Cate Devine Food Writer
The term Slow Food Glasgow could easily be taken as a snigger-inducing oxymoron, given the proliferation of fast food outlets, JustEat stickers and burger chains in Scotland's largest city. Despite the odds, though, this brave new food group wants to encourage all citizens to grow their own in a bid to create a grassroots food revolution – and join an international movement for a change.
On Wednesday, after an unsuccessful attempt a few years ago, Glasgow will at last join Slow Food, the international movement founded 30 years ago by the charismatic Italian food activist Carlo Petrini in protest at the opening of a famous burger chain at the foot of the Spanish Steps in his beloved Rome. His campaign against the industrialisation of the global food chain in favour of equal access to local, healthy sustainably produced food at a fair price has mushroomed. It is active in 150 countries, and Petrini recently launched 1000 Slow Food community vegetable gardens in Africa.
In Britain, convivia – or groups, so called to emphasise the 'conviviality' of cooking and sharing locally grown seasonal and affordable food with family and friends for the sheer enjoyment of it – were previously run from London under the banner of Slow Food UK. Slow Food Scotland was devolved last year, and convivia already exist in Ayrshire, Edinburgh and Inverness, with new ones in the Borders and Tayside and North Fife. It's a sign of the zeitgeist that so many Scots see something worthwhile enough in the movement to volunteer to run a group, or pay the annual subscription of £36 a year, for which they get to attend regular local meetings, although it has been guilty in the past of being nothing more than a private dining club for the middle classes.
But times have changed, bringing with them a conscience-pricking awareness of food poverty, dependence on food banks and inequalities of access to good fresh food in too many parts of the country. Cookery workshops in community gardens and visits to farms and producers have become part of the Slow Food agenda. Last year Petrini, in Scotland to launch SFS, pointed out that our national Bard was a farmer, "and he didn't work for Nestle". He said he saw evidence of young farmers and producers re-engaging with our agricultural past and argued that there should be more farmers' markets in the most deprived areas – citing the 12,000 that exist in all parts of the US including the Bronx, Harlem and Queens in New York.
That Glasgow has finally found a voice in his noble aspiration should be celebrated and supported. The public launch of Slow Food Glasgow on Wednesday isn't in someone's high-ceilinged Victorian apartment. It takes place at the social enterprise Project Cafe in Renfrew Street where a meal of locally sourced ingredients will prepared by the dynamic foodie-forward committee of young professionals and local producers.
Petrini told me he believed Scotland was on the brink of a food revolution, poised to become a great food nation once again.
Can the same be said for Glasgow? Change requires long-term commitment. So the answer to that is down to us all.
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