I’m a fan of several books by journalist Michael Pollan, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food because they bring to light much of what we as regular consumers often don’t think about when we go to the grocery store: where does our food come from?

Through my own reading, I became familiar with the slow food movement — a reaction to the massive expansion of fast food that promotes not only physically slowing down to prepare food from scratch and enjoy your meals with your loved ones but also making the effort to appreciate the people and work involved in making that meal you have possible.

It’s a great idea, but with two small kids and busy careers, Erica and I have to admit that it is sometimes hard to abide by that ideal — even with the help of great Univera family-friendly products like Essentials (basically a Jetson-meal-in-a-bottle).

So I was was intrigued to read about a new ‘slow money’ movement taking shape now that is designed to work in tandem with the slow food movement. The idea here is to keep investments local so that they benefit your local food producers and farmers. Do I abide by every premise of the article? Not completely. Yet, I loved the concept of this article, and think there’s much behind the premise of “Slow Food, Slow Money” for the future that can benefit all of us around the world.

Health, enterprise, and philanthropy are great passions of mine, and we at Univera continue to try to find a happy synergy between such distinct but related realms through our magnificent products, our financial opportunity, and our work through Serve First and Serve Always.

And it’s heartening to see that there is a sincere effort to try to grow these kinds of movements to change the paradigm of traditional finance to actively include something more, well, organic.

Take a look for yourself.

And then check out www.slowmoneyalliance.org.