In 1987, a group of Italian writers and journalists produced a provocative manifesto announcing the official launch of a new movement for the Defense of and the Right to Pleasure. Published in Gambero Rosso —an eight-page monthly ‘lifestyle’ supplement of II Manifesto —a widely circulating national independent communist daily newspaper—the manifesto began with the assertion that ‘we are enslaved by 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’. It followed with a number of statements declaring the necessity of founding a new international movement called Slow Food, which was ‘the only truly progressive answer’ to the ‘universal folly of the Fast Life’. Defending oneself against the speed of modernity, according to the manifesto, began at the table, through the rediscovery of ‘the flavours and savours of regional cooking’, the banishment of ‘the degrading effect of Fast Foods’ and the ‘development of taste’ through the ‘international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects’. Not surprisingly, the manifesto immediately attracted a great deal of public attention although, initially, many commentators regarded the idea of an international organization dedicated to the sensual pleasure of slow food and the ‘slow life’ as something of a joke. Yet, only two decades later, Slow Food has emerged as a highly visible and politically influential international organization whose dedication to changing consumers’ attitudes towards the foods they eat has had some quite remarkable practical effects.
The founder of Slow Food—Carlo Petrini—has famously dubbed his project as a new form of ‘virtuous globalization’(Stille 2001; Petrini 2001b). In other words, Slow Food promotes itself as providing a model for imagining alternate modes of global connectedness, in which members of minority cultures—including niche-food producers —are encouraged to network and thrive. While Slow Food has already amply demonstrated considerable organizational acumen in building an international movement around the revitalization of artisanally produced foods, its strategies and cultural politics have also been widely critiqued. This chapter traces the history of the emergence of the Slow Food movement from its origins as a lobby group engaged with the politics of food within Italy to its more recent manifestations as an international organization devoted to global biodiversity. In outlining key moments in this history, I hope to highlight some of the reasons why Slow Food politics have become so controversial.
The original Slow Food manifesto demanding an end to our ‘enslavement by speed’ was inspired by a loose coalition of public intellectuals opposed to the introduction in Italy of American style fast food chains. Led by food and wine journalist, Carlo Petrini, this relatively small, though culturally influential group had already garnered a great deal of attention through a spirited media campaign conducted against the installation of a McDonald’s franchise near the Spanish Steps in the mid 1980s. According to the Italy Daily (1998), it was almost an anti-Proustian moment of the smell of French fries that first stirred Petrini into action:
Walking in Rome one day, he [Petrini] found himself gazing at the splendid Spanish Steps when the overwhelming odor of French fries disturbed his reverie. To his horror he discovered that not twenty meters along the piazza loomed the infamous golden arches of a well-known food chain. ‘BastaV he cried. And thus began a project that would take him all over the world in order to promote and protect local culinary traditions. As a symbol for his cause he chose the snail because it was the slowest food he could think of (11/3/1998).
But, if we dig a little deeper, it is clear that the origins of the Slow Food movement are located elsewhere.
The organization now called Slow Food emerged out of a specific Italian cultural context: the 1970s. Popularly dubbed ‘the years of lead’ in reference to the activities of terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades, the decade of the 1970s was a period in which the radical ideals of the student movements of the late 1960s had ended in disillusionment. While some members of this generation had turned in frustration to the power of bullets, others abandoned revolutionary ideals for alternative forms of transformational cultural politics. The intellectual biography of Slow Food’s most famous protagonist, Carlo Petrini, is forged within this milieu. Alongside his collaborators, Petrini came of age within younger leftish critiques of the Italian Communist Party which at this time was itself in crisis (see Leitch 2003).
The son of a teacher and an artisan, Carlo Petrini was born in 1948, in Bra—a provincial town located in the heart of the agricultural region of Piedmont, known as Le Langhe. As its name suggests, this is a landscape of rolling hills that appear as a series of elongated tongues disappearing and reappearing with mirage-like qualities across the hazy horizon, dotted here and there with the villas and castles that still belong to the descendents of the Italian aristocracy. Made famous in the luminous prose of distinguished postwar literary figures such as Cesare Pavese, as well as the detailed documentation of peasant life in the work of noted Italian oral historian, Nuto Revelli (1977), the region is acclaimed for the production of some of Italy’s finest agricultural produce, including truffles and prestigious wines, such as Barolo and Barbaresco. With strong connections to the aristocracy, the area is also known for its deeply entrenched working class traditions, particularly left-Catholicism. Once a centre for the leather industry, Bra’s main other industries are now the production of laminated plastics and agricultural machinery.1
Petrini graduated from high school in 1968, first studying to become a mechanic, but later enrolling in sociology at the University of Trento, a department which, perhaps not coincidentally, was at the epicenter of 1970s extra-parliamentarian politics. After completing his studies, Petrini dedicated himself to local cultural politics, becoming a key protagonist in the foundation of a number of co-operative ventures including a bookshop, a food co-op and one of Italy’s first radical-left pirate radio stations called Radio Bra Onde Rosse or ‘Red Waves’2 Like many young Italians of his generation, during these years, Petrini also immersed himself in the rediscovery of the region’s rural traditions, its festivals and popular songs, as well as its food and wine culture. Indeed, according to Petrini, initially, wine, rather than food was the focus of his attention. He notes, for example, that an early encounter with Italy’s most well-known wine journalist and theorist of peasant life, Luigi Veronelli, had nurtured his love of gastronomy and its political potential. A self-avowed anarchist oenologist, Veronelli is famous for publishing a nine-volume work dedicated to Italian wines in the 1960s, as well as for his essays on the importance of rural and culinary traditions to the preservation of specific localities and cultural economies (Veronelli 2004). These works subsequently became a source of inspiration to an entire generation, including, the eventual founders of the Slow Food movement. As Petrini recalls:
Once I read the texts by Renato Ratti and Gino Veronelli and learned about wine tasting, my world became one with the wine producers, vineyards and wine cellars... we wandered through the Langhe looking for inns and new restaurants, but there was not an awful lot... there was no wine list, and the Dolcetto was the one and only wine that the innkeeper would serve you. Hardly anyone served Barolo. So it was inevitable that we developed the gastronomic project before the environmental one, although we had the basic idea for it.
