This is a CTP of initiative: Slow Food Italy
The first critical turning point is related to the publication of the first edition of the Slow Food’s guide of Italian traditional restaurants titled “guida Osterie d'Italia”. This is the first gastronomic guide edited by Slow Food Italy and one of the first publications of the Slow Food Publishing house (created in Italy in 1989). It is considered one of the milestones in the timeline of Slow Food Italy. According to the interviewee, this book -aimed to promote Italian traditional cuisine- has strongly contributed to the acknowledgment of the Slow Food Movement in Italy:
One of the key points is the publication of the guide of the Osterie of Italy. It is critical. We are talking about a Catholic, Christian country, where there is a great influence of the church. We, in our association, we proposed the right to taste, to pleasure… It was controversial. But then we had the intuition to claim traditional cooking, the slow food, the honest food, etc. This opened the door for us. The publication of the Osterie in Italy makes Slow Food known at the national level. We gained in acknowledgement. It is important to publicize the Italian Osterie through a guide where we show restaurants that preserved traditional food
The event constitutes a critical turning point considering the impact that the publication has had for the acknowledgement of the slow food movement in Italy. The initiative has been able to overcome its political and ideological label and started to become a reference in Italy, at least for certain sectors (certain cultural groups, gourmet groups, etc.). They were then mentioned in one of the most important Italian magazines, “The Gambero Rosso”. As a consequence, the association grew in number of associates and spread all over the country.
We left the corner; we overcame this prejudice of being perceived as a leftist association. Not just because the boom of the first edition of the guide Osterie d'Italia. The following year, a pharmaceutical company bought 100,000 copies of the second edition and distributed it throughout Italy (as a gift). We started to be well--known in Italy. Slow food was no longer a group of friends but a national association. The Gambero Rosso wrote about us! Gambero is a very well known gastronomy magazine in Italy. Later, we started to work together. We edited a famous Italian wine guide.
The impact of the guide goes beyond the Slow Food Association and it generates a renewed interest in traditional gastronomy among both experts and the general public with the consequence being that new places that offer traditional cuisine start to appear. Restaurants start to take up the cooking of “tasty and clean food”, which includes the use of local products, and the techniques of traditional cuisine, thus contributing to a revival and reincorporation of Italian heritage regarding cuisine that was lost due to the increased popularity of fast or fancy food.
Slow Food has continued editing this guide every year, which has become one of the Slow Food publishing house’s bestsellers. According to the interview, the success of the guide propelled a change of paradigm in local gastronomy, stimulated by Slow Food:
The guide aimed to present only the osterie, which are a traditional type of Italian restaurant, closest to our customs, as a bistro in France, or an inn in Spain. The success of this book led to more osterie being born in Italy, more places that preserve our traditional way of cooking.
The publication of the guide of “Osterie d’Italia” occurs in the first years of Slow Food. The Italian association was created in 1986 in the city of Bra (close to Turin, in the North of Italy). At the beginning, the association had an Italian denomination, “ArciGola”, and was connected to a leftist cultural association, Arci, close to the Italian communist party. The founder of the Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini, has been one of the leaders of the party (in Bra), but later he and his colleagues focused more on cultural food-related aspects and created “ArciGola” (1986).
We were part of the ARCI (Asociación Recreativa Cultural Italiana- Italian Recreative Cultural Association) which was an Italian leftist association with an intense cultural activity. The president of ARCI then tells us that this food and wine thing could be done as a section of ARCI, and then we created the ArciGola association. ArciGola preceded Slow Food. In fact, the movement was originally called Slow Food ArciGola in Italy, because our people did not want an English name. There was a lot of resistance. But we wanted to give it a European approach. We held a congress of ArciGola and very well-known people in Italy attended. ArciGola began to gain in number of partners, presence in the media… And after two or three years working in Italy, we realized that we were an Italian association, with Italian laws, etc. but with an international focus (...) ArciGola was known, we had many partners. But the great intuition we had is that there was such interest in gastronomy. We were not going to change the world, but we felt that something was changing.
