I ran across a great essay titled “In Praise of Fast Food” that poked a few holes in one of the driving tenets of the slow food movement – the belief that taking ripe, organic, locally grown ingredients and preparing them in traditional ethnic and cultural fashion is a more natural, time-honored process. Here’s a sample:
My culinary style, like so many people’s, was created by those who scorned industrialized food; culinary Luddites, we could call them, after the 19th-century English workers who abhorred the machines that were destroying their way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic aids to flavoring.”
I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “savor a world of authentic cuisine.”
Culinary Luddism has come to involve more than just taste, however; it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade—and it is here that I begin to back off. The reason is not far to seek: because I am a historian.
As a historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by this movement: the sunny, rural days of yore contrasted with the gray industrial present. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast; artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.
Over the weekend, the wife and I watched the HBO documentary, 
Most people who discover Bob Dylan’s music these days run across a song of his (or a cover of a song of his) in a film or on Pandora. If their interest is piqued, they’ll likely buy one of his greatest hits albums on a whim. The first 
When the wife and I moved to Greenville, SC from Washington DC, we didn’t really know anyone. I set a meeting with mayor to talk about the city, the local economy, and get a sense of what’s in store for the metro area. We spoke for almost an hour and I enjoyed the conversation very much. I didn’t think my meeting request was weird at the time, but everybody now laughs at the mere mention of it. Anyway, I told the mayor that the main reason we chose Greenville over other cities across the southeast was the city council’s commitment to urban redevelopment and the relatively low cost of living. He suggested I write a guest column for the local paper about our decision-making process, so I did.
I could go on and on about how there are 
