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| "Women's Life and Health" is the interview series that features active professional women about their health, lifestyle and career. |
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| Interview
vol.6 |
Natsu Shimamura -Part1 |
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| Slow food is an approach to food that came from Italy, isn’t it? |
| Yes, it all happened around 1985. When Italian people talk of “slow food,” it’s symbolic of the food that forms the center of their lives, and a slow life in general. In other words, they’re talking about a kind of lifestyle. This is precisely why our way of living changes when we change the food that we eat. This is the view of the person who wrote the book, Manifesto Ufficiale di Slow Food, an old philosopher who is now well into his 80s. This concept of eating and living is exactly the same for a person who lives in a penthouse in Roppongi Hills and for a young girl who has relocated to an island of Okinawa. Food is at the center of our lives, and the fact that the roots of that food lie in nature remains apparent-that does not change. Even without hearing a lecture on the subject, through slow food we naturally come to think more about the environment, and in that sense I think it truly is an amazing word. |
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| I thought that the phrase you included in your book, “Slow food involves knowing what lies outside of your plate,” was particularly helpful for understanding the concept. |
| This is something I heard from an Italian friend of mine. He says that those people we have been calling experts are only able to distinguish the flavors that come on the plate. However, in sparing no expense in gathering together the finest delicacies from all over the world, we forget the origins of such delicious food. In Tokyo the only nature you can see is that which you find in parks, but it is still clear that we are experiencing an abnormal climate. When there is heavy rain, cedar trees fall down like a flash flood. But some people produce food even in such situations. Some people become too obsessed about food safety, but if all the farmers could find this idea ridiculous and give up farming, any type of gourmet cuisine would cease to exist and the basis of food safety would actually deteriorate. If you really want to eat good food well into the future, those serious gourmet aficionados have got to start considering what lies outside of the plate. |
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| And that point is directly connected to slow food, isn’t it? |
| Who made what’s on this plate, how did they make it, how did they get it here? And going even further, there is the question of the conditions of the area where the food was produced, which I think is an important point. For this reason the theme for me for the past couple of years has been to make an effort on my own to further improve the point of contact with food safety. Particularly in Japan, there is the question of how are we going to support the fisherman in small coastal fishing areas as well as the rice and cattle farmers who are constantly influenced by the government’s agricultural policies? |
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| I agree that food plays a much closer role in our lives than we usually realize. |
| Exactly. One nice thing about food is its sensuous, animalistic, and instinctive aspects. Being delicious is one thing, but it also connects you to the smell of the ocean, the essence of a far away jungle, and so on. Recently, people have been throwing away the enjoyment of thinking about such things and the enjoyment of making such food, which I think is unfortunate. The enjoyment of creating a meal and everyone eating it together is really connects to those sensuous, animalistic, and instinctive aspects. Searching for and thinking about food in this way, using our own senses, is incredibly important. |
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| Do you mean that we have become estranged from that kind of enjoyment? |
| That’s right. It is said that heating up food in the microwave is simple and convenient, but when you really get down to it, it is really quite pitiful. The boiled potatoes that typically appear at breakfast in Japanese business hotels have all been cut into hexagonal shapes by women working in factories in China. The cooks simply open a bag and heat its contents in the microwave. Even kinpira gobou (fried burdock root and carrot), which is supposed to be representative of “a flavor of Japan,” always contains some kind of artificial sweetener like sorbitol. We have left things up to other people to such an extent that we have become alienated from sensual pleasure. Things don’t seem real and we feel hollow. And so, we become stuck in the delusion that our real life is to be found somewhere else. |
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| 2/3 |
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