Fast World, Slow Down
August 11, 2026
“The renewed appeal of cooking real food and eating deliberately.”
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Our relationship with food has accelerated along with everything else. We can have dinner delivered with a few taps on a telephone, eat breakfast in the car and consume lunch while answering email. Convenience certainly has its place, but eating has gradually become another task we try to complete as efficiently as possible. There may be a reason to occasionally push in the opposite direction. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Clinical Psychology Review examined experimental research involving mindfulness and mindful eating and found that these approaches were associated with reduced food intake, although the researchers emphasized that effects were larger in laboratory settings than in real-world settings and found no evidence of an effect on appetite. In other words, mindful eating isn’t magic—but paying attention to what and how we eat may matter.
There is also something valuable here that can’t easily be measured in a laboratory. Preparing a meal forces us to participate in the process. You select ingredients, chop vegetables, season the food, wait for it to cook, and hopefully sit down long enough to enjoy it. For centuries, meals were not interruptions to life; they were part of life. Perhaps one small rebellion against an accelerating world is to occasionally cook something from scratch, put the telephone somewhere else, and actually taste dinner. We spend enormous amounts of money trying to improve our quality of life. Slowing down long enough to enjoy a good meal may be one of the least expensive ways to do it.
