In February, we talked about how great homemade sourdough starters are (and any homemade ferments generally). Now we're headed in a slightly different direction with this month's short blog post looking at slow food.
Slow food, fast food? What exactly are we talking about here?
The Slow Food Movement:
First of all, we truly love it when people get involved in the foods they eat and go so far as to make their own. We think an awesome way to appreciate food is when you're making or growing it yourself. To us, that's a big part of what the slow food movement is trying to get at: appreciating what we eat, where it comes from and how it was made.
There are a lot of food-conscious movements today that focus on slow food: preventing the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions. This is the opposite of fast-paced life that prioritizes convenience. Sometimes at the cost of nutrition. And it certainly opposes things like greasy (if tasty!) fast food and the invisibility of the food chains that make a chicken nugget indistinguishable from the next.
Slow Food Globally
Caring about where our food comes from, who's hands it's been in or who packaged it is not unique to us. It's a global phenomenon now. Slow Food International - an international organization founded in 1989 that celebrates local foods, shares slow food tips and resources and generally advocates for sustainable choices for food.
The movement's philosophy prioritizes food based on three principles:
- Food is good: good quality, flavoursome, and healthy.
- Food is clean: reflecting production processes that don't harm the environment, including animals.
- Food is fair: available at accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers.
And there's so much more to explore on Slow Food International's website - slow fish, cheese and bees, slow food travel, food for change and food waste. Lots!
Sourdough and Slow Food
We see at lot of alignment in our values at Kaslo Sourdough with the principles of the Slow Food movement. For us, sourdough is a great example of a slow food. We've long touted the benefits of our European-style long fermentation process. You will absolutely recognize that we LOVE good food for its ability to bring good people together. And you'll recognize the priority we've put on the high quality ingredients and sourcing the ingredients that make our breads and pastas. And that includes knowing the local farmers and suppliers that we rely on.
Further, with sourdough, the long fermentation is key to enabling the bacteria in the sourdough culture to help break down proteins and nutrients in the grains to make them easier for us to absorb. The fermentation process is super important to making sourdough-pretty-well-anything as nutritious as it is.
There's a wonderful art to learning about sourdough - the process, the proofing, the baking. For those who tried a hand at your own sourdough culture (our February blog post) - you'll appreciate how much there is to get to know! Especially as you try out different recipes and stray from just your basic sourdough.
Kaslo Sourdough and Slow Food
And more specifically for our company, we have spoken before about our environmental priorities and people priorities. We do our best to minimize impact to the environment through our production and shipping processes. One of our innovative, waste-reducing measures included exploring soup cuts this time last year. And for a long time we've done things like ensuring we use the minimum packaging materials needed (no fillers, packaging at a minimum, pasta per package reasonable and not a lot of "dead air").
We also take great pride in being a great employer with competitive wages and an inclusive, supportive workplace. Our people are important to us. We love to recognize the good people that make up our teams and help our sourdough pastas come together.
Thank you for joining us for this quick dip into the slow food movement for April. We see a lot of room for finding ways to celebrate local, sustainable, foods that nourish us and the planet.
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