(Petrini and Padovani 2006: 61-62)
By the early 1980s, Petrini was contributing articles to La Gola, a magazine published in Milan by a group of young intellectuals—philosophers, artists and poets—dedi-cated to epicurean philosophy. And it was out of this group that a new organization called Arci Gola—the forerunner of the Slow Food Movement—was founded in the mid 1980s.
In Italian gola means ‘throat’ as well as the ‘desire for food’. Although it is commonly translated as ‘gluttonous’ implying a negative state of excess or greed, to be goloso has a more positive connotation of craving with pleasure a particular food. As Carole Counihan (1999: 180) aptly observes, because gola implies both ‘desire’ and ‘voice’, it suggests that desire for food is a voice—a central vehicle for self expression in Italian social life. In turn, Arci is an acronym for Recreative Association of Italian Communists: a national network of recreational and cultural clubs first established in 1957 by the Italian Communist party to counter the influence of ENAL, the state recreational organization that supplanted the Fascist OND at the end of the Second World War. In the 1960s and 70s, as political goals became increasingly divided within the Italian left, the Arci network spawned a wide variety of clubs and associations dedicated to particular topical interests such as hunting, sport, women’s rights, music, film and the environment. Arci Gola was one of these groups. It emerged out of the desire to create a less hierarchical, youthful alternative to existing gourmet associations that Petrini and his collaborators viewed as linked to chauvinistic and elitist cultural politics. And although the aim of the new association was to raise the profile of regional cuisine and produce, the principle of conviviality combined with an insistence on the right to pleasure and to enjoy oneself through the consumption of good food and wine was always central to the group’s philosophy.
However, it is worth noting that the formation of the first Arci Gola groups also took place within the context of a number of other food scandals and environmental catastrophes that led to emerging public discussions on the fate of Italian agriculture and its oeno-gastronomical culture. For example, in March of1986, there was a public outcry over the revelation of methanol-tainted wine that was eventually discovered to be the cause of nineteen deaths across northern Italy. The deaths resulted from the unscrupulous practices of some bulk wine vendors who had deliberately adulterated wine with methyl alcohol in order to increase the alcoholic content thereby ensuring higher prices. But before the public authorities were able to uncover the chain of contamination, much of this adulterated wine stock had already been sold to large supermarket chains. The consequences of this event were devastating. The scandal not only created wide scale panic among local consumers, but it also resulted in significant damage to the reputation of the Italian wine industry and to its export markets. Later that year, yet another crisis emerged for Italian agriculture: the contamination of the aqueducts of the Po valley with a herbicide called atrazina. Residents of major cities such as Ferrara, Mantua and Bergamo were ordered to turn off their taps as health authorities investigated the damage done to local water supplies from toxic runoff caused, apparently, by the overuse of pesticides (Petrini and Padovani 2006:49). In addition, the Chernobyl disaster occurred in April of 1986. The meltdown of the Russian nuclear plant released a huge plume of radioactive haze over much of Europe, creating widespread panic over the consumption of leafy greens, milk and meat products, as well as wild mushrooms gathered from European forests.
The roots of the slow food movement are located within this political and cultural context: in the growing public outcry over future scandalous scenarios of environmental contamination and in the micro history of a particular group of left activists, who were deeply engaged with transformations to their own regional cultural landscapes, as well as with the utopian possibilities of alternative cultural politics in an era of rapid social change. By the end of the 1980s, the original Arci Gola network was consolidated into a new organization called Slow Food.
In 1989, two years after the appearance of the first Slow Food manifesto, the International Slow Food Movement was launched at the Opera Comique in Paris. Over the next decade, as its membership base expanded with new offices opening in France, Switzerland and Germany, Slow Food began broadening its political agenda, to include discussions on the importance of food as a cultural artifact linked to the preservation of a distinctive European cultural heritage. This project became known as the ‘endangered foods’ campaign.
The ‘endangered foods’ campaign was designed as a polemical intervention into the growing circuits of a vigorous national debate concerning the potential disappearance of regional tastes and idiosyncratic products due to trends such as: the increasing drift towards farming monocultures; the disintegration of traditional rural foodways; environmental threats to national fisheries; and the dearth of alternate distribution networks for small-scale agricultural enterprises. Another, widely perceived threat was the rapid pace of Europeanization in the wake of the 1992 Maastricht Accord. Slow Food argued that the introduction of new European Union standardizing protocols for the manufacture of cured meat products and cheeses posed particular dangers. The application of uniform European hygiene rules designed for large manufacturers would, they argued, lead inevitably to the decline of traditional production techniques, as well as diminishing the economic viability of the small-scale producers of these foods. In response, Slow Food began to compile dossiers on particular products that the organization considered in special need of protection.
