At Hamburg’s Central Station recently opened Mutterland (”Motherland”) - an ambitious food store with a neo-ecological concept.

Owner Jan Schawe, who is experienced with restaurants already and lives close to the new store, missed the right food store (for himself) in the quarter and created his owm.  The district St. Georg is well-known for it’s drug-scene, gay-headquarter role and red-light environment. On the other hand the high street “Lange Reihe” is already expensive to live at and the worn jeans are often designer labeled.

Therefore the Mutterland store seems to be too high-class in this neighbourhood. The products are chosen with lots of taste, some are quite expensive. There are lot’s of delicious, organic and fair traded things offered. The branding is professional, it’s a beautiful modern store in a tough surrounding.

Mutterland, Ernst-Merck-Str. 9/ Kirchenallee, 20099 Hamburg,
phone +49 40-28407978.
Monday to Saturday, 7 am to 10 pm.

The holiday season seems like a good time for me to start writing about Slow Home on Slow Planet. It is a time when the connection between the quality of our life and the home in which we live seems to be the most evident. In fact it is often a holiday that is largely about being at home - with family and friends enjoying familiar kinds of food, music, and domestic rituals. Despite the incessant consumerism that runs rampant even in this more difficult of years, the memories we truly value about this holiday, and try very hard to impart to our children, are often about being together in a home that becomes a sanctuary from the rest of the world and the rest of the year.

Holidays are slightly surreal in this regard and our busy lives seem to take over again by noon on the first day back to work. But perhaps this intense annual experience of home points us towards a potentially different kind of relationship with the place in which we live. In the same way that the carefully prepared festive meal leisurely enjoyed over conversation at an actual dining table is a commonly experienced example of a slower approach to food, our sense of intimate home during this season can speak to a broader audience about the potential for a slower approach to home.

I believe that there are very strong parallels between the food we eat and the homes in which we live. A healthy relationship with both are essential to our well-being but these have come under siege by the too fast world around us. Over the past fifty years our historic rootedness in food and home has been challenged, if not shattered, by big business interests that provide readily available mass processed equivalents. These shallow copies of real food and real home promise everything but deliver little more than rampant consumerism, a drag on our environment, and a general diminishment in the quality of our lives.

Most of us understand these problems from a fast food perspective and see the potential for slow food to provide a critical alternative. This same argument can also be made against the so called fast housing industry. The sprawl of cookie cutter housing that surrounds us is a lot like fast food - standardized, homogeneous, and wasteful. It contributes to a too fast life that is bad for us, our cities, and the environment.

I founded www.theslowhome.com several years ago to raise awareness about these issues and provide critical alternatives to this cookie cutter world. In the same way that slow food raises awareness about the food we eat and how these choices affect our lives, my goal with Slow Home is to empower people to take more control over their home and improve the quality of how and where they live as a first important step towards creating a slower and more meaningful way of life.

As we start this new year and face the growing trepidations of an uncertain economy let’s try to remember the potential for home to be more of what of it has been these past few days and less of just a real estate investment in one’s portfolio.