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Gingerbread house with a range of personal touches, an expressive cuisine.

COMPLEX FOODS FROM SCRATCH: UNABRIDGED AUTHENTICITY
12 December 2005

If you're looking for an experience of authenticity, try making original, expressive foods from scratch. Make the base ingredients, select and refine the trimmings, do something not prescribed by recipe, in print or on television. Break the rules, waste some time, and put a little feeling into food preparation, and you'll find the art of eating makes more sense.

In a time when people are endlessly running about, trying to escape the rigors of the clock, the train schedule, the now-now mandate of e-mail, the digitalized artifice of a world trying to simplify itself, it may be that giving a little more effort, stepping out of the mainstream that keeps things moving too fast, devoting more time than is normally advisable to basic needs like food and eating, can put things in perspective, and bring satisfaction.

There is now a "slow-food" movement, which seeks to put thought back into the culinary process, to bring people's minds to bear on what they eat. First: to know what's being eaten. Second: not to seek convenience above all, but to seek value, the quality of the process, the ingredients and the experience of eating.