One example of an ‘endangered food’ that later became particularly noteworthy in this debate was the case of a unique type of cured pork fat: lardo di Colonnata. As its name suggests, lardo di Colonnata is produced in Colonnata, a tiny village located at the end of a windy mountain road several kilometers from the marble quarrying town of Carrara in central Italy, where I had also conducted ethnographic research on the subject of craft identity among quarry workers in the late 1980s. At this time, lardo di Colonnata was mainly marketed as a culinary delight—even a curi-osity—to the odd bus tour and Italian tourists on weekend excursions to the quarries. Since the 1970s, it had also been celebrated at an annual pork fat festival held in the village over the late summer months. And it was certainly well known to culinary experts who reputedly made pilgrimages to eat what some gourmets referred to as ‘one of the most divine foods ever produced on this earth’ (Manetti 1996) at Venanzio, a local restaurant, named eponymously after its owner, a local gourmet and lardo purveyor. But regardless of its appreciation as a festive food or its reputation among aficionados, pork fat was not commonly eaten in any of the households I regularly visited for meals while conducting fieldwork. It was, however, almost always nominated in the oral histories I collected detailing the conditions of work over past generations (Leitch 1996).
In many of these narratives, the past was distinguished from the present through tales of food scarcity and physical hardship. Until quite recently, meat was a luxury item in diets that consisted predominantly of various grains, legumes and vegetables, as well as produce gathered from the woods and forests, such as chestnuts and mushrooms, wild, edible roots and herbs. Many households also maintained small vegetable gardens which kept them going during periods of unemployment, and some households, with access to land, kept pigs. One of the by-products of these pigs, lardo or cured pork fat, thus constituted a kind of food safe for families in the region and was an essential source of calorific energy in the quarry worker’s diet. Like sugar or coffee, lardo was a ‘proletarian hunger killer’ (Mintz 1979). Eaten with a tomato and a piece of onion on dry bread, it was a taken-for-granted element in the worker’s lunch. Lardo was thought to quell thirst as well as hunger and was appreciated for its coolness on hot summer days. It was also adopted as a cure for a number of common health ailments, ranging from an upset stomach to a bad back. As one local lardo maker and restaurateur once remarked to me: ‘When you went to the butcher and asked for lardo, everyone knew there was someone ill at home’.
Although these days, lardo producers living in the village of Colonnata claim to have ‘invented’ the recipe for the product now known as lardo di Colonnata, in reality, cured pork fat was not unique to Colonnata. During the 1950s and 1960s, many local people cured their own batches of pork fat at home according to individual recipes that included varying proportions of raw fat, salt, herbs and spices. However, marble, preferably quarried from near Colonnata at Canalone, was almost always cited as an essential ingredient. Apparently, the unique crystalline structure of Canalone marble allows the pork fat to ‘breathe’ while at the same time containing the curing brine. If at any stage the lardo ‘went bad’ it was simply thrown out. And just like the marble workers who often reported to me that marble dust is actually beneficial to the body because it is ‘pure calcium’, people who made lardo suggested that the chemical composition of marble, calcium carbonate was a purificatory medium that extracted harmful substances from the raw pork fat, including cholesterol.
Traditionally the curing process began with the raw fat—cut from the back of select pigs—and then layered in rectangular marble troughs resembling small sarcophagi called conche. The conche were placed in the cellar, always the coolest part of the house. At the time of my fieldwork, many of these cellars were quite dank and mouldy. Some still contained underground cisterns that in the past supplied water to households without plumbing. Cellars were used to store firewood, as well as other household equipment, as laundries and, occasionally, to butcher wild boar. Once placed in the troughs, the pork fat was covered with layers of salt and herbs to start the pickling process and six to nine months later the pork fat was ready to eat. Translucent, white, veined with pink, cool and soft to touch, the end product mimics the exact aesthetic qualities prized in high-quality stone.
In 1996, Slow Food nominated lardo di Colonnata as one of Italy’s ten most endangered foods. As I have detailed elsewhere (Leitch 2000; 2003), this event resulted in some surprising, possibly unintended, consequences. Not only did Colonnata’s pork fat suddenly achieve new found fame promoted as far afield as the food columns of the New York Times (18/2/1997) and Bon Appetit (Spender 2000), the village itself was catapulted into the limelight as a major centre for international culinary tourism. There were also quite profound consequences for local producers, many of whom have now found new ways of making a livelihood out of lardo production. But the question remains: Why did the Slow Food movement nominate lardo di Colonnata as a key symbol for its endangered foods campaign?
