Indiana Alumni Magazine
Photo by Bert Katzung
Try to imagine his indignation and foreboding. In the very heart of Rome, known for luscious delicacies like tender potato gnocchi, baby artichokes braised with mint and garlic (or fried until they open like crisp green petals), pasta alla carbonara, richly sauced with eggs, pancetta, and the local pecorino Romano cheese — in the center of the ancient city near the fabled Spanish Steps, the Golden Arches were going up. New world meets old, with a vengeance.
But Carlo Petrini was not a man to sit around, idly twirling his spaghetti, when something he loved was threatened. Fearful that the fast-food culture that had spread from sea to shining sea in the United States, homogenizing food tastes and flattening out regional culinary differences in its wake, was going to wreak the same gastronomic mediocrity in his beloved Italy, he decided to strike back.
The ebullient and charismatic Signore Petrini did not want to launch another joyless left-wing protest movement. He would rally his forces with an emphasis on pleasure and eating well, a paean to food and wine and companionability and, most of all, to the local farmers, the artisan producers, the hard workers who had always made the food taste so good before the global corporate giants came in and threatened to make it all taste the same.
And so, one man’s horror at the advance of fast food has been transformed into a worldwide movement in celebration of slow food. Its mission is symbolized by its logo: a stylized sketch of that humble, unhurried, gastronomic delicacy, the snail.
The Slow Food Movement works to preserve local food traditions, throwing the mantle of its protection around endangered products and methods of food preparation, helping small farmers find a way to keep going in a global economy, supporting artisan producers, and emphasizing that eating is an intensely pleasurable, sociable activity that should not be done on the run.
For a taste of Slow Food, try these three recipes.
The main project of Slow Food is to identify foods that are in danger of being lost to the fast-food juggernaut — exceptional regional foods produced by artisans on a small scale that cannot compete with mass-production techniques but that have a long and delicious heritage worth preserving. Movement members work to add these foods to the Slow Food Ark of Taste — a roster of foods in need of rescue, which now includes all manner of cheeses, fruits and vegetables, honeys and preserves, meats and fish. Grassroots efforts promote, subsidize, and defend these Ark foods — aiming to get them onto restaurant menus, household shopping lists, and local political agendas to help ensure their survival.
Since the international organization’s founding in 1989, Slow Food chapters (called “convivia”) have sprung up in more than 45 countries, and in all 50 of the United States, where there are 140 of them. Indiana itself has four convivia (Slow Food Michiana, Kentuckiana, Indy, and Bloomington). Slow Food is huge these days, with its own university, a massive international food festival every two years in Turino, and many other events educating the public and linking consumers and producers.
IU professor Christine Barbour helped found the Slow Food Movement in Bloomington, along with chef Dave Tallent, right. Photo by Kendall Reeves.
I myself have been captivated by Petrini’s efforts almost from the start, hooked by a culinary philosophy that does as much for my soul and my heart as it does for my stomach. For me, Slow Food is a way to cook and eat attentively and spiritually, rooted in deep respect for the food, for my companions, and for the earth. And besides, it just tastes so much better to eat freshly harvested food in season rather than year-round tomatoes and other abominations of the palate that have been bred to withstand days inside a refrigerated truck.
But it turns out it isn’t so easy to get something like Slow Food started, even at the local level. Lots of people were interested, lots said it sounded like an admirable idea, but lots were busy, busy, busy. And so was I, and my ambition languished until the spring of 2003, when, for a Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times food column I write, I went off to interview Dave and Kristen Tallent, who had trained at the Culinary Institute of America and were starting their own restau rant in Bloomington.
Chef Dave Tallent is an impressive mountain of a man, six feet plus and solid. No one is going to mess with Dave; he looks like he could eat line-cooks for lunch. So when I asked why he cooks for a living, I was unprepared for the transformation. When Dave talks about food, his voice becomes hushed, almost reverent, as though he is talking about rare jewels or exotic blooms. The venison from a Martinsville, Ind., farm, the 10 pounds of fresh asparagus scored from a local farmer, the pancetta he would cure himself, the regional cheeses — found treasures all. His eyes widen and sparkle, his ruddy cheeks turn even pinker. The man is seriously in love with food.
Tom Stio / Indiana Cooks! Great Restaurant Recipes for the Home Kitchen, IU Press
And it wasn’t just food he loved, it was slow food. He had already contacted local farmers and artisans, letting them know he was in the market to buy. It was a boon for them — with a guaranteed market they could grow more creatively, planting foods Dave wanted to try and expanding what they could offer consumers at the community farmers’ market. Now more than two years later, firmly established at Restaurant Tallent, Dave is Slow Food personified. His brilliant cooking and seasonally changing menu showcase the incredible bounty of southern Indiana — local meats (pork, beef, venison, lamb, and rabbit), as well as fruits, herbs, vegetables, and other good things, including honey, shagbark hickory syrup, polenta, and cheese.
So, when I talked about starting a Slow Food convivium here, Dave was with me instantly. We chartered Slow Food Bloomington in January 2004 and immediately set out to fill our coffers with a spring fundraiser, a spectacular Chef’s Tasting Dinner — seven local chefs, cooking seven courses from local ingredients. Working with Bloomingfoods, a local food co-op, and the city of Bloomington Parks and Recreation Department, we sponsored tasting events at the Farmers’ Market. SlowFest was a fall harvest festival at which we served local specialties to 600 hungry people, and we held a biweekly winter farmers’ market at Harmony School. It was a splendid year for Slow Food Bloomington, and this year has been even better as our community of folks dedicated to living the slow life continues to grow.
Ah, the slow life. I’d like to say you’ll never see me in Marsh buying lettuce in a bag or grabbing a sandwich at Subway, but, of course, you will. With the best will in the world to slow things down, our lives still get hectic, and we can’t make every meal a leisurely local feast. But the decision about what to eat is a thousand small choices every day, and we can get some of them, many of them, right, even if others fall through the cracks. Every choice we make, every dollar we spend on food, is a vote for the way we want to live our lives.
Slow, delicious, and convivial versus fast, standardized, and corporate. For me, it’s no choice at all. 
Christine Barbour, BA’79, MA’80, PhD’90, founding member and co-director of Slow Food Bloomington, teaches American politics at IU Bloomington and writes a food column for the Bloomington Herald-Times. She is also a co-author of Indiana Cooks! Great Restaurant Recipes for the Home Kitchen.
Resources
Books: The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and Recipes, by Eric Schlosser (foreword), Corby Kummer, and Susie Cushner (Chronicle, 2002)
Slow Food: The Case for Taste, by Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini (Columbia University Press, 2004)
Online: www.slowfood.com
www.slowfoodusa.org
www.slowfoodbloomington.org