Savoring Rapid Expansion of the Slow-Food Campaign

Forget about that fast food. Toss those TV dinners in the trash.

Ventura residents Jake and Mary Blehm want to put the brakes on today’s eat-and-run culture. And they are inviting anyone who wants to join them over for dinner.

The Blehms are co-leaders of the Ventura County chapter of Slow Food USA, a nationwide movement with chapters in Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

The purpose is to support and celebrate a more leisurely, family-friendly approach toward breaking bread.

The movement calls itself an antidote to the homogenized and the mass-produced, a snail-paced counterattack against the idea that speed is king and taste doesn’t matter.

Supporters promote the creation of traditional dishes, prepared by hand and served to family and friends around a dining table.

They strive to preserve and broaden the demand for indigenous crops and handcrafted cuisine produced by bakers, cheese makers and others who keep alive America’s food heritage.

But most of all they seek a return to civilized dining, embracing the idea that food was meant to be savored with others away from cell phones, televisions and the other distractions of the modern world.

“It’s all too easy to drive through the fast-food place and toss a couple of Happy Meals in the back seat and feel like we’ve met our requirement for feeding the family,” said Mary Blehm, a former chef and mother of two who launched the Ventura County Slow Food chapter this summer.

“This is about reconnecting as families within the household and, in a sense, connecting as a community at large,” she added. “People just don’t take the time to get together anymore. I’d like to see if we can get people to slow down, prepare a good meal and enjoy each other’s company.”

This is no passing fad.

The Slow Food movement was launched in Italy in the 1980s by a group of gourmets intent on blocking a McDonald’s from rising in Rome’s historic Piazza di Spagna.

Although unsuccessful in that endeavor, they convened an assembly of like-minded connoisseurs in Paris in 1989 and composed a manifesto, dedicating themselves to preserving regional cuisine and to encouraging “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment.”

The movement now counts 65,000 supporters in 560 chapters worldwide. There are 64 chapters, with 5,000 members, in the United States. One of the largest in the nation is in Los Angeles, where there are more than 100 members.

Patrick Martins, president of New York-based Slow Food USA, said membership has increased twentyfold nationwide over the last three years, mostly through word of mouth.

“It’s about slowing down and respecting the rhythms of the dinner table; only if we do that can we protect America’s food heritage,” Martins said. “We all end up in the same place anyway, so we might as well go there slowly.”

Indeed, a big part of the Slow Food campaign is aimed at preserving endangered foods and protecting the small-scale farmers and food makers who produce them.

The group issues a list of foods that qualify, from California’s Sun Crest peach to Delaware’s bay oyster and Sonoma’s dry Monterey Jack cheese.

The Blehms say that in agriculture-oriented Ventura County, there might be some crops--such as Ojai’s little-known pixie tangerine or the economically troubled Valencia orange--that might be worthy of the group’s preservation efforts.

“We’ve got a rich agricultural history here but if someone isn’t paying attention, it could disappear,” said Jake Blehm, who runs a Santa Paula business that breeds beneficial insects for farm use. “This is really about trying to maintain a way of life and to get people to focus on the food we eat, how it’s prepared and where it comes from.”

The Blehms have held just one Slow Food meeting so far. About 15 people gathered in June at their Ventura home, sampling bite-sized potatoes, cheeses and berries. Half a dozen people joined the chapter, and another gathering is to be held in coming weeks.

Ojai resident Larry Yee, head of the University of California’s farm advisor office in Ventura, attended the inaugural meeting and is eager to learn more.

“A lot of the smaller independent producers and processors are really being squeezed,” he said.

The Blehms don’t want the local chapter to turn into a snobby food-and-wine club. They stress the group’s educational component, which includes helping parents and educators learn how to teach children about good nutrition, and about the history and culture of the food they eat and the importance of sharing it with family and friends.

To that end, they hope to draw a variety of like-minded food lovers into the local chapter, from people of Mexican descent who every day dish out meals rooted in their culture to those who every year display their handmade cheeses, home-grown vegetables and home-brewed beverages at the Ventura County Fair.