I argue that Slow Food took up the cause of pork fat for a variety of reasons. One was certainly timing. In March of 1996, the local police force had descended on what one newspaper called ‘the temple of lardo’ (La Nazione 1/4/1996), namely the Venan-zio restaurant in Colonnata. Protected by the local constabulary, regional health authority personnel proceeded to remove several samples of Venanzio’s lardo and subsequently placed all his conche under quarantine. Later, samples were also taken from other small lardo makers in the village, but Venanzio and one other wholesaler, Fausto Guadagni, were singled out for special attention. The reasons for the quarantine were never entirely clear to the lardo makers involved. When I asked them later, they flatly denied it had anything to do with the spread of Bovine Spongiform ncephalopathy (BSE), which, nevertheless, was a topic of immense anxiety at the time. Obviously, BSE has little to do with pigs, but collective hysteria over the spread of the disease had already provoked numerous articles in the local press about the benefits of vegetarianism. And, in the wake of this hysteria, it may not have been entirely coincidental that regional health authorities had decided to take a closer look at lardo, a product that, after all, had never undergone scientific analysis of any kind. However, local lardo makers simply interpreted the whole affair as a completely unreasonable attack on their autonomy to make a product that they had been producing without a single problem for many years.
This quarantine resulted in a barrage of media commentary that soon reached the national dailies. Apart from the predictable tones of conspiracy theory, at the local level, the main preoccupation was the possible threat to the 1996 lardo festival. Nationally, the issue led to debates over the power of the European Union to impose standardized hygiene legislation regulating Italian food production thereby determining Italian eating habits. Writing for the national daily La Repubblica, Sergio Manetti responded to the quarantine with an article entitled ‘The European Union ruins Italian Cuisine’. In a somewhat satirical tone he reported that:
My friend Venanzio introduced lardo di Colonnata to the world... For centuries lardo has been preserved in marble basins and stored in cellars carved out of the rock where the natural humidity and porosity of the walls create the perfect conditions for its maturation and where it can keep for months, even years. Now all this has gone. The cave walls must be tiled up just like the floor and you need a toilet... Lardo will probably become quite disgusting. All this has happened because some poor functionary from the health authority has to carry out their duty enforcing the bureaucratic rules of the European Union. These poor people have probably never even tasted lardo l let alone visited a cellar. Perhaps, like most city children they have never even seen a chicken, a lamb or a live pig. And so, soon, we must bid farewell to the for-maggio di fossa (‘ditch’ cheese) and the cheeses of Castelmagno, to the mocetta valdostana (a type of fruit chutney). And then we will be forced to eat the industrial products that are made according to strict hygienic laws (but can we be sure?), but which are absolutely tasteless and with no smell... and all of this because of the European Union. All of us are facing the end of the world. Or at least that is what Nostradamus predicted in four years time. For God’s sake, just let us eat what we want over these last years!
(Manetti 1996; my translation)
According to Carlo Petrini (2001a), coinage of the term ‘endangered foods’ dated to the mid 1990s, just before the pork fat controversy erupted. As I have already outlined, up until then Slow Food had been perceived by the public as an association of gourmets, mostly concerned with the protection of national cuisines. But by the mid-1990s, Slow Food began to imagine itself as an international organization concerned with the global protection of food tastes. The eruption of the lardo quarantine controversy thus proved entirely fortuitous, providing a perfect media opportunity for the organization to promote its new international agenda of eco-gastronomy, and in this regard, Petrini was certainly not slow to exploit lardo’s proletarian exoticism.
A second reason was that the case of lardo presented an unambiguous test case for challenging new standardized European food rules that insisted on the utilization of non-porous materials for the production of cheeses and cured meats. Although there are certainly good techniques for sterilizing the conche, marble is porous and its porosity is clearly essential to the curing process as well as to lardo’s claims to authenticity and its taste. Local lardo makers involved in this dispute thus had a vested interest in lobbying for exceptions to the generic rules designed for large food manufacturers. At this particular moment, their interests perfectly coincided with Slow Food’s own political agenda, in particular its campaign to widen the debate over food rules to include cultural issues.
A third reason has to do with the discursive strategies used in Slow Food’s endangered foods campaign. In the numerous publicity materials that subsequently appeared in the press, Petrini frequently likened the protection of pork fat made by local people in dank and mouldy cellars to other objects of significant national heritage, including major works of art or buildings of national architectural note. In valorizing the traditional techniques of lardo producers, Petrini was rhetorically distancing himself from accusations of gourmet elitism, while simultaneously challenging normalizing hierarchies of expert scientific knowledge, including, most importantly, those of the European health authorities. In this kind of strategic symbolic reversal, the food artisan is envisaged not as a backward-thinking conservative standing in the way of progress, but rather, as a quintessential modern subject, holder par excellence of national heritage. A food item once associated with pre-modern culinary otherness was reinterpreted symbolically as the culinary pinnacle of a national cuisine.
The campaign to protect nationally ‘endangered foods’ led to the compilation of the Ark of Taste in 1997; a compendium that proposed the documentation of disappearing agricultural and food products on a global scale. With its explicit biblical imagery of deluge and salvation, the Ark project thus represented a new focus for the organization that determined on making more explicit links between gourmets and environmentalists. This campaign eventually spread to include international activists working on issues of food sustainability in countries outside Europe (Meneley 2004; Kummer 2002). As Petrini himself was fond of repeating in numerous interviews he conducted at this time: ‘An environmentalist who not a gastronomist is sad; a gastronomist who is not an environmentalist is silly... [to include] the environment where food is created... has allowed us to overcome the real taboo of every gastronomist: hunger’ (Petrini and Padovani 2006:118).
