Trusting Your Senses...A Slow Approach to

SustainabilityDr. Ursula Hudson

Slow food• Is a grassroots movement• Is a not for profit organisation• It operates worldwide

• It promotes the right for everyone to enjoy their food

Slow food core principles

•Good

•Clean

•Fair

Good, Clean and FairFood Choices

• lead to good quality food• lead to cleaner production, distribution

and consumption• produce a better connected food culture

that leads to• wider changes regarding

– increased individual health and wellbeing– increased biodiversity– less impact on climate change– increased social justice

SF International areas of work

• Sensory Education• School Gardens• Foundation for Biodiversity• Ark of Taste• Presidia• Granos• Food networks• Terra Madre: biannual world meeting of

local food communities

To achieve this, local SF groups:

tune the food senses – tastings – experience the delight of

really good food, which is also clean and fair

– meet the producer – understand where good food comes from

– children: those with food senses tuned eat healthily…

… and learn to prepare it well

To achieve this, local SF groups

produce a sense of locality by – understanding where the food is

produced – food like wine: place, soil, aspect, local

varieties and breeds– food has identity – flavour and nutrition

attached to where and how it is grown – reviving traditions and biodiversity

– this is how quite naturally food is situated within a geographical network

– supporting the local networks

Slow activities that encourage sustainable food choices • School meal and school garden projects (“The

Edible Schoolyard”)

• Tastings, sensory training, hands-on events

• Producer visits

• Farmers’ markets and local food networks

• Community growing networks and seed swap events

• Community supported agriculture and garden projects

• Local currency schemes

• Aim at Food Self Sufficiency - Sitopia

Building Food Knowledge

Producer Visits

Building Food Knowledge and Food Networks

Celebration of Local Food

Building Food Knowledge

Apple Day

Transition Town Lewes and the Lewes Pound

Due South, the Brighton beach restaurant, sends its chefs to Patcham High School to give workshops on how to cook locally sourced food                                   

Bringing in the restaurateur

What Slow Food does

• It encourages us to trust our food senses and take pleasure in food as a right.

• This trust in our food senses leads to making sensible, responsible, sustainable food decisions that help to build sustainable and bio-diverse food networks.

• From the most local – our own senses – through increased enjoyment of one our most important activities –eating - to ‘saving the planet’.