by Carl Honoré · April 29, 2008
The first leg of my North American book tour for Under Pressure is over. My last interview here in San Francisco had a nice symmetry to it.Back in 1990, when I was in the final year of my undergraduate degree at Edinburgh University in Scotland, ABC’s Good Morning America came to town to do a few shows. I got taken on as a runner and ended up working with one of the presenters, Spencer Christian. We got along well and I’ve always remembered him fondly. So what a happy surprise to find Spencer waiting to interview me onView From the Bay.We even had a laugh about it on air. Sometimes TV can be a lot of fun…
by Carl Honoré · April 22, 2008
My blog here serves two masters. Or two books, anyway: In Praise of Slow and Under Pressure. Although the newly-published Under Pressure is my top priority at the moment, I still have things to say about Slow. And you can delve deeper into these on www.slowplanet.com. So here goes with a Slow post…
The fast food industry has always seemed at odds with the Slow movement. Just consider the Big Mac: everything from the way its ingredients are sourced to the way it is prepared and consumed is all about speed ? at the expense of quality. But can fast food also be a force for good? There is an article in the current issue of Fast Companythat supplies some food for thought. (Yes, I know, what is a proponent of Slow doing reading a magazine with a name like that? Well, it offers a sparky and insightful take on modern culture. And for some reason I have been given a free subscription…) Anyway, the article is about a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants called Chipotle. It’s growing like a weed across the US, and could have 840 branches and sales of $1 billion by the end of the year. What makes Chipotle stand out from the crowd is that it takes a very ethical ? perhaps even Slow? ? approach to feeding the public. Staff make every burrito by hand, which means that customers queue for much longer than the four-minutes that is standard in the fast food industry. But they’re happy to do so because they prefer hand-made over prefab fare and the burritos taste good. What’s more, the company seeks to use naturally-raised meat wherever possible. It uses rBGH-free dairy products. All its pork is free of growth hormones and antibiotics and is humanely raised. The same goes for 80% of its chicken and 50% of its beef. This means prices are higher than you find at fast food rivals but again customers are willing to pay. This begs some intriguing questions. Is Chipotle’s business model just a niche in the fast food market or is it the beginning of a sea-change? Already two of the biggest fast food giants, Wendy’s and Burgher King, are exploring how to bring humane pork into their supply chain. If enough of the market swings in the right direction, we could be on the verge of a great leap forward in agriculture. But can a large corporation with hundreds of branches like Chipotle ever be Slow? Or Slow enough? And does that even matter if its business practices are nudging the market in a healthy right direction? As it happens, I have just arrived in Seattle to start promoting Under Pressure in the US. Maybe I should go sample one of these Chipotle burritos for myself…
by Carl Honoré · April 21, 2008
Talk about a frantic schedule. I’m sitting in the engineering room of City TV in Edmonton, Alberta waiting to do a 30-minute live interview. And then the schedule is pretty solid all day. So much I want to write about the reaction to the book and new things happening that take the idea forward. I hope to blog here later today or tomorrow at the latest. First subject will be how Toronto last week became the first jurisdiction in North America to take a formal stand against the avalanche of homework piled onto kids these days….Oh, that’s the producer coming to mike me up now…
by Carl Honoré · April 17, 2008
Hi everyone! My new site is finally live. I will be blogging here and at www.slowplanet.com. At the moment, I’m in Ottawa, four days into the North American tour for my new book, Under Pressure. There is nothing less slow than a book tour but it has to be done every few years. The upside is that the reaction to the book has so far been very favourable. People seem to get it. And it’s not just parents. Yesterday, a 24-year-old told me about her over-scheduled childhood. Her college application contained two pages for extracurricular activities and she won a scholarship based on her work in community development. But as soon as she left home and school, she dropped everything, including the community development. “I feel ashamed because everything I was doing in high school had an ulterior motive,” she said. “Looking back it would have been nicer to done things for their own sake.” Sure, she got the scholarship, but what did she lose along the way?
