Do we need a slow culture movement?

by.. Hutri Devina Shany

Just like we as people chose to reduce our dependence on standardized processed food it is time to think about abandoning our dependence on standardized culture
From food to culture
For the first time in decades, the American obesity rate is in decline.  Farmers’ markets and organic produce can be found in small towns throughout the country.  School cafeterias are making an effort to ween themselves off overly processed food.  Conversations about nutrition and health have become mainstream, while the stockbroker who leaves her day job to make artisanal pickles is not just a Brooklyn trope, but a national one. And if there can be said to be an origin moment all these interconnected changes, both big and small, it can probably traced back to the ‘Slow Food’ movement that first began in the late 1980s when a McDonalds franchise tried to open up next to the Spanish Steps in Rome.  What began as localized protest and became a movement through the 90s and 00s, has now evolved into canon law.  Today, with the help of the White House and widespread media acceptance, every single Restaurant Association trend for 2014 can be directly linked to the objectives laid out by the original Slow Food movement of Italy. The fight isn’t over, of course, and corporations still control a huge amount of the production and distribution behind much of what we eat, but headway has been made and progress continues. So, the question is, is it time that culture follows suit?  And what would that even look like?
Processed culture is, overwhelmingly, how we consume art, literature, music and film.  The big four publishers account for over 50% of books sold in the US.  Combined, the four biggest record companies have over 75% market share. On the distribution side, Amazon and iTunes control over 80% of book and music distribution.  There are fewer than 1,800 independent bookstores left in America.  Compare this picture with the restaurant industry, where all chains account for less than 10% of full-service restaurants and we start to get a picture of just how non-local our cultural consumption patterns are.  Conventional wisdom says that this is simply because the best (music / books / movies / games / etc.) attract the biggest audiences, but what if this isn’t true – after all, in the 1970s, McDonalds was said to have the best burgers in America.

It worked for food
Of course, food and music are not the same thing.  Food is a physical need. Your ears won’t die if you don’t play them Bach.  And while a restaurant can serve meals every night, a writer needs years to create a book.  The brilliance of 20^th Century publishing was how it transformed two years of work into a sustainable paycheck for thousands of artists.  The problem, like all the late-capitalist systems of the 21^st Century, is that we’ve ended up with a conglomerated system where very few producers get ridiculously wealthy, a massive bureaucracy of marketing professionals and administrators is supported, and the overwhelming majority of content creators have become volunteers, rather than specialists.  Farmers were able to leave the corporate food system to sell their produce in summer markets because the consumer economy was able to support this shift.  As people realized that they could eat better, healthier, and more happily by diversifying and localizing their consumption habits, artisanal economies emerged. From a McDonalds in Rome to a national decrease in US childhood obesity levels, the Slow Food ideas have improved the lifestyles of thousands, and cut across class, race and gender lines.  What would the result of a Slow Culture movement be?  We are becoming better at nourishing our bodies, should we begin to think about how we nourish our souls?