niente senza gioia

I am not a foodie. Conversations which fixate on food and restaurants inspire a mood that swings back and forth from murderous to suicidal. But I do eat. I buy food, prepare it, and I have strong memories of food, and strong preferences. I'm just not that interested in talking or obsessing about it. Partly because my preferences generally are for the simple, and strongly for the "Mediterranean" diet of my childhood, especially at my Italian grandmother's table.

But I see what bad food is doing, and I fear it. As Michael Pollan writes in his new book: "The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them." He means the contemporary western diet of corporate food, that is artificial and unhealthy. In fact, it's deadly.
I also fear the trend of food coming from so far away, and being dependent on that. But there are other, newer trends that are heartening. A few were highlighted in just the past few days--in a local article about a woman in my town who grows and prepares almost all her own food. From our local university, HSU, where students are trying to commit to a sustainable healthy diet--even if the best they can do so far is breakfast. And a trio of articles (here and here and here) in the San Francisco Chronicle about using disused land to grow vegetables for food "in the shadow of buildings" in the city.

These are all great. I'm also a fan--from a distance, at least--of the Slow Food movement that began in Italy (where else?) Not only because it supports all these good things--good, healthy, real food, sustainably and locally produced. But because it's also about having a good time. Someone somewhere said it's the first leftish movement--and one could add the first ecological movement--that emphasizes joy. (That's the founder there on the left: Carlo Petrini.) That reminds me of a slogan of an arts program for Italian schoolchildren I've prized for years, even if as only an aspiration: niente senza gioia: Nothing without joy.