A second initiative linked to the Ark of Taste was the Presidia: a noun derived from the Italian verb presidiare meaning to ‘garrison’ or ‘to protect’. These were grassroots organizations of direct producers who worked in collaboration with Slow Food ‘research commissions’ to identify and promote local Ark foods to the public. With the launch of the Presidia, Slow Food began mixing politics with business even more explicitly, actively intervening in the promotion and distribution of Presidia products and organizing public events such as the Salone del Gusto or Hall of Tastes: giant biennial food trade fairs held in the converted ex-Fiat factory exhibition space at Lingotto in Torino. Following from this, in 2000, Slow Food sponsored its first Slow Food award for the Defense of Biodiversity—a star-studded food Oscar—honoring outstanding contributions to the Defense of Biodiversity. Not long after, in 2003, the organization launched its own Foundation for Diversity: a nonprofit organization devoted to the defense of agricultural diversity around the world that has recently gained official recognition by the Food and Agricultural Organization (Donati 2005:237).
In 2004, after almost two decades focusing on the protection of culinary diversity in Europe, Slow Food undertook an even more ambitious new project: the Terre Madre: World Meeting of Food Communities An idea that apparently had emerged some years before in the context of discussions at the Commission for the future of food in Florence, this event brought together 5,000 food producers from 131 nations around the world (Donati 2005:237). Its purpose was to deepen the links between communities of farmers around the globe—the so-called ‘destiny communities’—that Slow Food imagined as sharing common feelings and problems but which were separated from each other, as well as from potential global food distribution networks. Thus, according to Donati (2005), the Terre Madre initiative represented the building of a new eco-gastronomic agenda for Slow Food that for the first time explicitly recognized issues of social justice within the global economy. While it was certainly not without controversy (Chrzan 2004), the Terra Madre meeting clearly demonstrated Slow Food’s remarkable organizational and financial capacities to bring together large numbers of individuals and groups from diverse cultures, attracting, as well, internationally influential figures engaged in food politics from very diverse ideological spectrums.3
While the majority of its members still reside in Europe, Slow Food is now represented in over 122 nations, including Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, as well as a small number in Africa. And while its headquarters remain in Bra—the small town in Piedmont where the movement originated—Slow Food currently has six other national associations with autonomous offices in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, France, Japan and the United Kingdom (Petrini and Padovani 2006). Slow Food has also been active as a lobby group on food and agricultural policy within the European Union, fostering transnational alliances, for example the 2003 joint agreement with the Brazilian government to revive local food traditions using indigenous knowledge (Labelle 2004:88). In addition, Slow Food has successfully lobbied the Italian government to provide funding for the opening of two universities dedicated to teaching its eco-gastronomic philosophy.
What accounts for Slow Food’s rapid expansion and increased international visibility over the last two decades? According to Donati (2005) one explanation lies in Slow Food’s organizational capacities and its extraordinary knack for securing funding for its activities though growth in membership, as well as though corporate and government sponsorship. Another key to Slow Food’s success is its ingenious use of the media. From its inception, Slow Food has cultivated an ever expanding international network of journalists and writers to promote its programs, while also developing an extremely successful commercial wing, publishing books and travel guides on cultural tourism, food and wine. And, as Julie Labelle (2004:88) notes, Slow Food’s more recent strategic merging of gastronomy with ecological issues has resulted in a further expansion of this communication network, for example, the establishment in 2004 of a publishing collaboration between Slow Food and Ecologist magazine.
For Labelle, it is Slow Food’s commitment to knowledge dissemination that is crucial. The breadth of the movement’s communication networks enables individual members to connect with one another but, perhaps more importantly it also makes visible how all actors in the food system are linked in a network of food relations (Labelle 2004:90). Labelle is referring here to the shift from Slow Food’s early focus on spreading knowledge to consumers about local and typical foods to the organization’s new emphasis on sharing knowledge among food producers as evidenced at the Terra Madre meetings. Slow Food’s official web site makes this link explicit. It now promotes the concept of a ‘co-producer’, that is: ‘going beyond the passive role of a consumer’ to take an interest in ‘those that produce our food, how they produce it and the problems they face in doing so’. As a co-producers, the organization asserts, consumers become part of and partners in the production process.
However, some writers have been rather more critical of Slow Food’s well-oiled publicity machine. Acknowledging the popularity of Slow Food activities among upper middle class professional communities in the United States, Janet Chrzan suggests, for example, that Slow Food is, in reality, an organization that relies more on rhetoric than substance. It is, she argues, little more than a ‘gourmandizing fan club for celebrity food personalities and their followers’ (2004:129). Thus for Chrzan, Slow Food has become a cliche; a phrase that is repeated with ‘mantra-like rhythmic repetition’ to mean all that is positive to people, societies and the globe. She asks: ‘Is Slow Food a movement, or is it an artfully-named organization situated at the right place and the right time...?’ (2004:122). But artful names, these days, are central to modern politics. And despite this critique of Slow Food’s attention to media politics and its rhetorical strategies, I argue that Slow Food has undoubtedly struck a chord because the language it adopts quite clearly taps into real concerns about the pace of modern life and its potential erasures.
