Slow Food Nation, cont'd

What I took from Slow Food Nation and what I feel Carlo Petrini is portraying:

Food is a network of people, places, products, and knowledge. Think about a dish of pasta...
the tomatoes - Who grew them, what did they use in their soil, when did they pick them, how much gas did it cost them to transport them to the place you bought them?
Or where they canned- what an extensive process canning and preserving is! ?
What about the spaghetti, what did it cost to grow the wheat, make the flour, roll the pasta, package it, and deliver it to the store?
Did the farmer's know what the effects of pesticides could do to the tomatoes?
Did the famer make parmesean cheese from milk of cows fed animal by-products or grass fed cows ?

As a gastronome, you feel a part of that network. You belong to a food network, which goes from the global to the particular. From universal to local, for producers and co-producers. Reactivating the connections between producer and consumer, which often now are so far distant the nodes of the network do not even know they are part of the network, will circulate the network. New nodes of conscious people can expand the network , the network thus sustains itself. A sustainable network focused on human growth instead of economic growth- leading to quality food.

This new quality of food can be obtained via educational strategies of knowledge and of products: so that food is good for the palate and the mind, sustainable for the earth, and fair because every person's dignity is guarenteed