Slow Food comes to Kendal

11:23am Saturday 3rd May 2008

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As news of the global food crisis was making front page headlines, a special gathering at Kendal's Riverside Hotel on Saturday couldn't have been more timely.

The occasion was the annual meeting of Slow Food UK, the British branch of the international movement founded in Italy in 1989 to celebrate, enjoy and promote' food that is good, clean and fair', ie: it should taste good; it shouldn't harm the environment, animal welfare or human health; and the people who produce it should be fairly compensated.

Slow Food (whose official logo is the snail' pictured right) now has 80,000 members in 130 countries. In the UK alone there are some 48 Slow Food groups (each known as a convivium) with more than 2,200 members between them, one of the convivia being in Cumbria which had bid to become the Slow Food's UK headquarters, but sadly lost out to Ludlow, in Shropshire.

Saturday's meeting was only the second annual get-together, so it was an honour for Cumbria convivium leader Peter Jackson (Organico, Heart of the Lakes) to welcome Slow Food converts from as far north as Shetland and as far south as Cornwall to the Riverside Hotel.

Lunch, which was cooked by renowned Lake District chef Steven Doherty with the help of the hotel's kitchen team, had local' stamped all over it there were cheeses from Wardhall Dairy, Thornby Moor and Birdoswald served with Lizzie Smith's award-winning Damson Gems'; double cream from Low Sizergh Barn; various cured meats from Peter Gott of Sillfield Farm at Endmoor; and bread from Munx Lakeland Bakery at Staveley.

But the hero of the hour was Riverside Hotel owner Jonathan Denby whose pigs, which he breeds at High Lowscales Farm, in the Duddon Estuary, provided the sausages and slow-roasted belly pork on Steven Doherty's menu, while the rhubarb for dessert came from his own garden at Grange-over-Sands.

"We want to make people realise what there is around them in terms of food and to fight to reduce their reliance on supermarkets," said Jonathan.

It goes without saying that at an annual meeting there is usually a good degree of debate about finances - one Slow Food member wanted to know exactly where his £35 membership went in terms of helping the international Show Food cause.

The answer came from Slow Food International general secretary Paulo Di Croce.

He described a recent US study which has shown that in the 60s, Americans spent 17.5 per cent of their income on food and 5.2 per cent on health care. Today, they spend 9.9 per cent on food and 16 per cent on health care.

"Eight hundred million people suffer hunger and 1.4 billion people have health problems caused by bad food," said Paulo. "We are destroying this world. The main reason why the land is in this situation is because of the way we produce food.

"We are realising that our message is getting stronger and stronger around the world. We can really play an important role worldwide."

But to do that both Slow Food International, and Slow Food UK, need not only to drive up membership of the organisation but also to bring more young people on board.

Here in the UK, the movement is set to launch several ground-breaking initiatives - for example, Slow Food on Campus' which will be based on an e-membership scheme in the hope of encouraging more young members; while young UK delegates are also being sought to attend the Terre Madre', the biennial international meeting in Turin which brings together food communities, cooks, and academics for four days to work towards increasing small-scale, traditional, and sustainable food production, to be held in October this year.

In the meantime, if you want to know more about Slow Food, or you want to join the Cumbria convivium, then log on to www.slowfood.org.uk for all the details.