Manners: Slow Food

National Review, Dec 31, 1998 by David Klinghoffer

THE Thanksgiving dinner I attended this year fell a little short of traditional. A German investment banker next to me described how he recently had been stalked by a girl he had dated a few times. He couldn't figure out what drove her to do this. Unless, he mused, it was that vee-jo of her, another woman, and himself engaged in sexual intercourse. A vee-jo? Yes, she kept pestering him for the vee-jo tape.

It wasn't a conversation you would have expected around Norman Rockwell's table. But formal meals at home are so rare nowadays that it's worth saying a word in their favor, vee-jo-toting Germans notwithstanding. Thanksgiving offers an occasion to do so, along with an article in the Los Angeles Times about a group of concerned Europeans called the Slow Food Movement.

The essential Slow Food insight is that food and its consumption are getting faster and faster, with worrisome consequences. The movement was founded in Paris in 1989, a few years after outraged food-traditionalists fought unsuccessfully to stop McDonald's from opening a franchise on Rome's Spanish Steps. A manifesto was drawn up, declaring: "We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, invades the privacy of our homes, and forces us to eat Fast Foods." Nine years later the Slow Food Movement claims seventy thousand members in 35 countries, all rabidly opposed to Big Macs and the less-than- two-hour lunch.

The nineteenth-century French gour- met Anthelme Brillat-Savarin put it neatly: "The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves." If so, then the destiny of our own nation must seem increasingly in doubt.

Take the New York subway system. Mayor Giuliani has been fretting about the danger of terrorists' releasing biohazardous fumes in the train tunnels. But the real biohazard down there is the fumes of McDonald's hamburgers, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other take-out items being eaten by neighboring riders. You don't just smell this stuff; you feel it entering your lungs like a greasy fist.

Above ground, the situation is much the same. Folks pace the sidewalks of Manhattan, head tilted up to let a piece of pizza slide down the gullet. There goes a youth with half a hot dog sticking out of his mouth. At the tonier end of the social spectrum, pricey take-out is the rule for time- deprived yuppies.

From the Slow Food perspective, news from the rest of the country is also pretty bad. Most troubling is the fate of family mealtime. As Patricia Hersch reports in her book A Tribe Apart, about the folkways of teenagers in Reston, Va., kids typically cook for themselves, forage in the kitchen for whatever take-out Mom or Dad may have brought home from work, or call Dominoes for a pizza. Family members eat separately, at each person's convenience.

The Slow Food-ites think they know what's at stake here. At their convention last month in Turin, Italy, attended by 100,000 people, one of them told the L.A. Times: "This is about preserving the pleasures of food and what it brings to people." If that's what all the complaining is about, then one might cheerfully endure the reeking subway cars. Imagine those stuck-up foreigners the morning they wake to find a Burger King enthroned next to every great palace, cathedral, and museum in Europe. That's entertainment!

In fact, however, the costs of convenience are steeper than the Spanish Steps. The best exegesis of the dinner table I've come across is by Daniel Lapin in his new book America's Real War.

Rabbi Lapin probably understands the culture war better than anyone. Eating, he points out, is one of those activities that people share with animals, along with birth, death, sex, and passing waste. Traditional cultures were careful to place around each of these a hedge of rules and rituals. Otherwise a person having sex, or eating, or defecating, can easily be mistaken for an animal. That possibility once bothered us because the radical distinction between people and pets was seen as a pillar of civilization.

The distinction is still upheld in some quarters. Even today, the bathroom is often the most civilized room in the house. Writes Lapin:

At that moment when we look more like animals than at any other, it is a deep comfort to reflect upon the little soaps cast in the shape of seashells and upon the monogrammed hand towels. They remind us that although we are doing in private what most animals do in public, it would be a mistake to think of ourselves as animals. No animal decorates the room in which he relieves himself.

When they feel hungry, animals graze, nibbling leaves and grass as they find them. They hunt, and gobble their prey without standing on ceremony. If you put food in front of them, they will eat under any circumstance. A set table in one's own home-where the family gathers at a certain time, dining on china or glass, governed by seemingly pointless customs, with one fork for salad and another for the steak (why?)-reminds us that we are men, not monkeys.