My Views on the Slow Food New World and Gastronomy
This book can be called the bible of slow food, offering the most complete exposition of the concepts behind the slow food movement. The following content is all excerpted and digested from [Slow Food Nation, Carlo Petrini / Slow Food Nation, Carlo Petrini 2007]
Of course, there is a great deal of content in this book, and digesting it all quickly may be a bit of a struggle. Some book reviews suggest starting with the diary entries interspersed throughout the book, and that is indeed a good way to begin, but to solidly understand a whole "discipline," frankly, it is still somewhat insufficient.
Here I will begin by excerpting some content I consider important so you can quickly gain a preliminary understanding. This piece, Gastronomy, can be seen as starting right from the beginning by exploring definitions, such as etymology and some of the writers who influenced him, such as France's Brillat-Savarin, and can be said to treat the matter of food and drink in an almost thesis-like, serious way.
And another interesting viewpoint, such as... since the Second World War, those who are interested in gastronomy and derive pleasure from it have always had to face social prejudice, which holds that a love of fine food is self-indulgent pleasure-seeking and full of sin (religious belief also accelerated the spread of this idea)... In fact, this can be said to coincide with the food bloggers who have long been popular in Taiwan, China (though frankly most bloggers are indeed simply pursuing happiness, and today's social values would not even criticize this, but rather encourage it). The founder/author actually does not abandon this idea, and believes that pursuing fine food is human nature, but that we should eat from more correct standpoints. The next piece will begin to explore what those standpoints should be, and what "correct eating" really is.
§ The Science of Gastronomy
This word originates from Greek, and first appeared in 1801 in the title of a poem by the French poet Joseph de Berchous: [La Gastronomie Ou l’homme des champs a table]
Literally translated as [Gastronomy, or the farmer at the table], it can be said to indirectly connect the world of farming with the world of consuming food.
By the early nineteenth century it gradually acquired a definition, and its important promoters were France's gastronomes. After the French Revolution, the positive and constructive relationship established between gastronomes and chefs can be seen from the fact that more than two thousand restaurants appeared in France between 1804 and 1834. One of the most important writers: Brillat-Savarin (Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin), was also an important figure who influenced Carlo Petrini's thinking.
From an etymological perspective, Gastronomy means [the law of the stomach]. In definitions that developed later, it only partially retained the meaning of [the art of preparing and cooking food]. When the word gastronomes was first included in the French academic dictionary (Academie Francaise) in 1835, it was still only defined as [a person responsible for selecting, arranging, and serving abundant food at the table].
§ Social Elites and the Poor
From the very beginning, gastronomy carried an obvious implication of elitism. In the nineteenth century, [the law of the stomach] for most of the rural population was mainly a question of getting enough to eat, and it was taken for granted that only those who could obtain all kinds of ingredients would be interested in seasoning and cooking methods. By contrast, the poor and the underfed, although over the centuries they had developed much survival knowledge in adapting to the land (such as various methods of preserving and extending the edible life of food), were excluded from the field of gastronomy and deprived of the rights they should have had.
§ Is It Merely a Folk Orientation?
Food and gastronomy have historically been separated and completely different. The former represents economy and livelihood, a serious subject of a scientific nature, while the latter represents pleasure and food culture, purely recreation and entertainment. And since the Second World War, those who are interested in gastronomy and derive pleasure from it have always had to face social prejudice, which holds that a love of fine food is self-indulgent pleasure-seeking and full of sin (religious belief also accelerated the spread of this idea). And when one thinks of the common saying, it is not hard to understand this way of thinking: first work, then pleasure.
Brillat-Savarin wrote [The Physiology of Taste] (Physiologie du gout) in 1825. Although the French food craze was at its peak at the time, deep down he still felt ashamed of his enthusiasm for fine food. The first edition did not even include his name. But the book still clearly defined all the elements of the science of gastronomy, and some of his ideas are precisely the basis of the gastronomy argument I put forward in this book – gastronomy is any rational human knowledge related to eating..., gastronomy drives growers, winemakers, fishermen, and many chefs, or those who use any title to conceal their concern with the preparation of food.
I hope to take Brillat-Savarin's definition as a starting point and discover that gastronomy is in fact a complex set of elements spanning different disciplines: agriculture, economics, science, technology, society, nutrition, and so on. But I refuse to accept the [folk orientation] viewpoint, though I do not abandon the playful characteristics that are closer to hedonism. For this is a discipline related to fun and pleasure, but one that must be faced with a serious attitude. To use a phrase Brillat-Savarin loved most, to reflect on ourselves is to reflect on the food we eat.
