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The “Ah-Hah” Moment, Slow Food Style The International Slow Food Movement came into my life when I had reached a turning point in my career as a chef. I was looking for a path that made sense, although I was not sure what that path might be. But once I learned about Slow Food, my reasons for doing this work started coming together. I felt that I finally had a mission: to bring the best-possible food to my customers by empowering my environment to provide me with that food. At the same time I would prove that New Jersey is a gastronomically powerful place to live and work. In other words, Slow Food not only changed my life but gave me a professional purpose. Getting involved with Slow Food was the first of my two best decisions. The second was to marry my wife, Kim, who has been my partner on our Slow Food journey and has put up with me as I’ve written this book. In our search for great food and the people and places behind it, Kim has been patient yet progressive, strong yet quiet. She has made me a better person, and the Slow Food movement has made me both a better chef and a better businessman. Most of us have had “ah-hah” moments when something we’ve mulled over for a long time suddenly comes together. We turn a corner, and the answer is right in front of us. We glance down at a puzzle, and the dots connect. That’s how the Slow Food movement came into my life: in one of those big, clarifying “Ah-hahs.” As a chef and restaurant owner in the Garden State, I had long been frustrated that I couldn’t directly purchase all the wonderful fresh foods that were being produced virtually next door to my restaurant. It made absolutely no sense that a locally farmed tomato had to be trucked out of state through a network of brokers and distributors, only to be trucked back to my door days later at three times the price and half the quality. In less than a week the tomato had been transformed from a fresh vegetable with a New Jersey pedigree to a hunk of anonymous produce that might have come from anywhere. I had always felt that one of my most important responsibilities as a chef is to obtain the best products that I can find. But how could I possibly know what is best if I didn’t know where it 1  1  came from? And here was another question that nagged: why had America allowed the noble turkey—which two hundred years ago was so robust that Ben Franklin had suggested that it be our national symbol—to become the blandest thing on the Thanksgiving plate, its taste overshadowed by everything from the gravy to the cranberry sauce? What had happened to the flavor of our food? These were the kinds of questions that were percolating in the back of my mind. But they only surfaced at the end of the long day, after the customers had gone and I was on my restaurant’s front patio with my fellow foodies, as we riffed and griped about our wild and wonderful business over plates of antipasti and good wine. In 1998, Tre Piani opened in Princeton, New Jersey. I was the chef and a partner; later I became the sole owner. And although I loved the vitality of working in a major university town and was dedicated to bringing the finest-quality seasonal foods to the table, acquiring those foods was a constant struggle. Then, about a year later, I got a brochure in the mail. I was about to chuck it along with the insurance solicitations and bonus-mile advertisements, but for some reason I stopped and took a good look at it. The brochure was from an out- fit called the International Slow Food Movement. Intrigued, I kept reading; and as I read, I got more excited. It was answering every question that had ever bugged me about bland, artificially pumped-up food, not to mention explaining the country ’s outrageously expensive and complex Rube Goldberg mass food system. It suggested a way to make things better but without going the political route. Instead, Slow Food aimed to conquer the big guys by massing together in support of locally based growers, producers, and food suppliers. The object, in one of...

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