The interviewee explains the evolution of Slow Food, due to the fact that, despite its Italian origin, the ambition of the association was to become, a European movement. Petrini and the other founders perceived a raising interest and concern both in Italy and Europe more broadly, concerning cultural and gastronomical heritage. After three years of local activity, they connect to other food activists and experts in Europe and America and officially found the Slow Food Movement in an International meeting in Paris, in 1989 (where a hundred delegates from 15 countries endorsed the “Slow Food Manifesto”). Initially, Slow Food pursues the “defence of regional traditions, good food, gastronomic pleasure and a slow pace of life”. The initiative finds in this message a starting point for a change of paradigm in gastronomy, now oriented towards preservation of regional culture and healthy and high-quality food. One of the first decisions that Slow Food leaders took after the Paris gathering was to create a publishing house in Italy, in 1989. The object was to publish books and magazines that “raise the profile of quality food and wine production; safeguard endangered products; inform and educate consumers”[1]. After that, the promotion of Italian osterie was a way to reach Italian society. It is important to note that founders and leaders of Slow Food Italy have had good connections to mass media. Some of them (e.g. Carlo Petrini, Piero Sardo) were involved in radio broadcasting or had been working as journalists in 80s. This media expertise enabled them to comprehend the importance of such communication activity as a way to become known and gain social influence.
The interviewee explains the reasons behind their starting to work on issues related to food, when even before the creation of the ArciGola association, they had published a magazine to ascribe value to their regional wine production:
When we started we were already a group that had been working on cultural issues and gastronomy in Bra. We had organized concerts, shows, and an International Folk Festival that gathered 80.000 young people. The novelty was the topic of gastronomy. But when we started the movement, we started from a eno-gastronomy tradition. For example, in my family we have made cheese for three generations. We had a wine business. We (ArciGola founders) had a lot of contacts. And, first at all, we wanted to valorize the Barolo, the wine that was produced in our region. Barolo is one of the best wines in the world, but there was little appreciation for it at the time. Then we started to publish a magazine, a newsletter that we sent to 500 friends and to wine producers. It was a paper magazine of course. We were only three founding partners.
[1] Retrieved from http://www.slowfood.com/slow-food-editore/
After the publication of the first edition of the guide of Italian Osterie, Slow Food Italy continues with the publishing work, editing an Italian wine guide. With the help of the press, Slow Food became quite popular in Italy in the nineties increasing in membership and projects (such as taste workshops and other food education activities), including the Slow Food magazine Slow, the main newsletter of the movement until today. The Italian association was also involved in the promotion of the Slow Food movement at an international level. Witnessing the success of Italian guides, Slow Food leaders decided to publish a new wine guide that recommended Slow wines from around the world. The interview posits that this “Slow Food guide to wines of the world”, edited in 1994, was another milestone, that spread the name of Slow Food to the international gourmet sector:
In 1990, Slow Food was already an international association. Since the publication of the Guide of Osterie, the association was very strong in Italy, we had many partners and we published a number of things such as the guide of Barolo wine. But this did not happen at an international level. So we wondered what kind of publications we could aim for to target our international public. So we decided to edit a wine guide of the world, which is a very important publication, but that only has two editions. It became very popular, but we did not have the resources to continue with the work. We needed more than 400.000 € in order to cover publishing costs. However, this publication is still widely used today, despite having been published over 15 years ago! Actually, some people use it as a travel guide.
The movement did not have a clear structure in those days. It was an Italian association that had the ambition to become influential beyond Italian borders, but they only existed as a formal organization in Italy. The interviewee points out that the association changes in significant ways in the 1990s. For instance, their international reach and focus becomes clear. Italian leaders played an important role in pushing for the constitution of other national associations in order to expand the work and projects that Slow Food stimulated from Italy. Slow Food celebrates a conference in 1996 that integrated all national associations:
Another important point is the Congress of Slow Food Italy in Sicily in ´96, where the Italian association decides to be a global organization, open to any country in the world. At first, we wanted to involve rich countries, European, British, American, and we integrated a small number of national associations like Switzerland, Spain, France, Germany and the United States. At that time, they had few members compared to Italy. But in that conference we decided to create a new international board to represent the entire Slow Food family spread throughout the world. At that time, a structure that went beyond the headquarters in Bra was designed. Slow Food was starting to become a big global family.
