Imagine the possibility that your local community unionized with an increased awareness for improving their health and vitality. Members of work to educate their community about the benefits of sourcing their food locally. As a response, farmers and farmers’ markets respond to satisfy the demands of its local consumers. This collaborative exchange results in building our community and we celebrate our lives with food that is more delicious and nutritious than EVER imagined!

What is Slow Food?

Slow Food is a volunteer run organization committed to building communities through the food we eat. Slow Food’s foundation is in the promotion that all foods should be GOOD, CLEAN and FAIR for all. This means that we are collectively committed to supporting efforts to make our food supply more sustainable, cleaner, and available to consumers. Are you interested in sourcing foods that are more nutritious and delicious for your family? Well the Slow Food movement has grown now to more than 500 chapters around the world including over 225 chapters here in the United States. Slow Food even has nearly a dozen chapters here in New England and we collaborate our leadership together as Slow Food New England.

Here at we work to promote foods grown and produced first here in Massachusetts but also throughout New England. We seek to raise awareness of sustainability issues and to host events that are just plain fun. After all, if you don’t enjoy your food, why bother eating it? Life is too short to eat fast food.

What is Fast Food?

We all take for granted the process in which most of our food gets to our local marketplaces to satisfy our taste and demand for convenience. Much of our food supply is harvested now in large quantities in remote lands including Mexico. Our foods are grown on large farms and to maximize the farmer’s yield a massive amount of insecticides, growth hormones, antibiotics, and genetically modified seeds and species are introduced into our food supply. These foods are thefore rushed to harvest and then rushed to market on large boats and trucks typically requiring transportation of several thousands of miles. This is Fast Food! And we at look to change this process by educating our community about alternatives that make our foods more delicious and nutritious.

I believe that by building a local community which is more aware of its local food resources and their benefits, we will go back to our roots. By this I mean that I see the possibility that we can create tighter bonds in our community and become healthier at the same time. After all, the sharing of food is one of the most social things that we do in our lives. We build families at our dinner table, we entertain in restaurants, and when we gather as a community we feast! Best of all we love to explore open lands and to gaze at farm animals and vast fields of corn with our children don’t we? I know I do! I believe that FOOD is the catalyst that brings stronger bonds to our families and will bring a community spirit back to our neighborhoods and towns as well.

Slow Food Boston

Slow Food Boston is an all-volunteer chapter of Slow Food USA. We work to arrange events that promote a better food system here in Massachusetts and New England. Some things we’ve done in the past few years include movie nights, author talks, farm picnics, grass fed beef dinners, sustainable fish tastings, pickle makings, bread bakings and potlucks.

CALL TO ACTION –

Slow Food Boston now has a vision for several new Slow Food groups here in Massachusetts including . We need “Slow Foodies” to unite throughout Greater Boston, the Boston North Shore, the Boston South Shore, Boston Metrowest, Western Massachusetts, and Cape Cod & the Islands. We’d like to call to action all of our local farmers, farmers’ markets, marketplaces, restaurants, artisans, bakeries, breweries and more to help increase consumer awareness about our local food sources by hosting community events that will educate, unite, and best of all increase demand from your local community. Let help you with the promotion and management of your next community event.

If we adopt the principles of Slow Food, we are more likely going to expand the production of our local farms in our community and to give our local farmers the incentive to sustain and to improve their production. Farmers and farmers’ markets will have to respond to the increased demand of consumers who are more aware of how they wish to nourish themselves and their families.

Slow Food Boston – Meetup.com

Slow Food Boston has organized a meetup group on Meetup.com and we encourage you to join us there to keep informed about community events.

Slow Food Boston – Facebook.com

Slow Food Boston is now on Facebook. Blog with us on Facebook and share your ideas and events within the community. Help us build awareness of local foods and the benefits of their consumption.

Slow Food Boston – Twitter.com

Follow Slow Food Boston on Twitter. This is a great way to keep in touch and remain informed up upcoming events hosted by the community.

A lot of folks take a condescending view of the local dimension. They say your products are too minor, too marginal-but the opposite is true. If you join together as one, you small-scale producers arguably form the biggest food multinational of all. The difference is that you don’t produce standardization or pollution … or poverty. You produce wealth, diversity, exchange, preservation of memory, and progress. Here we have the values of the local economy.

Carlo Petrini – Founder, Slow Food