Buy fresh, read more, live well.

(Pictures from top to bottom: Carlo Petrini's book Slow Food Nation; Carlo Petrini sipping Navarro Pinot grape juice with Alice Waters as they announce Slow Food Nation at Greens; All things American. Farming is freedom, farming is life; Carlo Petrini's book Slow Food, A case for taste; The Slow Food Nation '08, visit http://slowfoodnation.org/ ; The most inspirational book I've ever read, Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. )

When I started the culinary program, I knew no one/nothing. Chef Gordon (he fancies calling people by made-up names; I can't figure out if he wishes to inspire people to follow after the great "movers & shakers", or whether he genuinely cannot remember their names..) always called me Alice. 'What? Who is Alice? I'm sure he will tell me...'. All he would tell me was to look it up.
Upon looking it up, I read all about Alice Waters and her extreme presence within the local fresh food movements. The more I read about her, the more I realized another name popping up; Carlo Petrini.
I had remembered my Chef ranting about the Slow Foods Movement, saying that I would love Alice Waters's involvement in it. Well, it turns out that Carlo Petrini is the founder of the Slow Foods Movement and Alice Waters has forwards written in two of his books (not to mention the many more books under her belt).
Just to give my destiny another little nudge, after clocking out at work one day I stopped into their culinary book section. To my surprise, right in front of my eyes lay a copy of Carlo Petrini's Slow Food Nation. There is an excerpt I would like to share with you:

The contradiction in agroindustrial terms is clearly emerging: agroindustry has given us the illusion that it could solve the problem of feeding the human race. I would go even further: over the last 50 years, it has turned food production into both executioner and victim. Executioner, because the unsustainable methods of agroindustry have led to the disappearance of many sustainable production methods which were once part of the identity of the communities that practices them and were once the highest pleasures for the gastronome in search of valuable knowledge and flavors. Victim, because the same unsustainable methods- originally necessary in order to feed a larger number of people- have since turned the sphere of food and agriculture into a neglected sector, completely detached from the lives of billions of people, as if procuring food has become a matter of course and required no effort at all. Politics shows little interest in it, except when pressured to do so by the most powerful lobbies of international agroindustry, while the average consumer either does not reflect on what he or she is eating or has to make a titanic effort to obtain this information that will explain it. -Carlo Petrini

Please read this book. Not only awakening, but also inspiring, Carlo Petrini, with the help of many others, attempts to shake the world out of it's coma and back into life.