I've been having a fine exchange with Eric Holt-Gimenez at Food First about Slow Food. Slow Food is an idea about which I'm a little ambivalent. It was founded on some fairly important political principles, particularly around the politics of taste. Slow Food's founding question: 'why can't the masses have pleasure when they eat, why is it only the rich who can afford to eat well'?

The response was to observe that workers need two things to bring this kind of pleasure within reach - time and money. So they organised, working with unions to increase agricultural labourers' wages, and fighting for a two-hour lunch break in which to enjoy food.

Now, as Eric notes, Slow Food has increasingly become a circle jerk of olive oil and blue cheese fantasists, moving away quite sharply from its political roots. ... read more »

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Posted on 25 February, 2008 - 20:16

Slow Food was an invention of the Italian Communist Party, and has some important roots in workerist organising, with a radically egalitarian vision of why everyone needs to be able to savour food more. In Slow Food sites outside Italy, this rather tends to get lost, and Slow Food becomes just an alibi for a certain kind of conspicuous consumption. So I was very pleased to speak with someone from Slow Food Perth, where I am at the moment, and where people are aware that theirs is a political project. They've got Edible Schoolyard-type projects, and they're a great resource on how to avoid supermarkets in Perth (which, I've been told by more than one reader, is very hard to do). ... read more »

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Posted on 11 September, 2007 - 21:07