Focus on food: March 16, 2005

The Slow Food Ethos

Have you ever heard of the Slow Food Movement? If you have then what I am about to write will be obvious. For those of you who have never heard of this worldwide movement, I ask that you check it out.

What is attractive about the Slow Movement is that while it recognizes that the 21st century is spinning faster and faster, we needn't allow our own lives to spin out of control. Quite the contrary, with a very little bit of thought and planning, we can, at least occasionally, rekindle the lives that most of us would prefer. More time with our family and friends, a chance to savor and in fact enjoy interpersonal relationships, and of course a chance to take a deep breathe and "smell the roses".
I will be bringing more of the Slow Movement to you in the following weeks. It is important for us to achieve a proper balance in our lives and this may work for some of you. I hope that it least gets you thinking.
Best Wishes...AL

SLOW FOOD: ideas and network

Founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986, Slow Food is an international association that promotes food and wine culture, but also defends food and agricultural biodiversity worldwide.

It opposes the standardisation of taste, defends the need for consumer information, protects cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguards foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable species.

Slow Food boasts 83,000 members worldwide and offices (in order of creation) in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the USA, France, Japan, and Great Britain.

The network of Slow Food members is organized into local groups—Condotte in Italy and Convivia elsewhere in the world—which, coordinated by leaders, periodically organize courses, tastings, dinners and food and wine tourism, as well as promoting campaigns launched by the international association at a local level. More than 800 Convivia are active in 50 countries (including 400 Condotte in Italy).

Slow Food’s publishing company, Slow Food Editore, specializes in tourism, food and wine. Its catalogue now contains about 60 titles and it also publishes the award-winning quarterly Slow: herald of taste and culture in six languages (Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese) and the attractive, large-format color magazine Slowfood, which comes out in Italian eight times a year.

Slow Food organizes national and international events to further its cause. They include: the Salone del Gusto, the world’s largest quality food and wine fair, held very two years at the Lingotto Exhibition Center in Turin, Cheese, a biennial cheese fair held in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, and Slowfish, an annual exhibition in Genoa devoted to sustainable fishing.

In 2003 Slow Food created the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, an independent non-profit entity with the mission to organize and fund projects that defend our world’s heritage of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions.

The Foundation supports Slow Food’s projects that pursue this mission,
such as the Ark of Taste and the Presidia. The Foundation exists thanks
to the Slow Food movement but also through generous support from public and private donors.

The Ark of Taste, designed and launched by the International Slow Food Movement, was founded to discover, catalogue and safeguard small quality food products and defend biodiversity. The Presidia are organizational units used to promote the products, guarantee their economic and commercial future and, at the same time, protect the land from degradation and create new job opportunities.

The Slow Food Award for the Defense of Biodiversity was instituted in 2000 with the goals of publicizing and rewarding activities of research, production, marketing, popularization and documentation that benefit biodiversity in the agricultural and gastronomic field.

Slow Food’s most recent and innovative initiative was Terra Madre, World Meeting of Food Communities, held in Turin in October 2004, a forum for all those who seek to grow, raise, catch, create, distribute and promote food in ways that respect the environment, defend human dignity and protect the health of consumers.

Alongside activities for the very young, Slow Food also organizes two major adult education projects: the Master of Food, a study syllabus in the wine and food sector split into 20 theme courses, and the University of Gastromic Sciences in Pollenzo, the world’s first academy of ‘eno-gastronomy’, with campuses in Pollenzo, near Bra, and Colorno, near Parma.