slow food

Conscious Lifestyle's recent partnership with Slow Food USA included a commitment to send the social innovators leading the Conscious Lifestyle - Slow Food Ventures to Slow Food Nation in San Francisco.

Slow Food Nation (SFN) was a summit of over 60,000 people who celebrated the birth of a broad and inclusive food movement to build an American food system that is sustainable, just, and delicious. It included tastings, a farmers market, workshops, a concert, lectures, and a lot of great food.

Paul Valetutti and Kathy Helfrey represented Slow Food - Rutgers. Their venture connects local growers with Rutgers University Dining Services to dramatically increase the amount of "good, clean, and fair" food served to students.

Conscious Lifestyle is proud to be partnering with Slow Food on Campus, the student engagement initiative by Slow Food USA. Slow Food is "a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 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." Slow Food has over 85,000 members and a presence in 132 countries.

If Americans were to 'get Michael Pollan' about what they ate (or in other words—really think about what they consume), their eating habits would radically change. Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is billed as "a natural history of four meals," but it is about much more than food. Pollan begins the book closely examining the omnipresence of corn in the modern American diet. And then he goes beyond the territory traversed by other books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and as an investigative food journalist, Pollan does not only offer critiques of the unsustainable megaliths of industrial corn farming and the PETA-angering Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), but offers alternatives to these destructive systems.