I can suggest you follow my link to their website where they have scans of all their issues. That being said, do see if you can find an outlet to buy it in - this is the kind of magazine you keep on your shelf for years and find yourself coming back to more than once.

Plus, if you like Found magazine, then may I direct you to Colour's very impressive "1000 Extraordinary Objects" Book? Yes, yes I may.

Them folk on yonder island ain't so much like our folk
-This all reminds me...microwave meals (usually called "Ready meals") are ten times as popular in England as they are in Canada. They take up much more space in supermarkets and many of them are actually very high quality - though still pre-made food which has been stored for lord knows how long and it tends to have way too much salt in it. Certainly, there is a lot more temptation to pull you away from trying to live slow, to be sure.

-People from sleepy towns beware! A yellow light, even when the green man is still flashing underneath it, apparently signifies GO NOW NOW NOW to London drivers. This has resulted in a fair share of near misses on my part!

P.S. I have recently learned that if you read my site on an RSS feed then you only get the first version of a post. I often go back to add pictures or correct errors, so may I recommend that you bookmark the site instead? If only so I seem a tad more literate? This is important, I swear!

P.P.S. It is weird seeing people debate and discuss your possible identity.

P.P.P.S. Why the hell am I using post-scripts on a website? OH WELL, NO TURNING BACK NOW