Slow Food: The Case for Taste (Arts & Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History) Book

With a magazine, web site, and over 400,000 followers organized into local "convivia," or chapters, the slow food movement is poised to revolutionize the way Americans shop for groceries, have their meals, and think about food. The slow food movement advocates a return to traditional recipes, locally grown foods and wines, and eating as a social event. In 1989, Carlo Petrini founded the International Slow Food Movement as a backlash against the fast-food lifestyle and its perpetual haste. Not only did Petrini renounce fast food, he renounced the overall pace of the "fast life," and called for the safeguarding of local economies and gastronomic traditions, and the creation of a new kind of ecologically aware and committed consumerism Petrini commemorates the origins and first steps of the movement, but the story is not told as an autobiography, or even the biography of a movement; rather, it is meant to sum up a current of thought into which his own reflections, and those of all who have worked to promote Slow Food, have flowed. As Newsweek described it, the slow food movement has now become an alternative the American rat race, "a kinder and gentler capitalism."Read More