The interviewee mentions there was no strong opposition concerning this critical turning point. As explained previously, Slow Food pioneers were people with expertise in media as well as in gastronomy. The impact was higher than expected and 30.000 copies of the first guide were sold in Italy. However, the interviewee mentioned that, after publishing the first edition of the “guida Osterie d'Italia” some members of the board of the Slow Food Italy Association had second thoughts regarding the availability and necessity of continuing with the publication of the guide.
The interviewee argued against this opinion and convinced the board of the importance of the guide to the interests and goals of Slow Food Italy in terms of acknowledgement:
The first edition of the guide sold 30,000 copies, and that is a lot for Italy. At least at that time, 30.000 were a lot of copies! At the end of the year the steering committee of Slow Food-ArciGola discussed and decided to publish one new edition of the guide every 5 years. I disagreed. Actually, I told them that it could not possibly work out that way. That if they did not want to do it, I would ask them to grant me the publishing rights and I would do it on my own, because it was very important to publish a second edition sooner than five years. In the end, the council took the decision to continue with the publication. The second edition was also a success
The interviewee affirms that the edition of the guide of Italian Osterie was perceived as a critical turning point at the time when it occurred. The impact of the guide on the acknowledgement of Slow Food Italy through the Italian territory was nearly immediate. Thanks to the excellent feedback that both the press and experts gave to the initiative (they sold almost 30.000 copies of the first edition) the Slow Food movement started to be noticed by the general public in Italy.
This understanding also contributed to the expansion of the publishing work, overcoming Italian frontiers to gain more impact in the international context. Two reasons were given to explain why this critical turning point was anticipated. First, the fact that founders had previous experience managing relationships with mass-media, especially regarding gastronomy and culture and their capacity to identify a raising interest in regional cuisine and a concern for loosing traditions in this area, due to processes of globalization of the food system.
Secondly, pioneers were curious and well educated people who had been previously involved in activities related to the revitalization of the Barolo wine production. They observed, for example, how French wine denominations gained reputation. Also, they were in contact with colleagues from other countries that had a better record of preserving traditions. Slow Food members anticipated that similar outcomes could be obtained if local gastronomy was well presented in a well edited guide.
Lessons from this critical turning point related to importance of publications for the dissemination of the Slow Food discourse. Mass media and magazines highly contributed to the acknowledgement of the movement but the positive outcomes obtained from the guide reinforced the objective of creating a publishing house and expanding their work internationally. Since the beginning, the Slow Food magazine appears to be the main source of information and communication with associates and public.
Every year, Slow Food dedicates more attention and invests more resources in communication strategy. It also became clear to them that the associations needed their own financial resources. Slow Food Italy has since developed several forms of fundraising, including the for-profit publishing house Slow Food Editore. In accordance with the statute, Slow Food Editore reinvests all the profit obtained into the organization.
Learning outcomes also involve a change in ways of doing and thinking that go beyond Slow Food members. The Guide of Osterie contributed to increased social awareness regarding the potential for loosing cultural heritage and culinary traditions, as well as biodiversity. Food activist aware of the need of protecting the “agrifood heritage” threatened by agriculture mass production. Local food varieties and regional specialities were in danger of disappearing as a result of the standardization of crops and production and processing techniques, Such environmental awareness inspired Slow Food leaders to create the Ark of Taste and the Presidia projects.
The interviewee explicitly noted a change in general levels of awareness. Many other initiatives and organizations have since then embraced parts of the Slow Food’s discourse:
Sure, there is a broad change. Society is more concerned with these issues, especially in the last years. Not only for us. We started with an innovative discourse (of slow food and sustainability), but now there are many organizations working very well. For instance, there is a strong organic agricultural sector and we collaborate with them. There are national associations of cheese producers that work very well, pursuing the same objectives and values that we stand for. There is a whole movement, not just Slow Food. Slow Food certainly changed awareness about these issues a lot, not only in Italy but worldwide.
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