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Slow Food was founded in Italy 1986 by the eminent Italian food critic and journalist Carlo Petrini. The international movement was launched in Paris in 1989.
Slow Food aims are first and foremost to educate people about this wonderful culinary resource in the face of the over-commercialisation and homogenisation of our food.
Through education, and what Petrini termed the eco-gastronomic intervention, Slow seeks to conserve endangered seed, breed, cultivar, and process. This scenario is exemplified in the following anecdote: up at the top of a Tuscan valley, there are only two eighty-year old men remaining who know how to make the local sausage, a delicacy based upon a similarly endangered breed of a hardy little red cow. The Slow intervention involves the enlistment of young people to learn the sausage-making technique; incentives for local farmers to breed and expand the shrinking herd of the rare cow; the recording of the production parameters; and assistance in seeking a wider, lucrative market, enabling the product to become self-sustaining, redounding to the benefit of consumers who are guaranteed access to the once-endangered food, the producers and the wider local socio-economy.
Hence, Slow Food is an idea and a belief; the idea is that by celebrating the magnificent foods that are under threat from standardisation, bureaucratic hygienism, and commercialisation, we can ensure that these products continue to be made and, having the future of these foods, we are then able to enjoy them! One of the key tenets of Slow Food is the belief in the right to pleasure!