A matter of taste: slow food movement champions 'good, clean, fair' food

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Think fast food and the images come--well, fast. Drive-through service. Speed. Golden arches. Fat and its accompanying guilt. Ingredients of dubious provenance. (Are there actually potatoes in those fries? Is it weird that the egg on your breakfast sandwich is a perfect cylinder?)

With Slow Food though, even for initates, the images are less clear. That's because Slow Food isn't actually a food category, or a cooking method, but a big tent over components as diverse as gastronomy, ecology and social justice.

Slow Food, the movement, began in Italy as a jocular protest to the opening of a McDonald's near Rome's Spanish Steps in 1986. That was terra sacra to Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini, a socialist and activist from an unhurried part of northern Italy. He bemoaned the homogeneity and fast-paced lifestyle that fast food seemed to represent.

From that epiphany of indignation, Slow Food has evolved over two decades into a feel-good movement about taste, community and sustainability wrapped around a nonprofit organization that claims 80,000 members worldwide. Slow Food's bottom-line aim is the protection of taste; its core principle is the notion that food should be "good, clean and fair." "Good" in that it should give pleasure like a rousing three-hour Italian supper; "clean" in that its mode of production and its components should harm neither ourselves nor the environment; "fair" in that food producers should receive an adequate wage for their work.

Petrini is fond of quoting Wendell Berry's formulation that "eating is an agricultural act" and of encouraging his followers to become "coproducers," getting involved in their food before it shows up on their plates. He was horrified by a recent U.N. report citing agriculture as a main force in pollution and the depletion of natural resources.

The result when it all comes together is a curious marriage of sensuous pleasure, with emphasis on flavor, and social conscience. Slow Food is as traditional as a family or regional specialty; as complicated as development economics, farm subsidies and immigration; as progressive as offering economic assistance to endangered small food communities and disappearing ways of life.

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Celebrating what we eat

It's fitting that with a theme as ubiquitous and fundamental as food, Petrini's Slow Food is all over the place. It includes a development arm, a publishing house, local chapters--called convivia--in several countries, including 130 in the United States and 350 in Italy. It founded the world's only culinary university dedicated not to cooking but the scientific and social facets of food, caged the University of Gastronomic Sciences. It also, every two years, hosts the gleeful and hectic Salone del Gusto, or Salon of Taste, a food festival that in 2006 brought more than 170,000 visitors over five days to a sprawling complex of hundreds of stands and stalls in a retired Fiat factory in Turin, Italy. (An American version of this event, Slow Food Nation, will be held for the first time in San Francisco in 2008.)

In May, Carlo Petrini was promoting his new book, Slow Food Nation, at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Advocating "virtuous globalization" based on sustainable and socially conscious eating--what Petrini calls "eco-gastronomy"--he laid out some paradoxes of modern food production that necessitate the existence of Slow Food. We get energy from food, he said, but we spend even more energy making it. But the food is getting worse--less diverse, less nutritious, of lower quality. And the earth is becoming less fertile as it strains to produce industrial bumper crops. The population of farmers, meanwhile, is shrinking, and traditional, slow-paced lifestyles are disappearing. In 1950, he reported, haft of Italians were farmers. In 2007, that number had shrunk to 4 percent.

Petrini does not object to globalization as such, and indeed is excited by the prospect of cross-cultural culinary sharing that would not have been possible in an earlier era. (2006's Salone del Gusto, for example, hosted 200 food producers from Italy and 100 producers from all over the world--including Polish mead brewers and Japanese sushi chefs.) But he objects to some of the priorities that seem to accompany globalization. "We can't eat computers," he points out. "We can't eat information."

Eye on the little guy

That the Slow Food founder has vaulted to international prominence, makes sense to Corby Kummer, who was Petrini's translator at Salone del Gusto. Kummer is an editor at The Atlantic Monthly and author of The Pleasures of Slow Food. "Appetite," Kummer marveled in The Atlantic in 1999, in the article that grew into the book, "can join forces with radicalism. ... Doing good by eating well--it's an irresistible combination."

Petrini was born in 1949 in the small town of Bra (population: 30,000), in the Piedmont region of Italy, just south of the Alps. He was president of the local Catholic association there by the time he was 17, and thereafter became involved in leftist politics. In the '70s, he founded one of Italy's first independent radio stations, Radio Bra Onde Rosse--literally, Bra Red Airwaves Radio. Petrini was also on Bra's Italian equivalent of a city council, as a representative of the now-defunct communist-leaning Partito di Unita Proletaria (Party of Proletarian Unity). Petrini, now in his late 50s, kept an eye on the little guy from early on.