Did you enjoy your dinner last night? Was it a deeply pleasurable affair where each dish provided a different treat for the senses? Were there vigorous explosions of taste, gentle wafts of ephemera and slow surges of many-layered flavours and aromas that made your taste-buds ping and your nostrils smile? Was it a feast for the eyes? Did you talk about the food while you were eating?
Or did you just fill your face in front of the television?
If it was the former, then you already understand "Slow Food" and are nonchalantly following its nourishing doctrine. But if it was the latter, and you can no longer tell the difference between food and fodder, then it's time to make some unhurried, agreeable adjustments to your life.
Slow Food is an ever-growing movement that was conceived in 1986 as a result of Italian food critic Carlo Petrini's protests over the opening of a fast-food joint in Rome's Piazza Spagna. In Paris, three years later, the international movement for "The Defence of, and the Right to, Pleasure: Slow Food" marked its official birthday (with a cornucopia of best comestibles, no doubt) and issued its manifesto. The English version, it has to be said, sounds un peu dictatorial, but we have to assume it lost its continental brio in the translation. "Fast Life", it says, "disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our home and forces us to eat fast foods". Fast Life has also "changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes". In order to free ourselves from our enslavement to speed we must "begin at the table with Slow Food . . . rediscover the flavours and savours of regional cooking" and develop taste rather than demean it. What all that means, of course, is that we should make it our mission to enjoy good food and support good food-producers - responsible makers of local or traditional specialities, organic growers and farmers, small manufacturers of quality products, farmhouse cheese-makers, inventive bakers, microbrewers, talented makers and importers of wine. And most importantly, we should s-l-o-w d-o-w-n and learn again to take deep delight in what we put in our mouths.
Slow Food's flavoursome philosophy has spread throughout the globe and there are now 60,000 members in 35 countries. Slow Food devotees include everyone from ordinary citizens who like their nosh to food producers and sellers, and also include international bigwigs like Italian playwright Dario Fo, French historian Jacques le Goff, British wine expert Hugh Johnson and our own Darina Allen. Allen has been a member for three years: "Slow Food is there to support artisan producers who were disappearing under a tidal wave of EU legislation, and who were being stifled by this mania for hygiene and stainless steel". The movement, she says, has managed to bring back foods that were lost, and to save ones in immanent danger, like the Italian lardo di Collonnata. This, she explains, is a tasty speciality made from hard back-fat of pork, cured with a little salt and herbs and served in thin slices on bread. "People have been eating it from time immemorial, and it is absolutely delicious."
The movement, she says, "is against GM foods, and questions the wisdom of continuing to go down the route of intensive agriculture and horticulture. We see huge problems ahead there."
Another Irish member is 26-year-old Jennie Guy of Guy Stuart Foods, a small business which makes sauces, tapenades, hummus - "our hummus is a bit of a cult thing" - and "fresh daily-made soups". Guy Stuart products contain no artificial additives, depending instead on rigorous temperature control for preservation. "Everything we make is simple in its nature and the ingredients are the best, like the extra-virgin olive oil that we import from Italy ourselves." Next weekend, Guy, along with other Slow Food providers, is offering us all a chance to experience the lingering thrills of some of our finest native products (as well as wines from abroad) at Ireland's first Slow Food exhibition, entitled - appropriately enough - The Joy of the Table.
Besides Guy Stuart's carefully-made products, there will be cheeses from Sheridan Cheese-mongers, organic vegetables from Denis Healy and organic meat from Mitchell's, as well as breads, wild salmon, oysters, sauces and chocolates - all convivially washed down with beer from the Dublin Brewing Company and a selection of wines imported from Italy. "The idea is to heighten people's awareness of these foods", says Jennie Guy. "And to have some fun". Then she adds firmly: " It's a great excuse just to eat and drink!"
The Joy of the Table takes place next Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. at 5-6 Molesworth Lane, Dublin 2. Tickets cost £1, and a booklet of ten tokens costing £5 entitles participants to sample the various delicacies. Membership of the International Slow Food Movement costs £38 and includes a subscription to its quarterly journal, Slow. For details, write to Jennie Guy at Guy Stuart Foods, SPADE, North King Street, Dublin 7. The Slow Food website is at: www.slowfood.com