= Full article availableOn one level, fast food appears to be taking a hit. McDonald’s recently announced the closing of 175 restaurants and slashed prices on some popular items to counter flagging sales. Wendy’s and other chains are also experiencing weakening profits. But whether or not people turn away from burgers and fries, fast food, in a larger sense, has taken root. Americans now eat fast and drink fast—and often want their meals prepared so fast that they completely bypass cooking.
We think it’s a trend in the wrong direction. It’s not just that when you let others make your meals for you, they decide how much saturated fat and sodium and how little fiber you eat. It’s also that you don’t pay attention to your food and end up eating too much. Wolfing something down while driving, working at your desk, or standing at the kitchen counter, you can’t “hear” your body telling you when you’re full. (It takes 20 minutes, on average, for the brain to notify the stomach that you’ve had enough.)
Along with a lack of attention, a lack of enjoyment from quick eating gets people consuming more than they should, too. Part of what people seek in a meal is good taste, pleasure, and relaxation. If those elements are missing, eating continues even after hunger is sated in a search for the more intangible satisfaction food is meant to bestow. And that substantially increases the chances for extra pounds to creep on, which raises the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and many of the other major conditions that are debilitating—and killing—Americans.
For those reasons, we feel it’s im-perative that people consider not just the ingredients in their food but also the circumstances under which they eat. We think there should be a return to slow food, if you will.
It’s not a new concept. In fact, there’s an organization called Slow Food that now boasts 65,000 members in 45 countries. It was started in the 1980s by an Italian food-and-wine writer named Carlo Petrini to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in the heart of Rome.
Slow Food doesn’t actually focus much on nutrition. In fact, much of its focus is rather esoteric for most people’s level of interest. For instance, it has offered an entire course on balsamic vinegar. And members of Slow Food’s London branch were recently invited to a dinner at which “we will not only taste the fabled Black Trumpet mushroom, but our host… will give a talk on the typical fungi of Slovenia.” The reason for such events is that the organization is very much concerned with preserving local traditions in the face of what it refers to as the “standardization” of food across the globe. It also focuses on organic farming, traditional methods of cooking, and saving varieties of fruits and vegetables that are in danger of going extinct. (Slow Food’s US office is based in New York, at 212-965-5640, with local chapters, or convivia, around the country.)
So where do Slow Food’s concerns and those of the average health-conscious American intersect? In Slow Food’s strong stand for the “protection of the right to taste”; in its belief that meals are meant to be enjoyed rather than simply swallowed; in its conviction that people would get more out of preparing their own food than from always having strangers prepare it for them. If more people used those principles as guides, their meals would automatically become more healthful.
To that end, here are seven slow-food guidelines of our own, all in keeping with the tenets of the Slow Food movement. We believe they make good resolutions for the New Year—and for always.
Don’t eat unless you’re sitting at a table. You’re not so likely to feel you’ve eaten a satisfying amount of food when, for instance, you have ice cream out of the container while standing in the kitchen. A little bit keeps turning into a little bit more. Better to scoop some ice cream into a dish, put the container back in the freezer, walk over to the table, sit down, and eat (at a relaxed pace) the portion that seemed appropriate when you dished it out.
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Prepare more of your own meals. If you never make your own dinner, try doing it once a week. If you do it twice a week, shoot for three times. You eat much more healthfully when you cook than when you eat out, take out, or order in. When put to the task of preparing dinner, most people intuitively include a vegetable or two (frozen is fine) to go along with a protein (like fish, chicken, beef, or beans) and a starch (like rice, potatoes, barley, or bulgur)—which is perfect.
Don’t believe you don’t have time to prepare your own meals. That’s a bill of goods people are sold by marketers to get them to buy pre-prepared stuff. Americans average 22 hours of television watching a week, so there’s definitely some time to cook.
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Don’t eat when you’re not hungry. This is a tough one in a culture where boredom, anxiety, fatigue, TV ads, and food on every corner beget eating. But it’s worth paying attention to. When people eat in the absence of hunger, they often eat guiltily, which means quickly—too quickly to stop before the calories really pile up.
Note: Do not tell yourself you’ll just eat less later. You won’t. A series of elegantly conducted studies in France (where else?) has shown that snacking unaccompanied by hunger doesn’t reduce the number of calories eaten at the next meal a few hours later.
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Savor what you’re eating. When you eat quickly and inattentively, you lose out on a lot of food’s flavor. Consider that much of what we think of as taste is really smell. The taste buds can only detect a few things: salty, bitter, sour, and sweet. But as a person chews, a food’s volatiles—odorous, gas-like substances—are released and “pumped” to the nose. There are literally thousands of odors that the human nose can distinguish. It’s what allows you to tell the difference between, say, cinnamon and nutmeg or chicken and turkey. The less you chew, however, the less you’re going to be able to appreciate those differences.
Of course, when you eat too fast, your taste buds get short shrift, too. Fast food companies are well aware of that, says Rosemary Stanton, PhD, a leading nutritionist in Australia. They purposely make their foods soft and moist so their menu items hardly need any chewing and can be eaten fast as well as purchased fast (think burgers with greasy dressing that almost dissolve between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, she says). But the chains compensate for the fact that their offerings hardly need any time in the mouth by using a lot of salt, sugar, and fat (the latter for mouthfeel). Thus, even brief contact with the taste buds and minimal release of volatile odors ensure a flavor hit. Foods that move through the mouth more slowly, Dr. Stanton notes, don’t need so much of those ingredients to satisfy.
Don’t eat what you don’t like. It would seem obvious, but it’s not. Who hasn’t had the fruit-flavored chocolates because they’re the only ones left in the box when they really prefer the ones with nuts? What a waste of calories, not to mention satisfaction.
Follow the same principles in restaurants that you would at home. You should expect the same relaxed atmosphere in a restaurant as in your own kitchen or dining room. If you feel rushed by the waitstaff; if you have to roar above the din to have a conversation; if you don’t feel comfortable asking for special requests, like for some of your entrée to be packed in a doggie bag before it ever reaches your table, you’re not in the right place.
Participate in some moderately vigorous physical activity each day. What does this have to do with slow food? Everything. Exercise helps with appetite control. Also, if you move your body appropriately, you’ll want to fuel it appropriately instead of eating willy-nilly whatever’s available. You’ll take the time to plan, prepare, and partake of good-tasting, nutritious meals. In other words, one good behavior builds on another.
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