Slow Food

The Movement

The name the Slow Food Movement encompasses many aspects of food production that one wouldn’t initially associate with the words “slow food” but they stem from the desire of one man, Carlo Petrini to counteract the demands and knock-on negative consequences of the fast food industry.

He founded the Slow Food Movement in 1986 that aims to encourage people to value their local food traditions enough to perpetuate them and the food culture of their individual regions.

This includes the farming of plants, seeds and livestock that are characteristic of local ecosystems in order to protect biodiversity.

The Slow Food Movement supports using organic methods to prevent climate change, conserve water and safeguard the legacy of rural knowledge. It promotes humane animal husbandry regarding daily care, feeding methods and slaughtering at abattoirs.

Presently over 300,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct in the last 100 years and 1 more is lost every 6 hours. 33% of cattle, sheep and pig breeds have either disappeared or are close to extinction and 75% of fisheries are on the brink of collapse.

Here is an informative video about an incredible seed storage bank in Norway which is providing the means to safeguard seed varieties from all around the globe to ensure the preservation of biodiversity. Cary Fowler explains why....

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Slow Food embraces the same pledges that relate to the Slow Town philosophy that evolved from it namely,

The Foundation

The Slow Food Foundation insists that the future lies with small-scale agriculture and its most important initiative is “Terra Madre” that gives voice to small-scale farms and producers. It includes 2000 food communities, 300 academics and 1000 cooks. It acts to encourage and promote sustainable methods of production in harmony with nature, landscape and traditions.

In South Africa a special species of livestock, the Zulu sheep project is registered with them and receives financial assistance and advice from the Foundation.

Slow Food Locally

Slow Food encourages customers to put "local" high on our lists because the beneficiaries of transported and processed foods are not the farmers but the processors, brokers, shippers, supermarkets and oil companies. Pressurising farmers to sell their produce at low profit margins or even below market prices has the eventual effect of driving small farmers off their land and increasing the opportunity for monoculture. This signs the death warrant for our soil, biodiversity and eventually our planet.

At this point in time, I’m glad I don’t have children who could one day ask me of my generation "what on earth were we thinking?" So there's many good reasons to support our local farmers' market Wild Oats.

Why Organic!

"Slow Food" advises that organic farming provides the soil with thousands of micro-organisms that work together synergistically, feeding each other and enriching the earth. Plants are able to absorb the individual nutrients they need for their growth and this soil retains high levels of moisture and thus needs less watering. (That's when carrots help you see and spinach makes you strong - right!)

Crops grown with fertilisers and treated with pesticides, cattle dipped in poisons and injected with hormones, chickens kept in 24 hrs of artificial daylight and treated constantly with antibiotics, (I could go on....) don't provide the nutrients our bodies need to be healthy. Plants are weakened by chemical treatments just as people constantly on antibiotics lose their own natural defences.

We are what we eat and evidence has been mounting for some time now (if we look at medical aid costs and the bed occupancy of hospitals and illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancers that are affecting even young children) that what we eat isn't doing us any good!

Worm Farms

The worms thrive and multiply speedily providing one with vermi-tea that I pour on my plants like liquid fertiliser but it won’t burn or damage them and of course, the compost. I tip the containers out onto a sack every 6 weeks or so and all the worms dive from the light. I slowly keep skimming the compost off the top and eventually (it really doesn’t take that long – about 15 minutes!) they’re all tangled up together on the sack floor.

Research into earthworms has revealed that they convert the waste products they ingest into beneficial nutrients when they excrete them. David Murphy states in Earthworms of Australia that “The actual numbers of benevolent bacteria in soil due to the presence of earthworms can exceed 2 500 000 per gram in over 100 different soil types”

The Recycled Organics Unit at the University of New South Wales, Australia has used earthworms to recycle large scale waste efficiently and has produced a book called “Best Practice Guidelines to Managing Vermiculture Technologies,” which would be an ideal blueprint for South African Municipalities to consider being environmentally friendly and cost effective…..

Ukranian authorities have used vermiculture to render harmless wastes from fruit and vegetable canning factories, milk plants, and bakeries. This would be a reasonable option for South African Municipalities to implement. It is a practical and economical way to rid towns and cities of their garbage by presenting it to worm farms that would convert it into superb compost for gardens and cultivated lands. It substantially improves the quality of soil effectively giving back to Mother Nature in an unprecendented way. In the process, cities would become cleaner and landfills would reduce. Everything except glass, plastic and metal can be fed to the worms.

Worm farms have been used to restore the damaged soil to a status suitable for organic farming at Chernobyl where on 26 April 1986 the worst nuclear accident in history occurred at the Chernobyl power station in the former Soviet Union close to the border between the Ukraine and Belarus. More than 135,000 people and 35,000 cattle living within 30 kilometres of the damaged nuclear reactor had to be evacuated after which an unprecedented "zone of exclusion" was established around the site.

Nature was abandoned to cope as best it could. In the 90’s worm farms were introduced to the damaged region. It was found that earthworms, by encapsulating and sweating out through pores on their backs indigestible pathogens and toxic substances, rendered them harmless to the environment.

These worms could be used on larger scales to help us deal with hospital waste products and the like. I shudder to think of some of mankind’s hazardous waste that is going into landfill.

How amazing is it that simple innocuous worms have within them the ability to render harmless many dangerous man-made products and if used judiciously can go a long way to restoring the damage we have wrecked on our natural environment.

Living Simply

In his book “Small is Beautiful “ E.F. Schumacher presents the idea that the world will not be fed until we pursue a lifestyle designed for permanence. He suggests that “even bigger machines,entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress. They are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and the beautiful.” These sentiments are shared by the Slow Food Movement.

To simplify life by getting back to the land and growing one’s own food increases one’s self-sufficiency reducing dependency on money. Two door-sized areas are sufficient to produce a workable vegetable garden for a family. Although a large plot of land will produce more crops, pot gardens and miniature indoor greenhouses can also provide fresh home grown fruit and vegetables for town and city dwellers.

It is very satisfying to be able to pick a good deal of our evening meal’s ingredients out the garden as we need them benefiting from the freshest most nutritious vegetables ever.

South African Slow Food Recipes

An alternative way to cook a potjie when one doesn’t want to sit outside and nurse an open fire is to use a slow cooker. Yet another is to use the Yum Yum eco-friendly hot box. In both instances I fry the onions with a spoon of sugar and brown the meat after that in the same frying pan to seal in the juices. I layer the meat and the vegies into the slow cooker, and rinse out the meat juices in the frying pan with a liter of water with flavourings, herbs and spices of choice in it so that the meat and vegetables are covered.

The meal can then be left to cook itself. One proviso for the Yum Yum cooker is that the liquid in the pot should be bubbling hot because that initial heat is going to cook the food for the next number of hours and for that reason I would also cut the meat and the vegies into smaller bite sized chunks so that the food cooks through easier.



For updated info on Sedgefield's Slow Food you can visit these pages,

Sedgefield's Slow Food Convivium

Sedgefield's Slow Food Workshop

Links to Similar Sites

They discovered a higher quality of life which meant more time with family and friends, a lower cost of living, a toxin-free home and yard, access to wholesome food and safe drinking water, and more time spent in nature.

Let them show you how!

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