John Miedema

It was the kind of meal that, when the plates were clean, led some to dark corners to sleep with the hushing of the wind, and others to drink mulled wine until our voices had climbed an octave and finally deepened, in the small hours, into whispers.

I am just finishing The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Smith & MacKinnon (2007). The couple tells of their year of eating food only grown within a hundred miles of their home. I’ll be reviewing it here soon. The quote above is about the meal that inspired the effort. The 100-Mile Diet is not so different from the Slow Food movement that encourages local cooking and eating. There is something about slow food that satisfies on multiple levels.

This is the first of a two-part post on the fast and slow dynamics when it comes to information. It stems from some recent thoughts and experiences about food:

Rory Litwin of LibraryJuice wrote two short posts for undergrads who prefer to use Google over the library. He asked, “Why eat at McDonalds when you can eat for free at the five star restaurant of your choice?” A number of people replied, some stating that they prefer to eat at McDonalds, and would like their information to go right through them just as quickly. Some do not care for five star restaurants. I wonder if they would care for the kind of dinner just described from the 100-Mile Diet?

I have observed how much easier it is to write an academic paper now than in my undergrad years, starting in 87. At the start of that period, finding sources involved manually digging through paper indexes. To spare labour, you would think carefully about the selections, and absorb every morsel from the ones you picked so you would not have to go back for more. You were on your own when formulating a theme because you couldn’t Google the idea for a fresh take. In 2007, keyword searches rapidly find sources and I can zoom in on the key phrases with my find function. Sometimes I wonder if I could assemble an entire A-grade paper with only copy-paste and a bit of re-wording. Faster? Yes. Better? Not so sure.

I recently stayed at the Hilton hotel in Markham. A sign outside their restaurant said something like, “We may not serve fast food, but we have fast service.” That sign inspired the following graph. Part II will feature a similar graph for information services including libraries, but I want to first make a few points about a similar idea with food.

The graph has two dimensions: service and quality. Service refers to the amount of time it takes from ordering food to getting it. Quality refers to the practical and sensory experience of eating the food. The graph treats fast as a negative on the left, and slow as a positive on the right, since I’m ultimately making some points about the positive qualities of slow.

McDonalds easily belongs in the lower left quadrant. Its food is prepared fast and served fast. It is fast to digest and low on nourishment because it is highly processed. Many of us, myself included, go there at least once in awhile.

The Hilton claims to be fast in service while still serving high quality food. I did not eat there, but I accept that this is possible because they are a higher scale business, and likely willing to invest the extra dollars for getting fresh foods and hiring expert cooks in return for higher prices charged to their customers. The Hilton is not a five-star restaurant but it is not bad. If we are traveling and have money or an expense card, we might like to eat there.

The 100-Mile Diet offers the best food of all, in my opinion, because it not only tastes great, and is good for me, but is good for the local agriculture industry, and less damaging to the planet. It satisfies on many levels. But the effort in obtaining and preparing the foods is not to be under-estimated. Those who prefer slower food must be willing to do some footwork. This quadrant could also be for five-star restaurants, luxury food for those who have the time. The effort in this case is paid for in price. Both slow food and five-stars represent exceptional circumstances for most of us — less frequent but more important moments.

Finally, what restaurant will claim to be both slow in service and serve poor food? Why, Joe Kool’s on Richmond Street in London, Ontario, of course. Every town has one of these. Think Crabby Joe’s. A great Friday night dinner.

I expect that all of this seems fairly obvious. We do in fact like to have a variety of eating options, depending on our current schedule, budget, mood and perspective. If this spectrum of choices is normal for eating, why do so many people predict or fret that everything is only going to get faster in information services? That is my key question. The popular media keep telling us that traditional library reference is dead because of on-line services like Google, and that the future of reading is the next version of the eBook. Given the pattern above, doesn’t it make more sense to think that as the digital rush subsides, information services will settle into a similar enduring spectrum of faster and slower services, each suitable for different people’s needs and circumstances?

In Part II, I illustrate the point further with a similar graph for information services.