Slow Food Movement Analysis

The act of eating is rarely a morally or politically innocent or benign act, but the cultural and social implications of such eating varies. Using the example of the United States, this paper will focus first on the particular moral ground gained in some Christian communities from particular diets such as the Weigh Down Diet as compared the ethics and politics of the Slow Food movement in the United States. These two examples, while not always interconnected, illustrate how US-Americans explicitly and implicitly understands food and eating as inherently moral and political activities, through which one gains higher moral ground through controlling and maintaining individual physical bodies and/or collective abstract bodies. Rebecca Mead’s
In other words, the moral lies not in the up-keep of a physical human or non-human body but the upkeep of a nation. Although the Slow Food movement in the United States has been “trimmed of any lingering anticapitalist sentiment” (Paxon 2005, 15), it contains socially moral concepts and ideologies that are meant to reject “alimentary monoculture” and fight against what many refer to as McDonaldization (Paxon 14). The movement in the United States has elements of Schwarz’s Fat Society ( Paxon 13), which emphasizes a (somewhat) new code of ethics that does not look at the nutritional value of the food or its impact on the physical body but instead promotes an indulgence in rich foods (in a way antithetical to the aforementioned anorectics and Weigh Down dieters). The eating of rich ,and most importantly, ‘local’ and ‘non-corporate’ produced, foods, the moral code of the Slow Food movement lines up with the claims of the utopian Fat Society that sees eating not in terms of “hoarding” food and riches but in terms of “harboring for our future, through investing in our local farms and agricultural productions (reference to Schwarz; Paxon 14-15). While it might seem somewhat naïve to not speak about the role of food and certain foods in shaping the body (Paxon 17), by moving away from the morals of eating being only ethical in terms of the self and self-control, the Slow Food movement, so Paxon, has potential to inspire consumer-based activism and change (Paxon 17). Thus, unlike other diets and food eating practices in the United States, the Slow Food movement implies that it is possible for US-Americans to think of the morality and politics of eating as not just limited to pertaining our own physical bodies, thus leading to measurements of moralized