Slow Food

Most people are familiar with the maxim “you are what you eat,” credited to the 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. The meaning of this phrase (that the food one eats has a bearing on one's mental and physical health) has since been distorted to capture the idea that the way we (as a society) eat reflects the values and behaviors of society more generally. Food, as with many other things in modern society, is now often produced, prepared, and eaten in haste, part of a so-called cult of speed. Global food marketing offers an impressive range of food choices that can be consumed with little effort. It is this global fast food culture and the productivist food systems that go with it that the slow food movement is rebelling against. This article explains the motivations and beliefs of slow food and its geographic spread and core initiatives and reviews studies and critiques related to the movement.

Slow food is a consumer movement established in Italy in 1986, when McDonald's opened a branch in the famous Piazza di Spagna in Rome. The opening of the restaurant raised concerns that traditional eating habits might be threatened by Americanized fast food. In protest, the food writer Carlo Petrini gathered chefs, authors, and journalists together for a meeting to discuss the best means of countering the spread of fast food in Italy. From this, slow food was launched. The slow food manifesto is simple: a movement for the protection of the right to taste. It promotes the following:

• Fresh, local, seasonal produce
• Sustainable farming practices
• Skills and artisanal food production
• Traditional recipes, passed down through the generations
• Eating slowly with family and friends

Slow food exists alongside other initiatives that are also calling for more sustainable, territorially embedded forms of food production and marketing, spurred on by the increasing persistence of “food scares” in the food chain and a concomitant debate about the relationship between food, diet, and health, as rates of obesity and heart disease continue to rise. This includes the burgeoning market for “natural” and “organic” foods and countermoves to return to localism, regional foods, and real cooking.

The slow food movement is strongly consumer orientated. The movement believes that food should be about pleasure and social integration. Slow food is also underpinned by the notion of “ecogastronomy,” which promotes the idea that eating well can, and should, go hand in hand with protecting the environment. Taking the snail as its symbol, the central objective of slow food is to decelerate the food consumption experience so that alternative forms of taste can be reacquired. It is the antithesis of fast food culture and consumption formats such as McDonald's, which impose a standardized model on each restaurant and serve food through one formula, the “Speedee Service System.” The first edition of the movement's magazine, Slow, explicitly sought to oppose the spread of McDonald's and other fast food chains.

The movement also has spatial motivations: it wishes to embed food in territory and bring consumers closer to these foods, reasserting also the natural bases of food production (e.g., seasonality) and the role of cultural context (e.g., culinary skills, tacit knowledge). It is a celebration of cultural connections surrounding local cuisines and traditional products, targeting discerning consumers to heighten their awareness of “forgotten” cuisines and the threats that they face. This has been very successful. In Italy, for example, over 130 delicacies have been saved, including purple asparagus from Albenga, Ligurian potatoes, and lentils from Abruzzi. The prime concern of the movement is thus for “typical” or “traditional” foods, although increasingly recognizing that some regional foods are disappearing because they are too embedded in local food cultures.

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