Eat+drink

slowly does it

Not a fan of McDonald’s and fast food? What you need is Slow Food. Lise Lykke Steffensen, Copenhagen’s Slow Food champion, explains the international campaign

How did you get involved in Slow Food?

In 1998, I got a letter from Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement. The name didn’t mean anything to me, so I checked it out online and found it was a campaign that began as a basic protest against fast food. In the 1980s Carlo Petrini objected to the opening of a McDonald’s at the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Local people got together to serve pasta with tomato sauce outside, instead.

Carlo was asking me to be a member of the jury that gives out Slow Food’s agricultural biodiversity prizes, because of my work in the area with the Nordic Council of Ministers. I’m now the representative for Slow Food in Copenhagen.

Why is biodiversity part of the Slow Food campaign?

The Slow Food campaign takes an holistic approach, which means everything from encouraging people to take time to enjoy a meal with friends, to giving Slow Food logos to restaurants that share our ethos, to funding gene banks to preserve rare plant varieties. Just like animals, a fruit or a cereal can become extinct. You might say a carrot is a carrot, but there might be 50 or 100 varieties. We want to open people’s minds to where their food is coming from.

Slow Food is an international organisation. How does Scandinavia fit into that?

In Scandinavian countries, there is an increasing interest in national and Nordic food. It’s a reaction to globalisation. We’ve eaten the pizzas and the sushi and in a way that’s prompted us to look back to Nordic food. It’s about getting back to your roots, re-learning the old kitchen techniques of how to preserve food by smoking or salting, the techniques of 50 years ago.

I think Scandinavia has a lot to offer the Slow Food movement and vice versa, because food is in our nature. In Scandinavia we think about food a bit differently from the rest of the world. Particularly if you’re from Sweden, Norway or Finland, you might have collected mushrooms or berries straight from the forest. In Finland people hunt moose and eat the meat themselves, with no middle step of selling it in a shop. In Scandinavia, there are still people who know what it means to eat straight from nature.

What’s the future of the movement?

Involving children in healthy eating is so important, from the right nutrition during a mother’s pregnancy onwards. Children are naturally curious so we should aim to open their minds to different tastes. I organised an event for 800 primary school children, to show them the grain we harvest in the north of Denmark, different varieties of apple juice, the cuts of meat on a slaughtered pig, and dead ducks and deer from the forest. They were so enthusiastic about understanding food. They thought it was the best thing ever. There are 10,000 more children on the waiting list.

Visit www.slowfood.com for more information