Culinary Travel Meets Slow Food

Ballymaloe Cookery School Sits at Crossroads

Apr 18, 2008 Jacqueline Church

Ballymaloe Cookery School sits on a 100 acre organic farm; right in the cross-hairs of two food trends: Slow Food and Culinary Travel. Kingsolver offers food for thought.

When does a trend become the standard? Culinary travel is no longer new. How it will be reconciled with environmental and slow food concerns, remains to be seen.

Slow food as a concept is a relatively new trend, but it's worldwide and growing. Then again, it's as old as time. Well, at least the time that the first human figured out how to gather food or grow it. A cooking school and an author offer examples to live by.

“Slow Food” is meant to convey the opposite of “fast food” and the name was coined deliberately to make us stop and think. Imagine if your food was produced locally and organically; imagine if you knew the farmer by name and s/he knew you. We live in an interesting time when the desire for local, organic food, for fair trade practices, and for a healthy planet all run high.

At the same time, we revel in the luxury of whatever we want, whenever we want it, at the best possible price. Some writers, cooks, farmers, and some disastrous environmental trends have begun to make us recognize that calculating “best price” can be done in many ways. And defining luxury, too.

The Sublime Paradox

Eating food that is seasonal is a "slow food" concept. It's not a new one. Before we began feeding our hunger for peaches in January or berries in February, we enjoyed seasonal treasures because we knew their time was short. Haven't we lost something by allowing cottony peaches year round to dilute our taste memory of what a perfect summer peach tastes like?

Barbara Kingsolver notes that restraint can actually equal indulgence. We think of restraint as a deprivation, but the sublime paradox is that no out-of-season tomato will ever compare with the sensual pleasure of a perfect tomato in season, from the backyard garden or farmer's market. Especially not if it's an heirloom tomato that has not had its flavor bred out for the convenience of shipping.

In the Northeast, asparagus, fiddleheads and ramps are in season now. Grilling ramps brings out a delectable sweetness. Each Spring the pleasure of this seasonal treat is deepened by the knowledge that the season is short.

Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, Ireland has been teaching cooking since 1983. One of five cooking schools highlighted in “A Cook's Tour in Provence” (Feb Travel + Leisure). It boasts acclaimed chefs and culinary teachers as well as having the advantage of the 100 acre organic farm from which the school sources its ingredients.

Cooking with organic ingredients from the surrounding farm...doesn't get much more local, or “slow” than that. In fact, Darina Allen has been a champion of Ireland's Slow Food movement, artisanal products and farmers and sustainable food and farms for years. She's also won numerous awards for her cookbooks, her classes and her stewardship of Ireland's culinary heritage. She is the daughter-in-law of Myrtle Allen who began the renaissance of farm to table cooking in Ireland in the 1960's.

This excellent series describes the flourishing Irish food culture: artisanal cheese makers, producers, farmers and the gaining appreciation for Irish food.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver's latest book (HarperCollins 2007) describes a family's decision to go back to the farm, grow their own food for a year. Currently, 85 cents of our food dollar goes to processors, marketers, and transporters not to farmers.

The author's epiphany came when she and her fellow Arizonans were advised that the tap water was safe for everything, (eating, drinking, cooking) but shouldn't be used for the goldfish, because it would kill them. She began to see that the city that had grown in the desert was akin to a space station where everything needed for life came from far, far away.

The story is instructive and the book avoids becoming preachy due to Kingsolver's willingness to laugh at herself as she does. She invites us to join her by the grace of her writing. Her family's adventure in farming gives us many opportunities to reflect on our own food choices, to think about them and the consequences of them, in new ways.

Many passages in the book border on hysterical. Funny how turkey parenting can illustrate what's gone so wrong with our outsourcing and mechanizing of food production. For example, turkeys bred for convenience and large breasts do not really know how to be turkeys any more. Do the turkeys left even know how to breed? Turns out we've bred out most turkeys' ability to even do that which should come so naturally, to any living creature. The genetic diversity of the whole of the species is decreasing too, and whatever you feel about turkeys, it's clearly not a good thing from a biodiversity standpoint.

The Irish have just begun to recover their agricultural riches and shake the ghost of famine that struck when their population was reliant on a single crop that failed.

Read about Heritage Turkeys, like Kingsolver's.

Food for Thought

Monocrop farming, decreasing diversity and deliberate short-sighted policy decisions could lead to devastating consequences for all of us, not just “people” “somewhere”. Someone described the fallacy of thinking decisions affect only those making them, comparing it to thinking peeing in only in one part of the pool is okay. Evidence mounts daily that food choices have health consequences for us and the environment.

Ballymaloe is a prime example of what can be gained by going "slow." Kingsolver gives us many options for starting out on the path. Don't worry, not all of them involve helping turkeys mate or canning our own tomatoes.

For more information on Darina Allen, her award winning school, and recipes galore: Ballymaloe Cookery School site.
See Darina Allen honored at the Cooking for Solutions event.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle site has resources (links to local Slow Food and Farmers; as well as government agencies and other organizations) and loads more recipes.
For a primer on Slow Food see Elaine Koontz's article here.

The copyright of the article Culinary Travel Meets Slow Food in Gourmet Food is owned by Jacqueline Church. Permission to republish Culinary Travel Meets Slow Food in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.