Slow Food

In 1986, Piedmontese journalist Carlo Petrini led the fight against the arrival of a MacDonald's fast food restaurant by the sacrosanct Spanish Steps in Rome, jokingly vowing to react by creating its antithesis, Slow Food, to counter multinational corporate blandness and promote local dishes and ingredients. It was an idea whose time had come: three years later the international Slow Food Manifesto was signed in Paris:

Born and nurtured under the sign of Industrialization, this century first invented the machine and then modelled its lifestyle after it. Speed became our shackles. We fell prey to the same virus: 'the fast life' that fractures our customs and assails us even in our own homes, forcing us to ingest "fast-food".

Homo sapiens must regain wisdom and liberate itself from the 'velocity' that is propelling it on the road to extinction. Let us defend ourselves against the universal madness of 'the fast life' with tranquil material pleasure. Against those - or, rather, the vast majority - who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of an adequate portion of sensual gourmandise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment.