Tom Hodgkinson pays tribute to the inspirational thinker who sought to save us from the madness of the fast life  

The founder of the Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini, died last week. It’s not over-egging things to say that his work improved the world.

The Slow Food idea has its roots in the early eighties when Petrini and a group of radicals protested outside the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome. Later in the decade he launched Slow Food with a cute snail for its logo. In Slow Food’s rousing manifesto, Petrini, who had been a member of the Communist Proletarian Unity Party when young, wrote:

“Homo sapiens must regain wisdom and liberate itself from the ‘velocity’ that is propelling it on the road to extinction. Let us defend ourselves against the universal madness of ‘the fast life’ with tranquil material pleasure.”

It was genius to create an anti-capitalist movement that was pleasurable and fun and had real impact on the world. Today thousands of restaurants around the world bear the Slow Food logo, a guarantee that the food inside is going to be non-industrial, good, made carefully, to be savoured in convivial fashion.

From the manifesto: “To escape the tediousness of ‘fast-food’, let us rediscover the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisines.”

It was a counter-cultural notion. “In the name of productivity, the ‘fast life’ has changed our lifestyle and now threatens our environment and our land (and city) scapes. Slow Food is the alternative, the avant-garde’s riposte.”

In the noughties they produced a really lovely and inspiring magazine celebrating good food.

Slow Food culture certainly seems alive and well in Italy today, despite the appearance of McDonald’s and other chains. It’s certainly my impression that Italian towns are proud of their local cuisine, and that small family-owned cafés and restaurants thrive. You see far fewer chain stores than in the UK, whose high streets are dominated by umpteen fried chicken outlets and crap burger bars.

Thank God then for those great pubs of England which source locally and with care. Thank God also for Riverford Organic, the box delivery scheme. One of the pleasures of being a Riverford customer is the weekly piece of A5 paper which comes with the veg and which carries founder Guy Singh-Watson’s revolutionary communiqués. These short letters very much adhere to Slow Food principles and see Guy regularly fulminating against “Big Farmer”, supermarkets and industrial food production.

Guy can also get philosophical. Last week he wrote: “Aristotle told us to build relationships on pathos (empathy) and ethos (shared beliefs and values) before we can effectively get down to logos (the numbers).” (Click here for a discussion of the many meanings of logos).

Well, let us remember Petrini, a truly great man. Read more at the Slow Food website.

Live well,

Tom

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