# Slow Food

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2004-11-27T09:25:21Z


A few of us had dinner with Mike Tommasi from Slow Food France. Slow Food (as opposed to fast food) is a semi-political movement originating in a protest against the entry of McDonald's into Italy and formally becoming an organization in Paris. They focus on a variety of gastronomy issues. They care about the impact of industrialization of food on farmers, diversity, cataloging endangered food, teaching children about food, finding produce that can be brought back or preserved and help create new markets and for slow food. They have successfully found a variety of slow foods including cheeses and meats and have brought them back and created markets for them in sympathetic restaurants. They have a magazine, a Slow Food Guide for Italy (Good slow food restaurants for under 30 Euros), and conferences where they invite farmers from around the world to share ideas. They are not against science, but are against science used to destroy food culture. They now have 80,000 members in 100 countries with offices in Switzerland, Germany, the US, France and Italy. Although it was originally founded by people from the Italian Left wing, it is recently more politically neutral. Being a movement originating in Italy, founded in France with an English name makes it unique as well. Their web site has a lot of interesting stuff on it.





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#### Categories

Activism, Eating and Cooking