O'qing: The Slow Food Movement
A. "The Slow Food movement began in Italy in 1986, when a journalist named Carlo Petrini organised a protest against the opening of a fast-food restaurant beside the Spanish Steps in Rome. What started as a local objection to a single burger outlet grew, within a few years, into an international organisation active in more than 150 countries.
B. "Petrini's central idea was not simply that fast food tastes worse than traditional cooking. His real concern was that the industrial food system was erasing local differences — the same handful of crops, the same brands, the same flavours spreading to every corner of the globe. A dish that had taken a region centuries to perfect could, he feared, be forgotten within a single generation.
C. "To counter this, the movement promotes what it calls 'good, clean and fair' food. 'Good' means tasty and fresh; 'clean' means produced without harming the environment; and 'fair' means that the people who grow and prepare it are paid decently. Critics sometimes assume the movement is simply nostalgic, but this three-part definition is deliberately forward-looking.
D. "One of its best-known projects is the Ark of Taste, a catalogue of foods at risk of disappearing — rare apple varieties, traditional cheeses, heritage breeds of animal. By recording and publicising these foods, the movement hopes to create demand for them, since a food that people will pay for is far more likely to survive than one preserved only in a museum.
E. "The movement is not without its detractors. Some economists argue that its produce is too expensive to feed a growing world population, and that only the wealthy can afford to eat 'slowly'. Supporters reply that cheap industrial food carries hidden costs — to health, to farmers and to the planet — that simply appear on a different bill."
