Slow Food

The Slow Food movement aims to preserve cultural cuisine and in so doing to preserve the food plants and seeds, domestic animals and farming within an ecoregion. The slow food movement has become a social and political movement capable of resisting the dehumanising effects of large-scale, commercial food production Connect over food and the fast-food industry.

Carlo Petrini, a food and wine journalist in Italy, founded The Slow Food movement in 1986. Petrini had become haunted by the spectre of fast food companies eroding Italy’s ancient culinary culture. The opening of McDonald’s on the Spanish Steps in Rome was the final straw.

That a fast food giant could open its doors in the heart of food-obsessed Rome symbolized to Petrini the vulnerability of older values to brash new industrial methods. Processed fast food was not only changing the landscape through intensive farming, it was also eroding a way of life that revolved around producing and eating food in a relaxed, sociable way.

It was time to act. Petrini realised that the key to change lay in motivating people with similar concerns. Strip away the Euro-talk and it is all about motivating ordinary people to take control of how they live, work and eat. He knew that the only way to counter the threat was to tackle the problem internationally and by promoting gastronomic culture, developing taste education, conserving agricultural biodiversity and protecting traditional foods that are at risk from extinction. Slow Food, whose aim is to “protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenisation of modern fast food and life,” was born.

The organisation now spans 100 countries, each with its own network of convivia (local Slow Food branches). Twenty years on, Petrini as President of Slow Food is opening up the debate on how to develop the movement further. His ideas have the potential to ignite a powerful grass-roots force that can shape the way countries live and trade with one another.

In 1999, the Italian Slow Food movement created the Cittaslow (which translates as ‘slow city’) scheme. It was designed to engender Slow Food values into local communties. The British scheme has developed in close collaboration with UK Slow Food members. Ludlow in Shropshire was the first British town to be admitted into the Cittaslow network in 2003. Aylsham and Diss in Norfolk, Mold in Wales, Perth in Scotland and Berwick-upon-Tweed have since followed.

Like the Convivia, each Cittaslow town chooses its goals and unites disparate local groups to bring them about. Ludlow Cittaslow, for example, have transformed the local leisure centre’s fast food restaurant into a healthy eating café, fought to protect local pubs, filled the town with flowers and have tackled the towns parking problems.

The slow food movement challenges us to think about how consumption choices we make form part of on interdependent network within a social economy – the pleasures of food preparation and consumption among friends and family helps develop social and cultural capital. Some places are setting out to be known as slow food destinations. Stradbroke Island off the Queensland coast has recently been recognised as the world's first Slow Island.

An important component of the Slow Food movement is the commitment to educate children about the origins and taste of food – to help them to have a connection to the food they eat. It aims to help children develop their senses and their appreciation of food and the pleasure of eating as a gastronomic and social event.

Source :
Food Matters : Slow Food
Don’t Eat So Fast!
Slow Food
Slow Movement : Slow Food