Slow Food Movement Analysis

Petrini was enraged by all of this, and rallied his friends and the local community to protest against this worldwide industrialization of food by arming themselves with simple bowls of locally cooked, traditional pasta. They chanted, “We don’t want fast food … we want slow food!” This initial idea developed gradually and three years later, in 1989, delegates from fifteen countries met in Paris to approve and endorse The Slow Food Manifesto, co-founded by Folco Portinari (Italian literary historian and University professor), and accordingly the Slow Food movement was officially established. It is a non-profit, grassroots movement, which now has thousands of members across the globe, that seeks to promote the desire for good, healthy, local food through a better understanding of it’s taste, quality and production, and thus counter the speed of the fast life.

Figure 8: The Slow Food logo

With an understanding of the psychological use of colour in design, it was interesting to discover that Slow Food have utilised red into their logo as well as McDonalds, displayed in figure 8. There appears to be a contradiction of the snail as an icon symbolising slowness, and red as a colour representing excitement and speed.

Its original objectives were to re-evaluate and celebrate local cooking traditions, inform citizens on the negatives of fast food, educate them on where their food originates from and also promote the use of local food products in cooking. Figure 9 shows an example of a local market stall with Slow Food values, . Founder Carlo Petrini, believes that: "Everyone has the right to good, clean and fair food." By ‘good’ he means that the food is fresh, ‘clean’ is part of the natural food cycle, posing no threat to the ...

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...ess, much like the methodologies and founding principles used in the Slow Food movement, there can be many benefits from slowing down.

Carl Honoré declares that the greatest thinkers throughout history were those that favoured the slow approach, asserting “Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University.” These extremely successful individuals demonstrate the significance of decelerating the mind into a lower gear in order to engage in more deep, holistic considerations. Abraham Lincoln, apparently proclaimed, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” This famous quote refers to the importance of preparation in a task, and that an intelligent person does not start a job straight away, they plan and prepare it first.