One recent analysis of the Slow Food movement has argued that although the origins of Slow Food may have begun with specific campaigns devoted to the preservation of regional cuisines and traditional systems of production linked to the material cultures of local communities, mostly in Italy, its politics were never just about food. Rather, the Slow Food Movement has a much broader agenda linked to a critical re-examination of the politics of time in contemporary society. Drawing for their analysis on the texts of the Slow Food quarterly magazine and various other Slow Food manifestos, Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig (2006) have highlighted the links made between Slow Food and what writers for the magazine call the ‘Slow Life’. They argue that in opposing fast to slow, slow food is not just about the opposition to the idea of speed in modernity, but rather its opposite, slowness. In other words, the slowness promoted by the Slow Food movement is not just a negative polemical stance towards the idea of speed and its material manifestations, such as fast food, but rather a more positive assertion of a program for everyday living associated with valuing ‘pleasure, authenticity, connectedness, tranquility and deliberation’ (2006:52). Slow Living, they assert, is a direct response to the processes of individualization, globalization and the ‘radically uneven and heterogeneous production of space and time in post-traditional societies’ (Parkins and Craig 2006:12).
Regardless of these debates, Slow Food’s philosophical position on the ethics of food as pleasure and eating as a kind of reflective cultural politics of resistance to the role of speed in modernity have quite clearly tapped into the public nerve of current debates on the busyness of everyday life in many Western nations. Apart from the huge publishing success of popular books on this theme,4 discussions over the organization of time, including the degree to which everyday life is increasingly colonized by work rather than leisure are currently also hotly debated topics within academic discourse (Pocock 2003). Moreover, these debates appear to have generated significant sociological repercussions in the growing phenomena of ‘downshifting’ (Schor 1998) and sea-changing (Salter 2001), in affluent Western nations. Indeed, in the contemporary context, there is, I suggest, an eerie mirroring of earlier, less well-remembered ‘time wars’, such as the late nineteenth-century international labor movement’s pressing demand for the ‘three eights’: the division of the day into three equal eight-hour intervals of work, pleasure and rest. And just as Paul Lafargue (1989 [1883]) irreverent treatise, The Right to be Lazy critiquing the ‘disastrous dogma of work’ as the ‘cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity’ captivated a new audience in the counterculture and student movements of the 1960s and 70s, so too have Slow Food manifestos demanding an end to the ‘universal folly of the Fast Life’ reverberated in quite unexpected social domains.
In Australia, elements of the Slow Food program have now entered into the realm of public policy. For example, Slow Food’s campaign for the creation of Slow Cities has caught the attention of local councils in key metropolitan centers. In both Australia and the United States, prominent celebrity chefs are currently fostering the expansion of other Slow Food agendas, such as its program for taste education though the promotion of school gardens in state primary schools. In addition, the Slow Food philosophy has become something of an international brand, a marketing tool for editors of lifestyle guides to various cities, such as the recently published Slow Guide to Sydney, the first in a series, apparently, of guides to some of the ‘fastest places on earth’ (Hawkes and Keen 2007l 3). And judging by the number of people I see wearing ‘Slow Life’ T-shirts walking around the coastal path where I live in Bondi Beach, the slow brand has the potential for considerable commercial success.
Slow Food has recently been the subject of a great deal of critical commentary. While some writers, as already mentioned, have criticized Slow Food’s marketing strategies as vacuous (Chrzan 2004; Lauden 2004) or based on a corporate vision of food as simply a commodity (Paxson 2006), others have accused the organization of promoting a form of ‘culinary luddism’ (Lauden 2001) that deliberately obscures the democratizing benefits of modern food production over much of the 20th century (Lauden 2001; 2004). Thus, for Rachel Lauden, Slow Food’s program for the defense of high quality local products and regional cuisines has little to say about the plight of the hungry worldwide. By following Slow Food agendas privileging artisanal produced foods over mass production ‘The poor’ as Lauden puts it, are simply ‘stuck with the tyranny of the local’ (2004:143). Jeffrey Pilcher’s (2006) detailed discussion of the history of the Mexican tortilla production is a case in point. He argues that in Mexico, culinary modernism in the form of mass produced corn tortillas, continues to be essential to the survival of tortillas as the daily bread of the majority of Mexican wage laborers. While middle class Mexican elites, Slow Food activists and environmentalists are prompt to condemn factory produced maize flour as the antithesis of traditional cooking, bags of masa harina have nevertheless become essential care packages for Mexican immigrants and other aficionados of Mexican food in the United States, while in Mexico, a large parastatal corporation—the grupo Maseca —has emerged as the unlikely champion of authentic Mexican cuisine.
At the heart of these critiques is the accusation that Slow Food is disingenuous when it comes to issues of class. For example, in her fascinating study of the marketing and production of Tuscan olive oil, Anne Meneley (2004) notes that while olive oil producers of all classes displayed an affective attachment to their cold pressed extra virgin olive oil and were vitally concerned with the purity of their product as well as with authenticating markers, in reality sophisticated international marketing strategies were not available to all producers. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, Slow Food’s involvement in the marketing of olive oil has mostly benefited larger consortiums. Thus, while Slow Food claims to champion small producers, it often ends up favoring elites (Meneley 2004l 173). Other authors have raised the issue of class in respect to Slow Food’s membership base in wealthy nations. Chrzan (2004), for example, questions the high cost of Slow Food activities in the North American context, and Labelle (2004) similarly observes that Slow Food fails to recognize that locally sourced high-quality foods are in reality luxuries for the privileged few. Such critiques, however, are in danger of reproducing ethnocentric accounts of slow food politics that are rather narrowly enmeshed within localized fields of power. While Slow Food politics does at times elide class issues, especially in respect to the assumption of the buying power of consumers, it is equally true that the social and cultural contexts in which Slow Politics now operate vary quite considerably.
