Slow Food and Local Food

Here's another person's reaction to my latest set of blog entries:

In my experience, the vast majority of slow food people I have heard,
seen, and met are all tedious extremely arrogant snobish extremists who
are judgemental of any individual who has, for example, ever eaten
macaroni and cheese from a box or gone to McDonalds and not been
embarrassed. Especially if the person actually LIKED the food. The people
are in a cult, not a movement.

The local food people I have met and heard have all been down to earth
people who are just trying to grow a garden, make a trip to the farmer's
market in the summer, or buy local food when it's available. Or like the
woman who opened a cheese shop which is making an effort to sell from
local cheese makers. Some of them get school classes of city kids to grow
vegetable gardens to supplement the school lunch. That seems like a nice
idea, both from educational and nutritional standpoints. Kids are also
probably much more enthusiastic to eat a vegetable that they grew
themselves.

It's always possible to find a spectrum of people in any given movement,
and any movement for which even one person gives up toilet paper in its
name is highly suspect. But is my impression of the average slow-ies as
snobbies and locals as laid back completely wrong?

My reply: I think you are indisputably right about the slow foodies, but my point was that the extremists are drowning out the reasonable local food advocates like Alice Waters and her school gardens.