Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food

by Carlo Petrini (Editor), Deborah Madison (Foreword), Slow Food Editore (Editor)

Remember the days before the dot.com explosion, before Golden Arches rose from the Great Plains, before the Age of Information, when the only commodity that wasn't in short supply in America was time? Time to relax and reflect, time to cook well, eat well, and live the life of sustainable hedonism. Today we pound down our Big Mac and fries as we check our e-mail on our collective Palm Pilots, at the expense of true nourishment for our bodies and souls. "Enough!" says Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food International, a movement that encourages us to turn down the volume, unplug the answering machine, and enjoy life to its fullest. Away with nutraceutical soft drinks and breakfast cereals made from refined sugar and shaped liked clowns. Bring back the pleasure of the palate, and return the humanity to food. More than 60,000 members worldwide now belong to the Slow Food movement, which believes that the slow shall inherit the earth. Slow Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food is an anthology for cooks, gourmets, and anyone who is passionate about food and its impact on our culture. Drawn from five years of the quarterly journal Slow (only recently available in America), this book includes more than 100 articles covering eclectic topics from "Falafel" to "Fat City." From the market at Ulan Bator in Mongolia to Slow Food Down Under, this book offers an armchair tour of the exotic and bizarre. You'll pass through Vietnam's Snake Tavern, enjoy the Post-Industrial Pint of Beer, and learn why the lascivious villain in Indian cinema always eats Tandoori Chicken. The articles are contributed by some of the world's top food writers. Slow Food is moving fast in North America, with more than 5,000 members, loosely organized into 55 "Convivia," from Montreal to San Francisco, benefiting from enormous free publicity. Slow Food offers a clear alternative to the "fast food nation" (the title of Eric Schlosser's great book on the horrors of the fast food biz). This is a perfect follow-up to Joan Dye Gussow's This Organic Life , and is proof positive that he or she who lives slow, lives best.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Cooking, Science

287 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Carlo Petrini, an Italian sociologist, is the founder of the international movement Slow Food (1989).

Reviews

[Erika · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me think about the way I grew up... eating figs from the tree in our backyard, calling my mother at the hair salon at the age of 7 to ask how to make meat loaf because she wasn't home yet and someone had to feed the family. Food, Family, Friends.... there's nothing better in life.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS IN CELEBRATION OF NON-"FAST FOOD”

Carlo Petrini (born 1949) is an Italian culinary editor, and the founder of the International Slow Food Movement (so named because it originated in opposition to "fast food" such as the McDonald's chain). This 2001 book collects articles from a variety of writers. He noted in his Preface, "Not that we have forgotten our origins as lovers of the pleasure of food, wine, and conviviality and as revivers of a passion for slowness, such an indispensable tool for improving the quality of our lives."

Another writer said in his historical Introduction, the movement "has educated members and readers around the world on uniqueness and tradition, regionalism and universality in food."

One essayist notes the McDonald's chain's emphasis "on predictable products, settings, and experiences, and on the replacement of skilled human beings with non-human technologies. I have used the term 'McDonaldization' to describe the process by which these principles have spread throughout the fast food industry, other sectors of American society, and increasingly other societies around the world." (Pg. 19)

A Yale professor quoted observes that in the 10,000 food ads that a child watches a year, "They are seeing soft drinks, candy bars, sugar-coated cereals, and fast food; all of them eagerly swallowed by extremely thin guys. Put the two things together and you can have only one result---obesity." (Pg. 26)

This is an interesting introduction to this interesting movement.

[Marjorie Elwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

A compilation of articles from the Slow Food movement's magazine, Slow, this was a little slow-going. Even the articles about food (a favorite topic of mine) weren't particularly interesting, although they were informative. There was one article, a fictional piece about cannibalism, that I found very jarring amidst the rest of the essays.