Editor’s note, May 22: This article originally appeared in the Piemonte issue of our quarterly Premium magazine Bellissimo, published in September 2022. Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, has died in his hometown of Bra at age 76. The text below has been lightly updated.
When McDonald’s opened its first location in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna in 1986, over 500 Golden Arches had already been hoisted throughout Europe, but for Piedmontese food activist Carlo Petrini, Italy’s first was the final straw. Protesting alongside a Roman who’s-who, Petrini notoriously doled out pasta to combat what he’d later call the “culturally homogenizing nature” of fast food. After years of advocating with a nonprofit organization called ArciGola, Petrini and his followers finally had, at the base of the Spanish Steps, a clear face to their foe. Just like that, Slow Food was born.
Within three years, 15 national delegates would convene to codify co-founder Folco Portinari’s Slow Food Manifesto, a guiding ethos which Petrini summarized as the belief that “everyone has the right to good, clean and fair food.”
Though the one-page creed stopped short of naming explicit directives, the foundational philosophy of Slow Food soon spread from its headquarters in Petrini’s hometown of Bra to some 1,500 locally-governed convivia across 150 participating countries, each charged with promoting local and ethical food ecosystems.
As a result, any number of Slow Food events and initiatives can be found worldwide today, from mammoth food fairs, such as Turin’s Salone del Gusto, to traditional community dinners in hamlets like Belvedere Langhe.
Yet for all of the movement’s globalization, the small hilltown of Bra still remains its beating heart. From here, multiple organizations work independently in pursuit of common goals, from the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, which manages agricultural concerns from its offices in downtown Bra, to the University of Gastronomic Sciences, the only academic institution of its kind.
A “revolutionary reconfiguring” of how we eat
Critics such as Suzanne Zuppello consider Slow Food a “religion for the ‘privileged’,” one that sets unrealistic standards on eating when millions struggle to access food of any kind. Yet Petrini maintained a belief that with a revolutionary reconfiguring of how we eat, the Slow Food model will benefit those people, too.
To wit, the Foundation for Biodiversity aims to democratize culinary prestige with its Ark of Taste, not only cataloging but celebrating at-risk cultivars and culinary traditions throughout the world, from the Caucasian Buffalo of Azerbaijan to the Bungo fruit of Tanzania. The Foundation also helps manage the 10,000 Gardens in Africa project, which works to increase awareness of and access to sustainable food in communities throughout a continent that has otherwise been exploited by industrialization.
At its best, Slow Food is a personal lifestyle to which we might aspire as much as it is a template of rules for an institution to follow. From Bra to Broken Arrow, Petrini and his supporters waged a war against the hollow hastening of culture, not only in the interest of economic and ecological goals, but, as states their Manifesto, for the sake of “sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment.” It might seem ambitious, driving toward a future where all of humankind is not merely sustained but satisfied, and yet for proponents of Slow Food, the alternative is unthinkable.
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