Perhaps a more trenchant observation is that in wealthy nations the popularity of Slow Food reifies forms of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ (Rosaldo 1989:90) that sentimentalize peasant traditions within and outside Europe (Jones et al 2003). Pilcher (2006), for example, asserts that while Slow Food has recognized some key individual Mexican contributions to agricultural bio diversity, as a whole, in Mexico the Slow Food project bears more than a passing resemblance to the European civilizing mission of the 19th century. Maria Gaytan (2004) similarly observes that Californian Slow Food members often draw upon deeply essentialized notions of Italian artisanal traditions that tend to romanticize the past: a process that is reflective of the current mood towards what might be called ‘Tuscanopia’ (Leitch 2000: 105), in which Tuscan peasant cuisines, house renovation projects and picturesque rurality all seem to have become key fantasy spaces of modern urban alienation.
These critiques not withstanding, a large part of Slow Food’s success, I suggest, is due to its promotional politics, with its imaginative use of the media and discursive strategies intended to reevaluate specific foods, not simply as economic commodities, but as cultural artifacts linked to salient notions of the past. By way of comparison, I would like to turn, briefly, to another example of a movement in Europe that similarly succeeded in reframing debates about food as a commodity—in this case genetically modified crops—to debates about taste as cultural heritage.5
Between 1997 and 2000 there was a public discussion in France about the future of agricultural biotechnology in France. According to Chaia Heller (2004), during the initial phase of the debate, between 1996 and 1998, the ‘risk’ frame and scientific expertise played a primary role in shaping public discussion. During the second phase of the debate, between 1998 and 2000, there was a remarkable shift in which an organization of small farmers—(the Confederation Paysanne (CP) or the Peasants Confederation) —reframed the debate about GMOs in France from issues of scientific risk, to questions of food quality and culture.
How did this happen? As background to this issue, Heller points out that the CP’s formation in 1987 represented the culmination of a decade-long struggle to create an autonomous voice for family farmers in a milieu largely dominated by France’s number one union of industrial farmers, the National Federated Union of Agricultural Enterprises (FNSEA). Since its inception, the CP had struggled to become a contending counter-power to the FNSEA, representing a network of socialist leaning family farmers contesting the agricultural policy that intensified during France’s postwar period. During this period, the CP was engaged in a strategic campaign to reclaim the historically contested and pejorative term paysan or peasant, in order to align itself with an international network of peasant movements, such as the European Peasant Coordination and Via Campesina. And in 1997, the CP launched its own anti-GMO campaign, presenting an anti-globalization message that defended the rights of peasant workers and indigenous peoples against agricultural biotechnology worldwide (Heller 2004:86).
In 1998, a radical sector of the CP, headed by Rene Reisal and the now infamous Jose Bove of anti-MacDonald’s fame, organized their first major anti-GMO event that involved a group of about 100 farmers destroying three tons of Novartis transgenetic corn in a storage plant in the southern town of Nerac by spraying it with fire hoses (Heller 2004:87). At the subsequent trial, Bove and Reisal countered the expert scientific witnesses on the subject of GMO related risk, with their own expertise as peasant farmers and union workers, asserting that they were uniquely situated to speak about food quality, farmers’ duties to protect and develop French seeds, as well as the implications of industrialized agriculture on rural peoples and cultures worldwide. According to Heller, by invoking both paysan expertise and the plight of the small farmer in the face of industrialized agriculture, the CP was able to appeal to a widely shared collective sense of regret felt by many French about the continued dispossession of the peasant farmer in the post-war period; a discussion that, in turn, draws upon a very long history of alternate constructions of the peasant in France (Rogers 1987). In this most recent resuscitation of the peasant as a key symbol of French culture, the CP draws upon the trade unionist discourse of the worker, articulating not a pre-social idea of nature as wilderness but rather, a ‘socialized nature whose value is not only historical, cultural, or aesthetic, but also economic, providing paysans with a viable and productive way of life’ (Heller 2004: 89). This, as Heller aptly points out is illustrated in the CP’s key slogan ‘To Produce, To Employ, To Preserve’. Thus in contrast to environmentalist understandings of conserving nature as wilderness, the CP promotes the idea that nature is best preserved by peasant workers whose expertise in knowing and caring for the land as a productive and meaningful landscape is of vital national importance.
In addition to advocating a view of nature as socialized, Jose Bove has also been instrumental in promoting good food as good taste, a rhetorical position quite akin to that of the Slow Food Movement. For example, in many of his discussions over the negative effects of industrialized agriculture, Bove uses the symbol of la malbouffe, a word that is close to the idea of bad or junk food (Heller 2004:92). As Heller observes, La Bouffe, or ‘good food’, on the other hand, brings together notions of pleasure, tradition and French cuisine, synonymous with French culture itself. To be cultured in France is to be ‘cultivated’ or to have ‘good taste’. Taste here, of course, has a double meaning. Both people and food may be regarded as having good or bad taste. As Heller puts it ‘While a food is well cultivated when produced according to regional agricultural traditions, an individual is considered cultivated when capable of recognizing, and taking pleasure in well-cultivated, good-tasting food or la Bouffe’ (2004:92). That which is not traditionally cultivated, in other words, foods produced without reference to cultural expertise and history, for example, fast foods and GMO foods, are seen as having no taste, and people who consume these foods are thus viewed as being without culture.
