Gordon Ramsay's worst recipes

The divergence in aims of the controllers of slow food and the bulk of its membership - small gourmet food producers and highly affluent consumers - is often missed. Some of the movement's activities, such as supporting artisanal producers of regional specialities against the heavy hand of EU food regulations accord with the ongoing battles many small businesses have against rampant bureaucracy.

Similarly, slow food's campaigns to save heirloom varieties of fruit, grains, vegetables and livestock by encouraging their consumption is akin to the economist Tyler Cowen's calls for the globalisation of folk and indigenous art and music as the best way to broaden their markets and thereby ensure their continuation.

However, slow food is also deeply anti-modern and is increasingly aligning itself with the coalition of interests seeking to idealise inefficient and outmoded agricultural practices. The original slow food manifesto explicitly rejected modern agricultural methods and seeks to idealise a medieval lifestyle:

This implies eating slowly and reinstating the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum (the Salernitan Regimen of Health, composed at the famous medieval medial school of Salerno in the 12th or 13th century) which is unjustly considered to be obsolete, setting aside time for its highest purpose, namely, pleasure (and not intensive production as the owners of machines and the proponents of things fast would have us believe).

The absurdity of this position is evident. The medieval lifestyle being idealised had a life expectancy of 35, horrific infant and child mortality rates and chronic illness for most of the population. The medieval diet for most of Europe consisted of vegetables such as turnips or cabbage, bread and ale with an occasional treat of meat on high days. Winter was particularly grim with little variety and insufficient nutrients. Given this reality, it is perhaps unsurprising the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum preaches moderation in spring, summer and autumn but recommends eating as much as possible in winter.

There are many who would immediately reject the glorification of Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum yet still find the idyllic rural imagery of slow seductive. The attraction of doing good while eating well is undeniable. But it is not that simple. Modern agriculture has been the saviour of millions of very poor people and instrumental to the development of the highly urbanised lives many slow food supporters choose to live.

The phenomenal increases in Asian and Indian food intake, at a time of rapid population increase are directly attributable to modern agricultural inputs and technology. Even in rich countries, modern agriculture has delivered nutritious, cheap food with the result that the proportion of income spent on food has dropped from 25 per cent to 10 per cent over the past 50 years. Moreover, the intensification of agricultural production has allowed the proportion of Australians working on farms to fall from more than 9 per cent in the 1960s to 3.5 per cent today. Despite the glorification of a lost pastoral arcadia, today's urban service economy workers rationally reject the idea of having to personally till their own land for food.

For although many people value the handcrafted product or the organically grown tomato or the undeniable pleasures of eating a carefully prepared eight-hour slow-cooked lamb leg around a table with friends and family, there are equally those people who value the time they gain in not cooking, or shopping or gardening.

Throughout history, women have done most of the cooking, growing vegetables, keeping the chooks and milking the house cow. As each part of that lifestyle has been superseded by the convenience of urban living, the lifestyle options of women have expanded. Yet slow food, with its emphasis on food as pleasure, food as environmental statement and food as social justice - “good, clean, and fair” - makes a moral judgment that those values are superior to other values such as freedom, self-actualisation, and progress.

Nevertheless, slow succeeds because it can take on a number of meanings. For the middle-class “foodie” it provides a moral overlay for exempting some kinds of food from the growing environmental asceticism. For example, eating expensive French Roquefort cheese, white Italian truffles and jamón Ibérico gain the slow food tick. But cheap Peruvian asparagus, GM canola oil and - of course - McDonalds are to be shunned.

As Ramsay argued, “I don't want to see asparagus in the middle of December. I don't want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home-grown.” It is entirely acceptable not to eat at McDonalds or to choose organic or gourmet food based on one's own tastes and beliefs. It is at best illogical, and at worst hypocritical, to evaluate food with similar characteristics (imported cheese or imported asparagus) with diametrically opposed criteria.

Local does not mean “better”

This ideological imposition of moral criteria onto food is increasingly widespread. Many foodies now describe themselves as “locavores” - a new word coined in addition to the more usual herbivores or carnivores. Locavores consume only locally produced food. In their mind, to demonstrate true food awareness they need to know where food comes from, and preferably grow it themselves or at least buy if from a farmers market, not a supermarket.