Why Slowing Down Can be a Good Thing

At YFM our core team members come from a range of backgrounds with a wide range of inspirations driving them. Franca Zingler discusses the ideas she found inspiring in Woody Tasch's Inquires into the nature of Slow Money: investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered :At the Youth Food Movement we see food as a topic that is an essential part of many of today's issues we have to face and find solutions for. It all comes down to our definition of value, culture and diversity, sustaining our future and living a healthy life. That starts with the soils that grow our food. The fertility of our soil is the basic foundation we all need to acknowledge. People tend to forget where our food comes from and how systems in nature work.When looking at the concepts of food and sustainability champions like David Suzuki, Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva and Carlo Petrini, we find a handful of core issues that seem to be the base of what is going wrong in our economy, our society and our environment.The American author Woody Tasch wrote an inspiring book in 2008 called Inquiries into the nature of Slow Money - Investing as if food, farms and fertility mattered. The founder of the Slow Food Movement, Carlo Petrini, wrote the foreword for this book and is quoted many times throughout it, as his ideas are very much related to Tasch's approach.Economy is a man-made thing - it is our invention. Money is moving faster and faster and often we don't even know where our money is 'floating around' the globe, what investments it is used for. 'Slow money' suggests a rethinking of those economic systems that have brought us a focus on GDP and extremely powerful corporations that are interested in increasing shareholders' wealth instead of stakeholders' health and wellbeing.How about we slow money down, invest locally in health, creativity and sustainability? In nature it's economies of scope that are sustainable, not economies of scale. Instead of economies of scale, why don't we let economies of scope thrive like nature does? Just think about how, as opposed to destructive monoculture, diversity in agriculture results in interesting, tasty and healthy food.Slow Money  truly provides 'food for thought' about how we want to design our future. To quote Carlo Petrini, "We have to find a new form of economy, an economy that knows how to govern it's limits, an economy that respects nature and acts at the service of man, a situation where political and humanistic choices govern the economy and not the other way around. We have to discover new economic relationships that move at a more natural pace. This is the potential of slow money."Image credit: Melanie Dunn at Not.Waste farm