http://www.slowfoodusa.org/Recognizing that the enjoyment of
wholesome food is essential to the
pursuit of happiness, Slow Food
U.S.A. is an educational organization
dedicated to promoting stewardship
of the land and ecologically sound
food production; reviving the kitchen
and the table as the centers of
pleasure, culture, and community;
invigorating and proliferating regional,
seasonal culinary traditions; creating
a collaborative, ecologically-oriented,
and virtuous globalization; and living
a slower and more harmonious
rhythm of life.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/slowfood081301.cfmFounded in 1986, in direct response to the opening of a McDonald's restaurant
in Rome's famous Piazza di Spagna, the Slow Food Manifesto declares that: A
firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal
folly of Fast Life.
In its first years Slow Food, which has adopted the snail as its official symbol,
was heavily concentrated on food and wine, and produced what is considered
to be Italy's best guides to wine, restaurants and food stores. But in the mid-
1990s Slow Food developed a new political dimension, called eco-
gastronomy. "We want to extend the kind of attention that environmentalism
has dedicated to the panda and the tiger to domesticated plants and animals,"
says Carlo Petrini, the movement's founder, a tall, handsome bearded man of
54. "A hundred years ago, people ate between one hundred and a hundred
and twenty different species of food. Now our diet is made up of at most ten
or twelve species."