Our relationships with food and home play an essential role in our physical and emotional well being. Historically, these relationships have been deep and intimate, reflecting the particular climate and culture in which we live as well as our personal and collective histories.

Currently, these relationships are being jeopardized as we become distanced, and even estranged, from what we eat and where we live. Our food and homes have been reduced to products created, marketed, and sold to us by large industrialized systems that destroy these interactions and leave us with only fast food and fast houses. Such shallow relationships erode the quality of our lives, contribute to a supersized ecological footprint, and create a culture of excess that we can no longer afford. Most importantly, they transform us from active, involved producers of our food and homes into passive, lazy consumers of the latest marketing ploy. Over the past 60 years ago the home cooked meal made from natural, locally grown ingredients has been replaced by standardized, processed substitutes created by an anonymous food industry. At the same time, the sensibly designed modest homes in walkable neighborhoods have been replaced by an endless suburban sprawl of oversized, anonymous cookie cutter houses.

The Slow Food Movement reacts to this assault on what and how we eat by promoting a deeper and more intimate relationship with food. It supports local products and sustainable agricultural practices, and celebrates the restaurateurs who use them and the pleasures of preparing and eating good food. Empowering individuals through education is a key component of the Slow Food Movement. Its Taste Education Program is dedicated to “reawakening and training of the senses and the study of all aspects of food. Taste Education helps people to make daily choices about food with awareness and responsibility, turning the consumer into a co-producer, becoming an individual engine of true change, choosing Good, Clean and Fair food” (1).

In the same way, Slow Home promotes the creation of deeper and more intimate relationships with our homes. Slow Home teaches us how to make better, more informed decisions about how and where we live in order to create homes that are Simple, Light and Open. This means homes that are simple to use and fit the way you want to live. It means homes that are light on the environment and that have open flexible spaces with a strong connection to nature.

Slow Home is also inspired by the groundbreaking work of the chef Julia Child, who invented Demonstration Cooking Television in the 1960’s to teach cooking as a series of skills and techniques which could be demonstrated, learned, and applied to a variety of situations. Slow Home’s web based series of daily design projects demonstrate architectural design as a learnable series of principles, skills, and processes. These tools empower us to improve the quality of where we live by forging a deeper and more direct relationship with our homes.

(1) http://www.slowfood.com/educazione/welcome_eng.lasso