Eighteen years ago in Rome, an Italian journalist, Carlo
Petrini, saw a McDonald’s open on Rome’s Piazza di Spagna and
realized that, for the conquering hamburger, no space was sacred.
Petrini, who had been a militant student in the early 1970s and
went on to found Italy’s first radical independent radio station,
began a mission to alert the world to the loss of local culinary
traditions in the wake of mass production.
He founded the Slow Food Movement, which took up the defense of
such delicacies as a succulent Sienese pig appreciated in the
courts of medieval Tuscany, the Albenga violet asparagus of
Liguria, and various handmade sausages and salamis — such as the
Campotosto mortadella of Abruzzo and donkey salami of Veneto —
whose recipes are now known only to a handful of old Italian
farmers. The movement grew out of the gastronomical branch of ARCI
(Associazione Ricreativa Culturale Italiana), a national network of
social clubs closely associated with the Italian Communist Party.
The dissident Communist newspaper Il Manifesto originally
published the gastronomical supplement called Gambero
Rosso (the Red Crab), which evolved into Slow Food’s
authoritative restaurant and wine guides.
While still drawing nearly half its members from its country of
origin, Slow Food is finding support all over the world — there
are now some 60,000 members in more than 111 countries. Just last
month, the movement inaugurated a full-fledged culinary institute
in Italy. In the United States, fast food’s homeland, Slow Food has
taken solid root, expanding to about 5,000 members in 62 chapters
around the country. With health issues ranging from disease
outbreaks among farm animals to obesity in humans grabbing the
headlines, the movement is not at a loss for recruitment slogans
these days.
Last month’s cover story of the Ecologist magazine, the
bible of that country’s radical environmental movement, hails Slow
Food as “a movement to save the world.” Its philosophy of
supporting local produce and local farmers is endorsed by the
Ecologist as one of the solutions to that bête noir
of various radicals, globalization.
“We were born as a gastronomical association, paying attention
to the traditional pleasures of the table and wine, in order to
oppose in some way the crazy speed of the fast life — the way of
life and food production that leads to the homogenization of flavor
and erosion of culture,” Petrini tells the Ecologist.
While Petrini’s gastronomical goals are in some ways
commendable, his argument has the formula backward: the erosion of
culture is the cause of all the culinary ills — not to mention
countless other kinds of ills — that Petrini laments. The
fundamental question is, what causes such erosion in the first
place?
ACCORDING TO A STUDY released last month by the World Health
Organization, some 36 percent of Italian children are now
overweight, and 10 percent are obese. The rest of Southern Europe,
known for its purportedly healthful Mediterranean diet, also fares
badly, with Malta, Greece, Spain and Croatia — hardly fast-food
nations on the American scale — rounding out the top five in the
survey.
The Italian Health Ministry said that, although obesity in
Europe had not reached the epidemic proportions of the United
States, the figures are disturbing. Italian Health Minister
Girolamo Sirchia proposed a revival of the religious tradition of
fasting on Fridays, with schools offering reduced portions.
Mario Di Pietro, a pediatrician, said that too much pasta was
not in itself the problem.
“Fighting excessive weight is not just a matter of diet,” said
Di Pietro. “It has to do with your entire way of life,” he added.
Di Pietro runs a seven-day course on healthy eating that includes a
ban on television as well as junk food. He went on to note that, as
Italian women abandon the role of “mamma” to pursue careers,
homemade foods are being replaced by less healthful store-bought
and fast foods.
A few years ago, Massimo Salani, a Roman Catholic priest from
Tuscany, stirred up controversy by calling fast food “the fruit of
a Protestant culture.”
“Fast food reflects the individualistic relation between man and
God introduced by Luther,” Salani said, prompting such clever
headlines in the following day’s Italian newspapers as, “Theologian
Excommunicates the Hamburger.”
“The individualistic relation between man and God, started by
Luther, is also reflected in the world of eating,” Salani went on.
“Lacking the community aspect of sharing, fast food is certainly
not a Catholic model,” he added.
While other denominations might make arguments about their
particular gastronomic traditions, Salani’s point was a good one in
that it addressed the erosion of an underlying tradition that has
led to the kinds of problems the Slow Foodists and others
lament.
Giacomo Mojoli, a vice president of the Slow Food movement,
demurred when asked about Salani’s attack, saying Slow Food took a
secular, rather than a religious, approach to the issue.
“Fast foods are dangerous because they bring about the
homogenization of taste, because there is no cultural diversity,”
he said. “But there is no sense in demonizing them,” he added.
Unfortunately for those cosmopolitans who crave cultural
diversity, when cultures are allowed to deteriorate one ends up
with fewer of them, not more.
THE POLITICS OF FOOD has never been more intriguing. With the
release this month of the documentary Super Size Me, in
which its director embarks on a no-holds-barred fast food feeding
frenzy, many are attacking “corporate culture” for shoving junk
food down their throats. The bigger problem could be that they are
allowing this polymorphous corporate culture to take the place of a
genuine culture and tradition — including any fundamental beliefs
and values — they lack.
And so the Great Relearning in the culinary realm will have to
begin. If the Italian communists who founded the Slow Food Movement
really want to preserve their gastronomic culture and
health-obsessed Americans really want to improve their diet,
instead of focusing on the black celery of Trevi and the Ischia
cave rabbit of Campania or worrying about what McDonald’s
executives want them to buy, they would do well to protect a way of
life that values more than the exotic and the expedient.
