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Comment by aethertap | Hacker News Reader

There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for well-being. You can get the nutrition you need with a pittance today in terms of economics, but as a society I think we've failed to fill the social gap that was left open by our liberation from the work of eating well. I'm not saying that the gap has to be filled by food (there are probably even better things we could do), just that the slow food movement is using it that way. Filling it with productive work as you describe certainly has economic value, but I think the cost in terms of happiness for some of us kills the reward.

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> There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for well-being.

Have you ever been involved in the process of growing food? A workday on the farm is substantially longer than any office job, the only way to talk to people is to scream because they're at least thirty meters away from you most of the time. At the end of it you're drained and people who have been doing it all their lives get to live the last years of their lives with terrible back pains and having to rely on the young folks for, um, growing food, because it turns out doing manual labour for twelve hours a day isn't so easy when you're eighty. There's anything but quality time in that.

Edit: It also turns out that, with foodstuffs having to be so cheap, this kind of work was also very badly paid, which meant that except for people who owned huge amounts of land (and generally didn't work all, or more commonly any of it), people who had to do this were, if not dirt poor, in any case poor enough not to be able to afford too much. It's the fact that we lost all this chance to have "quality time" that allows us to heartily debate such matters through silicon stuff that shoves charge carriers through really thin glass tubes.

I own a farm, and work on it every day with my family, so yes, I do have personal experience with it. It turns out that working together on something you value seems to build relationships, at least in our case.

How big a family and how big a farm? My grandparents used to have one, too. As they grew old and the family either shrank or less of it became available for regular fieldwork, it simply became unsustainable for them. They kept a small-ish garden that provides them with most of the fruits and vegetables they eat fresh, some livestock, and rented the rest of the land.

Family of four, twenty acres. I custom graze cattle and raise ducks and fruit and nut trees, and keep a large garden.

Not all vegetables must be produced in the way you describe. In my tiny, poorly-weeded backyard, we've got herbs, beans, peas, 6 kinds of weird lettuce, arugula, tomatoes, strawberries, gooseberries, and more onions than reasonable. Right, it doesn't feed us entirely most days, but we don't have to buy many veggies. I don't get paid to tend it. The time out there is probably good for my mind, given all the research showing green space as effective as pharmaceuticals in combating ADD/ADHD in children.

If we all had our little gardens the food landscape of America would change wildly. Japan's got tiny little gardens tucked into every corner. It's a different model of production.

> Right, it doesn't feed us entirely most days, but we don't have to buy many veggies.

This is in the context where, as ZenPro stated above:

> industrial countries spend between 9-11% of their annual income on foodstuffs and less than 5% of their time gathering said foodstuffs - the lowest in time/money expenditure for food in the history of the world.[1]

Things would change radically if you had to feed off it entirely most days. Having a small garden is great, both as a hobby and through the healthy food you get from it, but glorifying the times when you spent "quality time" working your ass off in the field is a bit far fetched...

Growing food was a major source of social connection in the same way uranium mines were.

Preparing food was a major source of such "quality time" as peeling, flaying, cooking and serving food for a large family. Quality time, indeed.

It's all well and good if you want to have the social connection while fiddling with your food. However nowadays you don't have to if you don't want to. I for one would not like to spend a lot of my waking non-eating time preparing my food.

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