Slow is in. Fast is out. Which is encouraging. You have an affinity for slow. Perhaps even a natural talent. You are all for slow. Until you realize it takes a lot of time.
Consider dinner. Slow dinner insists you start not in the super-convenient glare of the supermarket, but in the languid lane at the farmer’s market. There are carrots to ogle and sweet potatoes to squeeze and recipes to recite over the endangered cheese samples. There’s smug confidence in the wisdom of seasonal, the superiority of local. Not to mention the sheer beauty of the bumpy Brussels branch. After which, dinner hour will have come and gone. The evening will end, again, at the diner.
Your truly slow dinner will emerge slowly, over the course of many days. And nights. Deep in the darkest hours, while your children snore in their feather comforters, you scrape and dice and steam and puree. Your Cuisinart, in solidarity with the cause of slow, quits. Your fingers go brittle. Your eyes are rimmed with dark circles that refuse the best efforts of moisturizing mascara remover.
You feel slow. And sluggish.
You reread the Slow Food International Manifesto, admiring the plea that is Paragraph Five: “May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.”
And yet you wonder: Can frenzy run in slo-mo?
Then the doorbell rings. Your friends arrive cheerful. They have not spent the week, Cuisinartless, pureeing. They have not neglected their other duties and listened to the little ones lecture them, slowly, on the value of family time. They are downright energetic. Quick-witted. And willing to uphold that central principle of slow: conviviality.
Shuffling slowly around the table, you serve suitable doses of something handpicked and hand-crafted and hand-wringingly wrought. You begin to describe just how slowly this meal crawled out of the kitchen. But it comes to you swiftly: You are scaring your guests.
The rare entertainer can get away with making his efforts look hard. He usually wears hip boots, carries a whip and travels with a pack of tigers. Everyone else, like the corps de ballet, is stuck with the heavy lifting of making it look easy.
You glance self-consciously at the current issue of The Snail, house organ of Slow Food USA. You slide it under a packet of ramen noodles. Dinner, you swear, was a snap.
Perhaps you’ll recover the newsletter later and savor the drink column. It’s titled, enticingly, To Be Drunk Slowly.
