Slow Food and the Politics of “Virtuous Globalization”*

The founder of Slow Food—Carlo Petrini—has famously dubbed his project as a new form of ‘virtuous globalization’. This chapter traces the history of the emergence of the Slow Food movement from its origins as a lobby group engaged with the politics of food within Italy to its manifestations as an international organization devoted to global biodiversity. It highlights some of the reasons why Slow Food politics have become so controversial. The campaign to protect nationally ‘endangered foods’ led to the compilation of the Ark of Taste in 1997; a compendium that proposed the documentation of disappearing agricultural and food products on a global scale. Slow Living is a direct response to the processes of individualization, globalization and the ‘radically uneven and heterogeneous production of space and time in post-traditional societies’ indicates the ways in which food has emerged as a political topic par excellence, capable of connecting individual bodies to abstract communities, techno-scientific innovations and moral concerns.