Slow Money Supports Slower, More Sustainable Food

The Slow Food Movement has been around for a while, and continues to grow with the sustainable food movement. Slow Food is an international organization that works to protect the biodiversity of traditional food supplies, promote taste, and provider avenues for producers to connect with co-producers. Co-producers are consumers who take an active role in discovering the person or people who produce their food, how the producer makes his or her product, what challenges they face. By taking on an active consumer role rather than the normal, passive role, the consumer becomes invested in the product and therefore becomes a co-producer.

This is where the concept of "slow money" comes in. The idea of slow money isn't as popular as slow food has become, but it's an inextricable component of sustainable, slow food systems. Slow money was presented by Woody Tasch, in his 2008 book Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Tasch contends that the age of fast money, where people have a buy low, sell high mentality and prize personal wealth is on the decline, and alternatively we ought to practice a more "down to earth" approach to money. He envisions a restorative economy that moves away from exploitation, extraction, and blatant consumerism towards the sustainable preservation of the earth and community. In order to reorient our economy, Tasch proposes "nurture capital," a model of entrepreneurial finance directed at building soil fertility, cultural, economic, and biological diversity, with attention to sense of place and the carrying capacity of communities and ecosystems.

It sounds lofty, and it is, but it's important to note here that Tasch isn't talking about doing completely away with Wall Street and our entire economic structure, but rather building a new capital sector that stands alongside the current economic industry. Investors and companies wouldn't be so preoccupied with high return rates, but rather on the long term health of bioregion. In Tasch's book he focuses on the importance of applying the slow money philosophy specifically to local food systems and producers. He imagines an economy that puts 50% of its assets was invested within a 50-mile radius, directed towards building diverse, sustainable, small-scale, regional companies.

The slow money movement is still in beginning stages, but it's future is promising, particularly for sustainable food. The principles of slow money are already employed in many local food systems in small ways. The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model is a perfect example of slow money at its purest: the consumer invests directly in the local farmers product, which is produced according (hopefully) to sustainable, organic practices. What are other ways you can become a co-producer, and invest even a little bit of money in supporting sustainable food, your community, and the earth all at once? How can you participate in shifting the economic mindset of the country and bring it all back down to earth, towards a more "ground up" approach?

photo credit: CC BY 2.0