What are we to make of all these discussions on food and politics? Despite the fact that they are being conducted with reference to distinct national contexts involving particular social actors working within specific historical trajectories, one of the things that interests me in all these debates about food and identity, at least in Europe, is that they are managing to galvanize large numbers of people, and within a very short time frame have become remarkably effective lobby groups for environmental biodiversity and the protection of both cultural landscapes and niche-food producers internationally. Slow Food has been particularly influential in this regard, partly, I believe, because the organization maintains, quite self-consciously, a strategic distance from the radical guerilla strategies utilized by some of the more infamous actors in groups such as CP. Petrini’s response to the Jose Bove’s acts of sabotage against McDonald’s in France is quite explicit: it is against ‘slow style’. As he puts it ‘ we prefer to concentrate our efforts on what we are losing, rather than trying to stop what we don’t like’ (2001a: 28).
This difference in style can be illustrated by Petrini’s manifestos on fast food. Whereas Bove linked fast food to bad taste as well as to an explicitly anti-corporate and anti-globalization agenda, Petrini has always preferred to work in the positive, denying that Slow Food is simply anti-fast food. Rather, he suggests that Slow Food is against the homogenization of taste that fast food symbolizes. In other words, for Petrini, fast food does not necessarily represent bad taste although he certainly argues that it is a sign of the more negative effects of modern market rationalities on cultural difference. Slowness in this formulation becomes a metaphor for a politics of place complexly concerned, like the CP, with the defense of local cultural heritage, regional landscapes and idiosyncratic material cultures of production. Whereas, Bove and the CP lobbied within international networks of anti-globalization activists promoting anti-corporate agendas, from its inception Slow Food has mixed business and politics and none of its public manifestos advocating slowness and the benefits of the slow life or slow cities are explicitly anti-capitalist or anti-corporate. Rather, slowness is employed ideologically in order to promote Petrini’s idiosyncratic brand of ‘virtuous globalization’: a new figuring of cosmopolitanism that seeks to rupture binary oppositions—rural/metropolitan, local/global—refiguring the idea of locality as a kind of ‘ethical glocalism’ (Tomlinson 1999; Parkins and Craig 2006; Parasecoli 2003).
There are, however, significant convergences between the politics of the two movements. Both are engaged with the protection of cultural landscapes, local traditions and economies within debates about cultural homogenization in the context of Europeanization. Both are, in other words, political responses to what Nadia Seremetakis has called a massive ‘reorganization of public memory’ (1994l 3) accompanying the intensifications of market rationalities in European peripheries. Both utilize rhetorical strategies reframing scientific knowledge in terms of artisanal or peasant expertise, adding further weight to the thesis that political struggles in the contemporary era focus on struggles over meanings, as well as over political and economic conditions (McClagan 2000). Although I have not been able to explore this in great detail, both Slow Food and CP are also caught up in a kind of generational politics in which the interpretive and cultural frames of the main protagonists are deeply influential. Both, I suggest, are intimately involved with socially productive uses of nostalgia. This is to say, following the imaginative work of literary theorist Svetlana Boym (2001), that both movements invoke a reflective rather than a restorative nostalgia: a nostalgia that ‘dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging, [a nostalgia] that does not avoid the contradictions of modernity’ (2001: xviii); a nostalgia that explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones; a nostalgia that hopefully in the end, can, as Boym suggests ‘present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias’ (2001: xviii).
Just as CP interpreted its struggle over the future of agricultural biotechnology in France in terms of the struggles for the survival of other farmers in other places, Slow Food is also deeply engaged in public debates beyond the politics of food in Italy, intervening in emerging discussions about the ethics and repercussions of speed in the current era. I might add here that in this sense Slow Food draws attention to some very interesting parallels between 19th century rejections of machine time and current debates repudiating the orthodoxy of speed in everyday life. But this is a whole new topic. In this chapter, I have tried to indicate the ways in which food has emerged as a political topic par excellence, capable of connecting individual bodies to abstract communities, techno-scientific innovations and moral concerns. In Italy, Slow Food’s campaign to protect ‘endangered foods’ taps into quite crucial questions about the fate of place and the taste of culture on the margins of Europe. ‘Slow Life’ says Petrini with typical sound-bite finesse, is not just ‘Slow Food’. What I hope I have shown here is that debates about food, at least in Europe, specifically Italy and France, are debates about moral economies, not just economics. Food, in other words, is not just food.
* Originally published 2009
1. Bra is both a commercial center and a working class town with a long history of Mutual Aid associations launched by local craftspeople: cobblers, market vendors and tanners. In reference to Bra’s main commercial activity in the immediate postwar period, Padovani and Petrini note that in the 1950s ‘ the smell of tannin coming from the leather factories prevailed over the aroma of cheese’ (2006: 23).
2. Petrini himself notes that his social and political upbringing did not take place in the University’s sociology department, but rather in a ‘Catholic organization of which I had become president in 1966, at the age of seventeen’ (Petrini and Padovani 2006: 26).
3. For example, the Slow Food Terre Madre meeting attracted a wide range of prominent figures including Prince Charles, the environmental activist, Vandana Shiva, ministers from the Berlusconi government and Mikhail Gorbechev (Donati 2005: 237).
4. A recent example is Carl Honore’s (2004) In Praise of Slow.
5. I draw here extensively from Chaia Heller’s chapter in The Politics of Food (2004).
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