Petrini - Slow food: the case for taste

The New York Times, in a recent editorial entitled Read This Slowly, asked its readers to consider the Slow Food Movement, which took hold in Italy in recent years and is spreading around the world at an impressive clip.

Carlo Petrini, founder of the movement, here offers to our readership a consideration of Slow Food, its origins, history, and principles. At a time when globalization is a subject not only for debate but also for angry demonstrations in the street, this book is an important addition to the Columbia Arts and Traditions of the Table series.

There were 130,000 attendees, 80 participating nations, and more than 2,000 accredited journalists at the 2000 Salone del Gusto (taste show) in Turin, Italy. For the 2002 Salone, suffice it to say that more than 100 American food and beverage taste workshops (stands), 11 seminars, two Taste America dinners, and American embassy sponsorship constituted eloquent proof that Slow Food is effectively casting off its original Italocentricity for the many Americans who (to quote the Times again) wish to wean themselves from the eat-and-run life.

The very name, Slow Food, originated in protest against the Golden Arches, that portal to the temple of fast food and to the caloric altar of its high priest, Ronald McDonald, who threatened to take over the plaza below the historic Spanish Steps in Rome in 1989.These birth pangs left the movement vulnerable to potential misunderstanding. Slow Food is not a gourmet food and wine society, though its meetings emphasize the rediscovery of the flavors and savors of regional cooking. The Slow Food Manifesto declares, A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of the Fast Life. Nor is Slow Food any longer a gastronomic movement, per se; it offers an antidote to the insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods. In the name of productivity, Fast Life threatens to degrade the global environment and our local landscapes.

Here at the table lies the template for the preservation of human rights and the environment. TV chef Graham Kerr, formerly The Galloping Gourmet, now calls his program The Gathering Place. And Alice Waters has stated succinctly: Eating is something we all have in common. Its something we all have to do every day and its something we can all share.

Thus it was both predictable and normal that the manifestos proclamation of the defense of slow, long-lasting enjoyment begin at the table with Slow Food; just as the original table dhte of the movement (thanks to the Internet) was in the small Piedmontese market town of Bra (near the heart of the white truffle and Barolo district). Slow Food quickly evolved into a defense team for vegetable, animal, and cultural diversity, taking the stand for animal and human well-being in its periodical Slow, now published in Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish. Its public face has become that of a primarily educational organization, which realizes that food consumption cannot be divorced from issues of food production and distribution; its mission is defined as eco-gastronomic: for example, to convince the hygiene-obsessed EEC bureaucrats in Brussels, as well as the American public, that fresh produce is not dirty, though it comes without cellophane wrapping and looks unsymmetrical, and so unlike the waxen sterility of the processed and prepackaged products of the agribusiness industrial revolution.