All Hail Slow Food

The Slow Food revolution began in 1986 when Carlo Petrini organized a protest against the first McDonald's restaurant in Italy, unfortunately located on the Spanish Steps of Rome.

There are now over 65,000 members in Slow Food International, with 500 chapters, known as convivia, around the world. The organization has its hands in many different pots, from activism to celebration to publication. They've created an endangered-foods Ark Project to celebrate forgotten foods and spread them to members world wide. Slow Food International's Salone del Gusto draws hundreds of thousands of food lovers for a long weekend of education and appreciation. The group publishes "The Snail," a magazine-length newsletter that includes events and recipes, and spotlights local food producers.

At 31 years of age, Patrick Martins, director of Slow Food USA, has a lot of experience under his belt. He started working with Carlo Petrini in 1998 in Italy, and two years later he moved to New York City with his wife to launch Slow Food USA. In the past three years, SFUSA has grown to include over 10,000 members and 134 member-organized convivia. The organization has launched a hugely successful Heritage Turkey program to save endangered species of turkey.

Can you sum up for me the ethos of Slow Food?

Martins: Well, Slow Food is basically an organization dedicated to preserving and celebrating the regional cuisines and products from around the world. It's also firmly committed to reacquainting people with the rituals of the table and trying to introduce the idea of ecogastronomy, which symbolizes the fact that we think gastronomes are gluttonous if they don't have a concern about the environment and where their food came from. And environmentalists are very boring if they don't understand that pleasure has to be a side of food and the environment.

So in some ways it's reconciling the pleasure of eating with environmentalism.

Martins: Exactly. It's basically showing that it's OK to consume, it's OK to have pleasure.

In addition to the heritage turkey program, what are some activities Slow Food is involved in?

Martins: We started a raw milk cheese consortium to save raw milk cheeses [which are endangered by FDA regulations]. We've tried to send coffee around the world that is produced in the appropriate way and pays a proper premium to the producers. We basically try to create markets for products that are endangered from lack of awareness of them.

At a slow food luncheon here in Berkeley last month, you said, "If Slow Food is explained correctly, it cannot be argued with." I'm curious about what are some the arguments people have against Slow Food and how you counter them.

Martins: Well, there's one somewhat legitimate argument, which is that Slow Food is elitist. Basically our response to that is just because a small percentage of the population has embraced Slow Food doesn't make what we believe in wrong. To be embraced by more people it's important that we grow. It's through expansion that we'll become more accessible.

The question to ask is whether Slow Food is doing the right thing or not, and believes in the right thing. If people think it's right, then they should embrace it and help us to expand to different socioeconomic levels and regions.

We live in a time when small producers make niche, healthy, good, delicious products for the rich, but remain very poor. And meanwhile we have very rich companies that produce mediocre, unhealthy food for the poor and get very rich, and that's a gap that Slow Food is trying to bridge.

There's another thing, which is that Slow Food is trying to defend biodiversity in the food world, and a lot of these products are endangered in that they are expensive, they are in a way like boutique items. But maintaining a diverse genetic pool in the food supply is crucial, so in that respect, and in all those respects, the elitist argument does real damage to us and to the causes that we're fighting for.