Starting Up with Emma Collen @ The Jericho Kitchen Cookery School

For those of you who are not familiar with Slow Food, it is an international movement that was founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, to counter the rampant homogenisation of the local food culture in Italy.

Today it has grown to be an international network of more than 100,000 dedicated individuals from 160 countries, connected to each other through creative ideas that work towards a more sustainable and tasty future for food.

Change is inspired at a local level and connects people, products and projects from across the world, creating a global voice.

The Slow Food Movement ethos is: Good, Clean, Fair… to unlearn what we already know and start from scratch, the absolute basics.

Food should be enjoyable and we need to teach people, but more importantly children, how food is supposed to taste, and create a desire to start cooking again.

Take a carrot just pulled from the ground, still warm and grubby – a quick wash, and then to bite into that flavoursome vegetable, compared to a packaged, probably well-travelled and distinctly tasteless counterpart from your supermarket – who couldn’t be converted?

As someone with a limited budget, I will choose taste and local producer over the supermarket equivalent any day.

This has been a long time coming but I will never revert back.

You actually eat less, you feel so much better in terms of health but also in terms of feeling a connection with your environment and the seasons.

The newly-formed Slow Food Oxford aims to promote the virtues of taste and flavour, which in turn help to preserve local food cultures and traditions.

So, last week about 30 of us crowded into a room in the Turl Street Kitchen and eagerly awaited our very special guest, fingers crossed in the hope we would have the opportunity to meet Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food Movement in Italy.

We were treated to talks from Shane Holland, the head of Slow Food England, Fred Plotkin, who describes himself as a Pleasure Activist, and Annelie Bernhardt, a graduate of the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy.

All three were absolutely inspirational speakers in different ways, but the acid test was not to convince me because I was already converted, but my partner, Miles, whom I had dragged along to take photographs.

It didn’t take long to see he was inspired and totally engrossed in what was being said; and was so charmed by Petrini that his camera remained in his lap.

Ironically the term “Foodie”, first coined in Oxford in 1984 by Paul Levy, is now somewhat overused.

In fact “foodie” really doesn’t mean what we think it does. It was merely a term adopted by advertisers to sell us certain foods, not, as often thought, to describe a person who adores food.

It now feels like the perfect time to forget that label and move on to something new.

As our Pleasure Activist suggested: “We need to smell, touch and see – find pleasure in the small, real things, slow down and appreciate”. I agree. Imagine a policy legislated to improve your health through pleasure!

The bottom line is we all deserve to eat great food and making it local makes it easier to attain.

Making small adjustments to the way we shop can benefit not only our local producers but our well-being and in the long run the pennies in our pocket. I challenge anyone to just take the taste test and not be a convert.

Of course there is far more to this than just biodiversity and policy change, but if we all could take stock, just start from the beginning again, then change is possible, and in the words of this great man Carlo Petrini, “Cambiamento viene dal cuore non la testa”– change comes from the heart not the head.

So over to you people of Oxford!