Slow Food

Whether one’s image of an Italian pranzo comes from Italian films like Fellini’s Amarcord, or from films like The Godfather, that bridge the Italian and Italo-american cultures, the image is consistent: a complicated crowd of an extended Italian family, arranged around an endless table set up in a garden under a grape-arbor, with heaping plate after heaping plate of steaming pastas and meats and vegetables arriving as though delivered on a cloud, the kitchen off-stage, along with the host of cooking grandmothers, mothers, aunts and girl-children rapt by the mystery of food preparation. Pranzo was certainly never meant to be eaten on the run. Note the three-hour pausa/riposo/siesta built into the Italian work-day from 1:30 until 4:30 to ensure the kind of leisure required to eat and digest a good meal. Even school children come home for pranzo, their school day cut short by American standards. Who cares if that means they have to go to school on Saturdays! A proper meal is important.

In 1986, when the first McDonald’s opened near Rome’s Spanish Steps, and the “fast food” phenomenon threatened to infiltrate Italian culture, Carlo Petrini organized a massive protest—hundreds of people bearing plates of pasta—with the hopes of bringing media awareness that what was at stake was more than lunch, but the physical, spiritual and cultural well-being of Italians and all peoples, regardless of what country they come from. The ability to slow down in the middle of the day, nourish the body and soul with well-prepared meals made from fresh, regional, seasonal ingredients while enjoying real conversation, creating real relationships with loved ones and others one hoped to know, was the bedrock of civilization and culture. Without such opportunities for human-connection and nourishment by real food, people risked becoming mindless, multitasking automatons, stuffing valueless calories into their bodies while driving from appointment to appointment, tasting nothing, enjoying nothing. What was at stake was consciousness itself and a capacity for pleasure and joy.

In the more than twenty years since Carlos Petrini led the first protest against fast food, “Slow Food” has become an international movement , with an annual convention in Turin, that encompasses far more than a call to slow down and enjoy what we eat. The movement is closely associated with the organic foods movement, the movement to support local farmers and limit the support of big-industry cooperations that create foods for bulk, shipment and profits while neglecting food value and the costs—economic and in terms of the world’s dwindling fuel supply—of shipping nutrient-bled pseudo-fruits around the globe. The philosophy of slow food has encouraged many to examine the wheel-spinning behind so many aspects of our stress-filled lifestyles and slow down generally, examine our values, sort out the wheat from the chaff so to speak. And the awareness of how to do so begins with learning a new discipline of eating, a discipline that began, well…in the Italian kitchen.

The Official Slow Food Manifesto

Approved by delegates from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States, and Venezuela at the founding conference of the International Slow Food Movement for the Defense of the Right to Pleasure at the Opera Comique in Paris on November 9, 1989.

Our century, which began and developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.

We are enslaved to speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

To be worthy of the name, Homo sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.

A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of the Fast Life.

May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.- Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.

In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.

That is what real culture is about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, and projects?

Slow Food guarantees a better future.

Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can help turn this (slow) motion into an international movement, with a little snail as its symbol.

Petrini, Carlo (trans. Gius.Laterza & Figli Spa). Slow Food: The Case for Taste. New York: Columbia U P, 2001, p. xxiii