1 Slow Baltic The Slow Food Concept in Relation to Baltic Gastronomy Paper to be presented at the first international conference on Sustainable Food in Tourism and Hospitality: Local foods, regional development and the environment Kalmar, 28-30 September, 2010. By: Jan Henrik Nilsson Department of Service Management, Lund University, Box 882, 25108 Helsingborg Email: jan-henrik.nilsson@msm.lu.se 1. Introduction What we eat and how we eat has become a major issue in the public debate during the last decades. On one level, the debates are concerned with medical and health related issue, such as diets, nutrition, eating disorders and overweight problems. But there is also an interest in food from a lifestyle perspective. Eating has gone from being a matter of food supply to an identity and life style marker. The public interest in food manifests itself for instance in numerous gastronomic magazines, cooking books, TV-shows, web-sites and food blogs. Food has also become a major issue in tourism; food is no longer only part of the travel experience in general, it has become an important factor in the choice of destination for a substantial part of the travelling public. Food has also emerged as an important topic in relation to the environment. Environmental degradation in the form of pesticides and artificial manuring that causes pollution of soils and waters has made people aware of the relationship between the environment and the quality and safety of food. There is also an increasing concern about what modern agriculture does to our landscape and about ethical questions related to animal breeding. From a sustainability perspective, there is a close relationship between food production and climate change. Agriculture is in itself a major source of CO2 emissions (IPCC, 2007), and food is increasingly transported over long distances, hence causing increasing “food miles”. The Scandinavian countries have for instance become extremely dependent on food transported over long distances. Some countries, like Sweden, have abolished earlier policies aimed at sustaining at least a certain level of self sufficiency for security reasons. Decreasing relative transport costs and deregulation of international trade have been other important factors behind this development. Since food is an essential part of tourism and hospitality, the debates around food and the environment does have important implications for tourism development. Food tourism is seen as a component in the development of rural tourism, for instance in the forms of wine tourism, food paths, and agro-tourism. In many regions, the gastronomic heritage has become an important part of regional marketing profiles. The increasing interest in gastronomy and gastronomic heritage, in combination with environmental awareness and concern, are important reasons for the development of eco gastronomy. Gastronomy could be defined as „reflective cooking and eating‟ (Scarpato, 2002, p. 52). Following that, eco-gastronomy is