Free Best Food Writing 2013 by Holly Hughes

define in relation to food but a lot closer to the mark. In cooking andeating, what’s the practical meaning of slow? To me, it’s “careful, thoughtful, open, precise.” It means you pay attention. A better single word than slow might be “integrity,” except that it’s a noun and doesn’t lend itself at all to a catchy name or a slogan. If we weren’t easily distracted by its other connotations, I’d prefer “innocent.”
    As an opposite to “slow” food, “fast” isn’t quite the right word either. Industrial “fast food” is ready-to-eat and quickly eaten, but more important, it’s fake, cynical, false, misleading, unhealthy, ill-considered, bad for the environment, bad for workers, bad for all the animals raised under cruel conditions.
    The pleasure we find in cooking and eating lies not in being either fast or slow but in being both or in-between at different times. Different speeds are part of food as they are of the rest of life. What we need is balance.
    Some slowness helps concentration, unless for example you’re driven by adrenaline, like a line cook during the lunch rush. It turns out, if a study I once read about is right, that multitaskers don’t have a special ability that the rest of us lack; in fact, they do everything badly. Focus is important. If I run out of shelf space for books and I want to get rid of those I’ll never look at again, it doesn’t work to skim the shelf—I’ve tried that. What works is to take each book down and hold it briefly in my hand and mind. I get rid of a lot more books.
    Considering that I spend my days writing about food and publishing a food magazine, it’s ironical that at the end of the day I often feel I don’t have enough energy to cook more than a basic meal, often grilled meat and grilled vegetables with rice or potatoes. My family and I would probably eat out most of the time, if not for the cost, the distances, and the limited choices in the rural area where we live. Americans are cooking less and less. We spend an average of 27 minutes a day preparing food and four minutes cleaning up (to borrow the figures used by Michael Pollan in his writing on the topic). We spent more than twice that amount of time in the mid-1960s. And the reason isn’t only to do with time. Fashionable restaurants, from casual to luxurious, now generally pursue minimalist cuisine. In France, the classic sauces have all but disappeared; you hardly find a sauce at all. Maybe we’ve simplified because we’re tired, don’t have the time, don’t have the attention span. Maybe we’re worn out from living with the world’s complicated problems. Maybe the “slow” in“slow food” really just means “slow eating,” because so few of us cook or want to cook. And if so, I think that’s all right.
    What about time- and labor-saving kitchen appliances, such as food processors and microwaves? Do they have a place in slow cooking? A labor-saving tool frees you to do something else more important, presumably more important than taking a nap. I write on a computer, which eliminates the many hours I once spent retyping; now I spend more time writing. When the food processor became popular back in the 80s, the idea was not only that it would supply the skills you lacked but you would also have more time to cook fancier meals, involving more chopping, shredding, purées—French meals in particular. Which sounds rather quaint now. Personally, I avoid my food processor, except for making certain purées, because it takes longer to wash, dishwasher or no dishwasher, than a cutting board and a knife do. (Also, I love sharp knives.) For purées, a mortar and pestle give a more pleasing, slippery texture. Cooking and eating are sensory experiences; a food processor only gets in the way. I use a copper bowl and whisk to beat egg whites, just for