February 6, 2008 --

At the end of February, a group of Italians representing the international Slow Food movement intends to come to Union Square Park in Manhattan to promote its mission: “To counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” The group should find a sympathetic audience. The area adjacent to the park is the regular spot for upstate farmers who come to New York City several times a week to sell their local produce to loyal customers who want to buy organic. Slow Food was founded in Italy (perche no?) in 1989. For me, its mission hits home – probably because the goals of the movement sound awfully similar to the life that my grandparents brought with them to the United States. A life that was abandoned a century ago as the giant wheels of progress turned, and immigrants, happy to have left the grinding poverty of their homeland, traded agrarianism for industrialization. It’s always amusing for a third-generation Italian-American like me to see the ways of my grandparents reemerge in this new millennium – this time as a life to be imitated rather than looked upon with pity. Their customs, which I once believed were musty relics of the Old World, are now entwined with a movement that tells us how to seek a better, healthier life. I grew up wondering why my mother tipped heavy tins of olive oil when all the neighbors used Mazola; why we ate dishes like escarole and beans when everyone else was mixing Hamburger Helper into ground beef. I begged my mother to serve Chef Boyardee instead of Celentano frozen ravioli. How strange my requests must have seemed to my mother, who grew up watching her own mother spend all morning in the kitchen. My grandmother stretched the ravioli dough and rolled it nearly the length of the table, moist yellow sheets which she spread with a thin layer of ricotta cheese before placing another sheet of dough on top. No wonder years later my mother felt guilty buying frozen ravioli. And to make matters worse, her daughter begged for limp, canned squares. But I didn’t want to be associated with any Old World traditions, New World daughter that I was. I believed that anything modern, anything American must be infinitely better. My ancestors, those original Slow Foodies, were intimately connected to the land. After my grandfather settled in Maplewood, New Jersey, he dug a large garden next to the apartment building that he owned. He’d grow the vegetables and my grandmother would come down each morning to choose the day’s selection, which she would cook for dinner that evening. A few years ago, when I visited my mother’s family in southern Italy, my cousin drove my husband and me to the city of Avellino, where we planned to catch a bus to Naples and subsequently a train to Rome. Along the route, my cousin stopped at a gas station. I used the time to call our hotel in Rome to confirm our reservation; meanwhile another one of my cousins wandered off. I spotted him far in the distance, stooping on the black pavement. He walked back displaying a large grin and a bunch of wild arugula that had grown between the cracks, fresh-picked for his dinner salad. This connection to the land; this desire to pick edible food wherever it was available had always seemed to me – product as I am of a New Jersey suburb -- an embarrassing peasant mentality. The Ultimate Peasant, as the writer Julian Barnes dubbed this type of fellow in rural France: “ancient, rubicund, and toothless.” But today as once distinctive cultural customs bow to the homogenized goals of the European Union, I miss the Ultimate Peasant and the agrarian traditions that were lost once he disappeared. Although he had little choice – his way of life was determined at birth – and although only a naïve romantic wouldn’t admit that modernity improved his lot, I agree with the Slow Food proponents who argue that not all is well with the aggressive, market driven, technologically obsessed New World. My friend Edvige Giunta remarked to me that she likes to take her children to Sicily every summer so they can see lemons grow on trees. Her daughter once believed that lemons grow in dirt. “When you are disconnected from how things grow, you are disconnected from how people grow,” Edvige wisely told me. Unfortunately, I can’t get to Sicily right now. But I plan to head to Union Square at the end of the month. I want to see how an alternative movement chooses to articulate values that my grandparents lived and never thought to question.