Slow Fast Food [EN]

I nave been recently in a place called M**Bun. It is a small chain exixting for a few years, with at the moment three establishments, two in the center of Turin, Piedmont, Italy, and one in Rivoli, in the suburbs of the same town. It defines itself as Slow Fast Food. For sure McDonald's cannot patent the very common Scottish prefix Mc, but interpreting it as a challengo to the american giant is even too easy. The sponsorization by the organization SlowFood can also be straightforwardly recognized. It displays itself as a place where you can buy ready-made food quickly, to take way or to eat there in rooms with a minimalist interior design, that you order at a counter in disposable packages and with a service reduced to the essential. But then you immediately see the differences. The products, even the potato chips, are cooked at the moment; you can collect them at the counter but with a mechanism that informs you as soon as they are ready. All the material is recyclable, and you have to take care you yourself of the disposal in the proper containers. The products, from the meat to the drinks and the sweets, are only of very good quality and of local origin, not only as origin but mainly also as gastronomic tradiction. This is emphasized by the purely Piedmontese irony that you can see on stickers available around, and remembered at the entrance a statue of an ox, which is Piedmont is the king of the animals. Also dishes suitable for vegetarians are avalaible.
The place is spreaded with visual stimuluses about the etical principles they guide them, and you can find with transparency informations about the producers. On the website you can view the full list; the meat producer, the farming company Scaglia, also located in Rivoli, in summer organizes guided tours to the farm. For sure, you pay a little more, but you pay for the substance and not for the appearance. By the way, I have eaten an exceptional beef entrecote.

M**Bun in the center of TUrin

Some days ago, and only during two days, it was opened in Milan a trendy fast food named Single Burger. It has been sponsorized by two popular concurrents of the italian culinary talent show Masterchef. Every week they would have proposed a special hamburger conceived by them. The first opening Saturday night evening, here comes the revelation: the delicious hamburger with bacon proposed, is actually a McDonald's product, projected and realized with ingredients and technologies and by workers of the American multinational, available now under the name "Bacon Clubhouse" in every "restaurant" of the chain. This history cannot be settled so quickly simply as a joke to the gastro-cool people, or as a brilliant marketing operation, and not even as the licit try to clear out "prejudices" related to the brand. It is a fact that it is hard for it to seep through a lot of areas of South Europa, and even studies conducted by themselves seem to point out that, together with recent desperate attempts of cleaning their image, at least in Europe, increasing a little the quality of the products, they would make more profit.

Single Burger, now renamed McDonald's premium in the center of Milan

For sure it is easy to come out claiming that, in the end, what matters is waht you like, but the issue remains: we are progressively loosing in general the ability to eat well, just even in the meaning of understanding what it means, for the health and for the environment. A lot of people is satisfied with paying a lot because some restaurant is cool or sophisticated or elegant, but the quality concerns other aspects more intimately related to the food: the production technologies and their impact, traceability, locality, cultural value. The organization SlowFood deep in its heart works very well about these themes. Somoetimes maybe it ends up appearing radical chic, but the future of fodd cannot be BIO for the rich people and GMO for all the others. Obviously a local high quality properly made beef entrecote is more expensive that an hamburger in a fast food restaurant, but the opposite gives you no guarantee. The message that McDonald's is trying to conceive is then meaningful: you should not be cool and you can come and east by us, since you don't understand anything and for you is the same.
But this does not make disappear the objective criteria that allow to say that a beef entrecote in M**Bun is better than an hamburger in McDonald's: it is documented who produces the meet and with which criteria, it is fresh, it does not make thousands of kilometers, without preservatives used only for aesthetic purposes, without hormonal pumping, without antibiotic treatments to increase productivity, without GMO feeding, without intensive farming in plants with dozens of thousands of animals in conditions that you would not allow to visit, that instead you keep well closed hoping that the smell of manure is not revealing too much. You can see all this on the wealth and on the environmental impact, and with a little of culture of food you would see it also on the taste, whose knoledge in our society is getting lost under the delirium of industrialization.
A key point of capitalism is the idea that you have to follow your primary pulses without thinking about it. That a purchase is just filling the gap between a will and its satisfaction, and has no further implications. It is better when it is an impulsive action because it can be foreseen and directed. Instead, we are responsible of the success of the products we choose: CONSUMING IS A POLITICAL ACT.