The other day while zipping along on an interstate highway, I stopped for a Wendy's grilled chicken sandwich (tomato-lettuce-only-hold-the-honey-mustard-please). After I chowed it down -- the only sort of grub on I 75 between Dayton and Toledo -- I returned to the dual-lane speedway of double semi-trailers passing one another in deadly succession. I'm sure many of those semis were stuffed with salmon from Chile, tomatoes from Mexico, and strawberries from Watsonville, California -- headed for Kroger, Big Bear, Meijer's, and other Midwest supermarket chains.

Alex Friedman and Alice Goldmark's stick-to-the-ribs commentary about the Slow Food Movement flies in the grease-stained faces of McDonald's, Burger King, and that aforementioned fast-food nation unto itself, Wendy's. Without yammering about how America's "culture" is defined by its attitudes toward eating, this must-hear drop-in evokes the sound and substance of Portland, Oregon's Pasta Works, Peter de Garmo's food market, where loving attention is paid to truly farm-fresh, locally produced, seasonal comestibles. Without pontificating like an Alice Waters foodie, Goldmark leaps from Oregon to New York City's orchard-and-garden enclave near 14th Street, the Union Square Market, where five generations of the Race family, small New Jersey farmers, have shared their bounty with Big Apple consumers, delighted to purchase fresh local fare rather than go to their nearby D'Agostinos and Food Emporiums for trucked-in weeks-old West Coast produce.

Nearly a fourth of this all-too-brief commentary is devoted to the tomato. Think of how many store-bought, blah-tasting out-of-season love apples you've consumed. If you're lucky enough to have savored a Jersey tomato in season -- or a vine-ripe beefsteak tomato in southwest Ohio between August and October -- you're on your way to being part of the 86,000 gourmands worldwide, diehard members of the Slow Food Movement.

Slow down, America! Only a Brit, Virginia Woolf, could write the following without a trace of haughtiness or hedonism: "One cannot love well or sleep well if one has not dined well."