FROM THE ARCHIVES
[ home | archives | e-mail ]
Speedometer Food
[Iain Murray 03/09 03:51 PM]Rod, as a Tory I of course favor local food traditions. I grew up with Singin’ Hinnies, Saveloy Sandwiches and Stottie Cakes, none of which are particularly easy to get outside of the North-East of England. My trouble with the Slow Food movement is, as I intimated, that it is too dogmatic. One day I’d love a bowl of Pan Haggerty, but the next I’d like a bowl of Vietnamese Pho. If that pho requires spices and ingredients that are not native to the area, and which have to be imported from far away, then I see nothing wrong with that. Slow food, on the other hand, is an avowedly protectionist body that believes in import tariffs and barriers to make such imports deliberately more expensive. I happen to think New Zealand butter is the best I have tasted and am glad that Commonwealth trade links meant it was freely available when I was growing up. Slow Food wouldn’t approve. The slow food manifesto is a pretty scary document to me, showing its communist roots to the extent that you could delete “food” and replace the word with, say, “steel” in very many cases. And their application of the precautionary principle is deeply wrong, in my opinion. More of that anon, I expect.
So I wouldn’t join Slow Food. I wouldn’t join a Fast Food movement if there were such a thing either. The analogy to CAMRA I made earlier is what I’d like to see. A movement that repudiates the health extremists who are responsible for much of the homogenization of our food and exists to strengthen the demand side for good food, so that the market can provide such food at a reasonable price for everyone, everywhere that they want it. It should be noted that the ales of the Burton area, where the water is particularly conducive to good beer, are now available all over the UK thanks to CAMRA’s work, but regional breweries still thrive — CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival every August is a great showpiece for them (perhaps you’d like to go with me this year or next, Rod?). No beer purity laws were needed — just the pull of the market. It happened with beer. It can happen with food.
|
