Slow Food Movement Quotes

The delicate sweetness of just-picked vegetables is always worth savoring.

Wherever possible, I like to use home-grown or locally produced ingredients.

When I was at the Cordon Bleu things took hours and hours and hours to make. And they were beautiful dishes - and I know how to cook that way - but I was like, 'no one is cooking like this.'

When I grew up in Italy in the 1950s, it was still very agricultural. Food was very important; produce was very important. Everyone made their own olive oil. It took me a long time after I moved here to understand that Americans are much further away from their food.

I think America's food culture is embedded in fast-food culture. And the real question that we have is: How are we going to teach slow-food values in a fast-food world? Of course, it's very, very difficult to do, especially when children have grown up eating fast food and the values that go with that.

Americans are tired of fad diets, counting calories, and living within restrictive guidelines about carbs and fat. They are turning to Mireille Guiliano for her sensible and admittedly contrarian advice on eating well.

I'm obviously very hippie-like, and I'm always in a different city and town and country, and I thought, 'Why is it that the big food chains are always so promoted? I want the whole ingredients. I don't want preservatives. I want what this town and these farmers produce and see how their chefs create.'

Whenever possible, I use local, fresh ingredients, just because it tastes and feels better to eat an egg or a tomato or a hamburger that wasn't flown halfway around the world, that didn't travel on a truck and get stuck in traffic jams, that hasn't been sitting in a supermarket's refrigerator case for days.

There's no doubt about it: people want local, real food.

... but food eaten quickly isn't food.

I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It's an older country, and they've learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.

I think the local food movement has been taken to idiotic extremes. And so I wrote about that and people got pissed.

It's difficult when you travel around America to get local food; it used to be very easy. You went from town to town and were more in touch with things.

As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food's going to taste good. And that - that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved.

In our fast-forward culture, we have lost the art of eating well. Food is often little more than fuel to pour down the hatch while doing other stuff - surfing the Web, driving, walking along the street. Dining al desko is now the norm in many workplaces. All of this speed takes a toll. Obesity, eating disorders and poor nutrition are rife.

We don't sing about eating local produce or growing beards or anything like that. It's funny to find yourself in a position where people associate you with things that are completely arbitrary to your songs.

I've become a produce snob. I like to eat food that's in season.

People cooked with a certain integrity before fast food, 50 or 60 years ago. When the cheap food arrived, and we didn't have the education and deep cultural roots to hold on, we got swept away by fast, cheap and easy.

The New Nordic diet originated in 2004, when the visionary chefs Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer called a symposium of regional chefs to address the public's increasing consumption of processed foods, additives, highly refined grains, and mass-produced poultry and meat.

In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.

The United States is far too efficient. We've lost the ceremony of eating. People don't eat at home and cook meals at home.

I love to sit and eat quietly and enjoy each bite, aware of the presence of my community, aware of all the hard and loving work that has gone into my food.

Eating local is a relatively new concept in American dining; for the Italians, it's a way of life.