“Is it normal that I would spend more money on my underpants than on my food? That happens in Italy. People like to buy underwear from Armani,” Carlo Petrini once said during an interview. It was a plea for fair pay for farmers, packaged as a witticism and followed by a burst of laughter. That typical combination of irony and conviction typified the flamboyant Italian, who for decades has been committed to food that is not only tasty, but also produced ethically: with respect for farmers, local traditions and the environment, and with correct compensation. Petrini, nicknamed ‘Carlin’, died on Thursday evening at his home in Bra, in Piedmont in northern Italy.
It was here that in 1986 the Slow Foodmovement emerged, a result of Petrini’s outrage over the arrival of a McDonald’s restaurant near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In a country with such a rich gastronomic tradition as Italy, he found this symbolic of the rise of fast food at the expense of local food cultures. The fast food restaurant was created anyway, but Petrini’s protest grew into an international movement that opposes the logic of fast consumption and that advocates quality, biodiversity and cultural diversity in food.
Slow Food, which embodies the exact opposite of fast food, has spread to more than 160 countries over the past forty years. In 2004, the movement also gained an academic pillar, with the founding of the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo. The campus, in a beautifully renovated farm, is located in the Piedmontese hills where the grapes of the famous Barolo and Barbaresco wine grow. There, students are trained to become ‘gastronomers’, professionals who study food from a cultural, historical, ecological and socio-economic perspective.
The course places a strong emphasis on food sovereignty, sustainability and the political dimension of food production. Because founder Carlo Petrini recognized early on that food is always political. For example, the study provides insight into the impact of Western agricultural subsidies on farmers in the South, who cannot compete with the low dumped prices of subsidized products. Since its founding, around four thousand students from a hundred countries have graduated from Pollenzo. A success, although Petrini believed that young people should be formed into critical citizens about food much earlier, for example through a food education subject at school.
We produce [voedsel] for twelve billion people
Global network
As the face of Slow Food, he traveled around the world. He was also one of the founders of Terra Madre (‘Mother Earth’), a global network that brings together farmers, fishermen, chefs, craftsmen, researchers and young people. This initiative grew into the heart of the Slow Food movement and aims to stimulate a positive form of globalization, away from an industrial approach to agriculture and food cultures that are becoming increasingly similar and thus flattening out.
Until the end, Petrini, who suffered from health problems, continued to intervene in the public debate. During an interview with NRCtwo years ago in response to the European agricultural protests, he said he deeply regretted that the European greening plans had been swept aside so quickly: “The European Commission wants to give the voters what they think they want. But if they realized that the ground is being pumped full of chemicals, causing the soil to become increasingly impoverished, they would rebel against this system.”
He saw no contradiction at all between farmers and environmentalists. Petrini also called it a myth that sustainable agriculture would not be able to feed the world population: “We produce [voedsel] for twelve billion people, and there are only eight billion. Yet the entire capitalist system is aimed at producing even more, while we should above all waste less.”
Carlo Petrini leaves a lasting legacy: a global movement that refocuses food as a key to culture, justice and sustainability. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni describes him in a funeral message as “a visionary, an innovator and a man far ahead of his time.”
