It’s 1 p.m. and the Italian national appetite has just been triggered.
Time to choose.
Slide past the rows of tightly packed motorbikes and enter the noisy, windowless hallway of a fast-food giant, to be jostled by the elbowing matrons and tripped by the kid-bearing strollers to wait in what is passing for a line to order a small hamburger, small fries, small drink and a side dish. Then, balance your tray in a seemingly futile effort to find a place to sit and eat before it turns as cold as the decor.
Or, opt for a quiet table at Sora Margherita, a tiny eatery with less than a dozen tables, off a splendidly silent piazza where you order an appetizer of mozzarella-filled fresh zucchini flowers, followed by a plate of steaming, rich eggplant parmigiana, brought to the table by the woman who made them, to be savored over the course of at least 90 minutes.
Which to choose?
Carlo Petrini, founder of the international Slow Food movement, feels it’s no contest.
The fast-food option leaves you frazzled. But the slower pace feeds the soul as well as the body. So instead of submitting to that urge for instant gratification, Petrini says, it’s important to resist the perceived need for speed and redirect that energy into rediscovering the virtues of lingering at a more languid pace.
The rewards of dialing down can be great, he promises, and can be realized by something as simple as taking the time for a proper meal.
“Behind the philosophy of Slow Food is the philosophy of slow life,” says Petrini, 49, a former food writer. “Slowing down becomes a homeopathic medicine. Every day we are able to slow down, we are able to relax, to think instead of run.
“There is one universal truth — we all end up in the same place. It’s better to go there slowly,” he says.
Petrini, born in the Piedmont town of Bra, about 30 miles from Turin, founded Slow Food “almost as a joke.”
“McDonald’s wanted to open a restaurant in Piazza di Spagna in Rome; wanted to put up one of those big, ugly yellow M’s in the most beautiful piazza in the world,” Petrini recalls.
An uproar followed, an agreement for more understated signage was reached, and Rome’s first McDonald’s opened on March 20, 1986.
At the time, Petrini and colleagues wrote a manifesto railing against fast food, urging Italians not to lose sight of their cultural and gastronomical patrimony.
Today, Slow Food boasts 60,000 members in 35 countries, with roughly 700 in the United States. Members span the spectrum from professionals who make a living making food to armchair gourmets who simply like to leaf through stories and recipes in Slow Food’s quarterly magazine.
As many as 100,000 such people, including Chicagoans, converged in Turin last weekend for Slow Food’s Salone di Gusto (Hall of Taste) food fair.
Passion is key. “Humanity goes forward with two things — eating and making love,” says Petrini, now Slow Food’s international president, supervising 100 employees at its headquarters in Bra. “Those are two things very important not only for humanity’s survival, but also for its spirit.”
He speaks on a day during which he feasted on his daily dose of pasta, this time with a sauce of tomatoes and veal sausage. His choice reflects his own passion. “In the 1700s, there was a Jewish community in Bra. The king of Savoy conceded permission to make the sausage out of veal instead of pork. Because this tradition remains, you can still eat this dish today.”
But Slow Food is about more than protecting historic recipes: Its philosophy is driven home by these excerpts from its manifesto:
“We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.
“A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.”
Members of Slow Food work on several fronts. A taste-education program aims to bring gastronomy classes into schools. Local chapters — dubbed conviviums — organize wine tastings, cooking courses and trips to markets.
As homogenous fast-food outlets proliferate, Slow Food is trying to raise awareness of the benefits of biodiversity. “McDonald’s, or any of the big fast-food purveyors, want to make their hamburgers everywhere. We instead want to encourage respect for the culture and cooking of every region. . . . We believe you need to defend the dishes, the products, the fruits, the vegetables, the wines of every territory.”
There are many who agree with Petrini. Virgilio Tabani, co-owner of Osteria delle Catene, a restaurant in the Chianti-region hill town of San Gimignano, says that thanks to the Slow Food movement, “people are rediscovering regional cooking and those nearly forgotten regional dishes.”
Hundreds of such dishes were sampled at the Salone del Gusto.
Tabani’s chef and business partner, Gino Guercini, presented a medieval saffron soup, a primo piatto (first course) served in his traditional Tuscan restaurant, along with secondi such as stewed wild boar or guinea fowl with juniper.
Another presenter in Turin was Chicago’s Paul Bartolotta, 37, executive chef at Spiaggia. He and Italian mentor Valentino Marcattilii prepared a closing-night feast. Before then, and with an eye toward bringing ideas back to Spiaggia, Bartolotta attended a seminar that included Montasio ubriaco, a “drunken” cheese soaked in dessert wine.
A Slow Food member for two years, and a firm believer in genuine cooking, Bartolotta says, “It’s important to take a moment to make a great chicken soup. It’s not expensive, we aren’t talking white truffles. . . . We need to look back, really enjoy and not get caught up in the frenzy every day, looking for what’s easiest as opposed to taking a moment to enjoy.
“The fact is that the Slow Food movement is one of the very few tools we have to defend ourselves from being enslaved by the speed in which the world is working. We put in so many hours, totally disrupting our ability to appreciate time in our homes, and at the table.”
Seeing real food as an antidote to stress is helping Slow Food make inroads in America.
Recently, the Sonoma County, Calif., convivium sponsored a boat tour of an oyster farm, an oyster roast, and a marine biologists’ lecture on oyster breeding.
In Chicago, Kelly Gibson, 37, director of public relations for Bays English Muffins Corp., is trying to start a Windy City convivium.
“I’m a food lover, first of all. I like seeing these traditions and these small producers, helping to educate people on maintaining traditional ways of cooking and eating,” she says.
“We get moving so quickly these days we forget what the real pleasures, and simple pleasures, of life are. We tend to get complicated when we are looking for ways to have fun and sometimes, it’s right there on the table.”
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Slow Food membership is $60 a year. For information, call 877-SLOWFOOD or see www.slowfood.com on the Internet.
