Slow Food Revolution:
A New Culture for Eating and Living
by Carlo Petrini and Gigi Padovani

Reviewed by Rachel Levin

A snail is an unlikely mascot for a movement that, in twenty years, has expanded from a close-knit group of Italian gourmands to an international network of 83,000 members in 50 countries throughout the world. Despite its relatively quick growth, the Slow Food movement—started by Carlo Petrini and his associates in the early 1980s—has remained true to its philosophies of eating, drinking and living in the slow lane. What began as a club for appreciating the pleasures of Italian oenogastronomy soon turned into a forum for grassroots activism in the wake of disasters wrought by industrial farming—mad cow disease, toxic pesticide run-off and methanol-tainted wine—and the importation of American consumerism and fast food. In 1986, the group issued a manifesto boycotting the arrival of Rome’s first McDonald’s in the Piazza di Spagna, and Slow Food was officially born. Since then, the group has championed a slower, more natural lifestyle: the preservation of tastes, products, agricultural practices and traditions the world over; the conservation of biodiversity; and, above all, pleasure in the act of eating and drinking.

Slow Food Revolution is a dense, detailed account of the development of Slow Food’s central tenets and activities as well as an abridged biography of the movement’s dynamic leader, Petrini. The book provides an overview of global technological and economic shifts within the past twenty years that have made food a hot political topic, dwelling in particular on Slow Food’s principles of environmental sustainability, economic equality and social justice as they relate to food production and distribution. Yet Slow Food Revolution is not a dry historical report; the book doesn’t neglect the movement’s fundamental philosophy of pleasure. In colorful vignettes of important milestones in Slow Food history, wine flows, thrushes roast on coals and ravioli are pressed by hand. Catalogued in the book’s comprehensive index are 300 endangered delicacies protected through its Presidia projects—everything from Scandanavian smoked reindeer meat to African monkó cocoa. With such an appealing agenda, as well as an international infrastructure that now includes a publishing wing and the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, Slow Food seems poised to usher in the revolution of the snail.

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