Fast food? Try some slow food for a change

"Would you like to come to a slow food dinner?" Railroad Square resident Michael Dimock inquired about a decade ago. "What's slow food?" I responded. "An alternative to fast food," he answered.

Having been a McDonald's cook for four years to put myself through college, I have eaten lots of fast food. So I decided to attend a slow food dinner, though it was long after Dimock's first invitation.

My reward: Good food. Great wine. Wonderful company.

It started in the afternoon with most of us helping and went late into the night. Storytelling and recited poetry kept us up. I felt nourished, both body and soul.

It reminded me of my Uncle Dale's farm in the late 1940s, before electricity reached rural Iowa. No TV. Ice boxes, gas lights and stories at night. "Once upon a time, a long, long time ago . . ." And we were off to a magical world. Being a dairy farm, we were the milkmen. We got our eggs from the family down the gravel road. I especially liked the huge 5 a.m. pancakes when we came in from milking and chores -- comfort food.

Maybe slow food is just a new name for an old way of doing food together. Preparing food and eating it together tends to create ongoing relationships between family members, friends and within a community. Maybe the pleasures of growing, preparing and eating food together are coming back again to more people.

When Dimock recently mentioned the Slow Food Nation that expects to draw more than 50,000 people to San Francisco this Labor Day Weekend, I was ready to go.

Dimock is now the president of Roots of Change, a group based in San Francisco that co-sponsors Slow Food Nation. He makes it home to Sonoma County on weekends.

Changing one's food habits is not easy; I've tried. Changing someone else's food habits can be even more difficult. Many of us living in the United States were raised on unhealthy junk food. It's cheap and convenient, and Americans tend to want to move fast. Yet slowing down has many advantages.

I got off junk food decades ago, but making it to organic and local food has been a longer stretch.

I moved to Sebastopol in 1992 to become a farmer, partly to learn more about and eat better food. A good reason to live here is that it is rich with healthy food options. Our local economy is strengthened when people buy more at farmer's markets, local grocery stores and directly from farms, such as those on Farm Trails. That way our money tends to stay here circulating among ourselves.

I am not a "foodie," like many of my farmer friends. I have learned about food, but I still have a ways to go. Being raised in a military family of seven, we ate rapidly and competitively. One reason I left the military was that the potlucks to which protesters invited soldiers had better food than that shoveled up by the Army.

I still am not a great cook, like some of my close friends, though I do well with oatmeal most mornings and make a great hot-sauced pasta.

The slow food movement is not just for those who can spend hours at it. Wherever someone is in the continuum from deadly junk food to healthy local food, slow food can provide support for improving one's food habits.

Most of us need support to shift out of old habits, even when we know that they can be destructive. Local slow food chapters and meals provide that support. One does not need to be a food purist to benefit from Slow Food wisdom.

Shepherd Bliss began farming in Sebastopol in 1992 and now teaches at Sonoma State University. E-mail him at sb3@pon.net.