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on eating in general, and on eating out in particu-
lar. The adverse of this is a widespread decline of
self-confidence common citizens, who feel that
they, by themselves, cannot choose their food or
eat it, either at home or outside, without profes-
sional help. These developments have induced
subtle changes in the cultural status and meanings
of Indian cuisines, taking place mostly outside the
range of vision of nutritionists, ethnographers
and columnists writing on food or restaurants.
Few seem aware that the traditional concerns of
ethnography of food—the cooked and the raw,
the pure and the polluted, commensality and its
absence, the sanctified and the profane—have
merged now with a new, more fluid politics of food
in countries like India. These politics are radically
altering, perhaps for the first time, the relationship
and the pecking order among cuisines that may
have acknowledged each other's presence for cen-
turies, but never as self-conscious, autonomous,
well-bounded culinary traditions.
However, the fast food and junk food are a threat
to our culture and culinary senses. Its increase fast
food culture in urban area and decrease slow food
cooking culture in families, thus, the Childhood
obesity is increasingly being observed with the
changing lifestyle of families with increased pur-
chasing power, less work out and eating habits of
fast food and junk food.
are related with affluence and sedentary lifestyle.
Overweight/obesity has classically been the disease
of urban area in all age groups. Food in urban area
has been replaced by high calorie snacks and junk
food”. Changed in eating habits have now suddenly
become overweight issues, thus, Indians are in a
frenzy to lose weight which has made gym busi-
ness a success. The young generation can blame the
McDonald culture but what about us adults? In an
age where fast food has virtually taken over our
culinary senses, it seems rather odd to be talking
about slow food or slow cooking. But that is what
precisely Carlo Petrini, an Italian, who started the
Slow Food Movement in Bra, Piedmont, North
Italy, was in Shillong (India) recently to share his
philosophy. Petrini is one of the world's leading
social movement leaders who has been promoting
through the Slow Food Movement, his philosophy
of what food sovereignty is all about.
The whole idea behind the Slow Food Move-
ment is that it should be good (meaning tasty),
clean (no chemicals) and fair (no exploitation)
food. In 2004, he was named a “European Hero”
by Time magazine. In January 2008, he was the
only Italian to appear in the list of “50 People who
could Save the World,” drawn up by the prestig-
ious British newspaper, The Guardian. Petrini has
been mobilizing people worldwide about joining
the Slow Food Movement because fast food chains
promote wrong eating habits and is an imperialis-
tic approach to food. He says fast food joints actu-
ally want all of us to eat the same food, cooked in
the same way and to forget our indigenous cuisine
which is known to be healthy, nutritious and which
in turn promotes diversity and originality of food
and benefit our farmers.
One of the things that globalization does is
to create homogeneity in taste whether that be
about fashion, about the brands we pursue and
also the food we eat. The Slow Food Movement
on the contrary fulfills need of the farming com-
munities to produce endangered species of crops,
which because of wrong policies are no longer
produced as farmers think they are not viable.
From Petrini's demonstration it was amazing to
find how the global policy on food is resulting in
huge wastage even as a large part of the world suf-
fers from hunger and under-nutrition. The current
food system is such that rich countries throw away
more than half of the food produced. In Italy,
about 4,000 tons of perfectly edible food is thrown
away everyday. In the US, about 22,000 tons of
food is discarded at food joints across the country
and at homes. Obviously, this is not a sustainable
food system and those who are worried about the
future ought to be worried about this thoughtless
consumption pattern which also promotes a cul-
ture of selfishness.
2
THE SLOW FOOD REVOLUTION
The famous multinational fast food joint, KFC
has started a franchisee in Guwahati (India)
recently. The launch was a major hit for the stall
owners. It appears that there was a long queue for
the KFC delicacies and many people felt they had
scored bonus points for getting anything at all to
take back home for their kids. That's the attraction
of fast food in today's world. All of this reflects a
drastic lifestyle change and of course, fast food is
good for the taste buds but what lies beyond the
taste and how that food metabolizes in our diges-
tive systems is perhaps the pertinent question. We
never saw so many obese kids and adults before.
In fact, obesity used to be associated with the
Americans, known to be big eaters. According to a
research in America “This parallel increase in obes-
ity rates and in the popularity of healthier foods
with lower calorie and fat density has been noted in
consumer research (Seiders & Petty, 2004) and in
health sciences as “the American obesity paradox”
(Heini & Weinsier, 1997) a survey done by Bharati,
Deshmukh and Garg (2008) in Correlates of over-
weight and obesity among school going children
of Wardha city in the Central India. Accord-
ing to Deshmukh et al. (2006), “All these factors
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