An Overview of the Slow Food Movement

Founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986, Slow Food is an international association that promotes food and wine culture, but also defends food and agricultural biodiversity worldwide. (see our History Section)

It opposes the standardisation of taste, defends the need for consumer information, protects cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguards foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable species. (see our Mission Section)

Slow Food boasts 83,000 members worldwide and offices (in order of creation) in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the USA, France, Japan, and Great Britain.

Slow Food¡Çs publishing company, Slow Food Editore, specializes in tourism, food and wine. Its catalogue now contains about 60 titles and it also publishes the award-winning quarterly Slow: herald of taste and culture in six languages (Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese) and the attractive, large-format color magazine Slowfood, which comes out in Italian eight times a year.

Slow Food organizes national and international events to further its cause. They include: the Salone del Gusto, the world¡Çs largest quality food and wine fair, held very two years at the Lingotto Exhibition Center in Turin, Cheese, a biennial cheese fair held in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, and Slowfish, an annual exhibition in Genoa devoted to sustainable fishing.

In 2003 Slow Food created the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, an independent non-profit entity with the mission to organize and fund projects that defend our world¡Çs heritage of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions.

The Foundation supports Slow Food¡Çs projects that pursue this mission,such as the Ark of Taste and the Presidia. The Foundation exists thanksto the Slow Food movement but also through generous support from public and private donors.

The Ark of Taste, designed and launched by the International Slow Food Movement, was founded to discover, catalogue and safeguard small quality food products and defend biodiversity. The Presidia are organizational units used to promote the products, guarantee their economic and commercial future and, at the same time, protect the land from degradation and create new job opportunities.

The Slow Food Award for the Defense of Biodiversity was instituted in 2000 with the goals of publicizing and rewarding activities of research, production, marketing, popularization and documentation that benefit biodiversity in the agricultural and gastronomic field.

Slow Food¡Çs most recent and innovative initiative was Terra Madre, World Meeting of Food Communities, held in Turin in October 2004, a forum for all those who seek to grow, raise, catch, create, distribute and promote food in ways that respect the environment, defend human dignity and protect the health of consumers.

Alongside activities for the very young, Slow Food also organizes two major adult education projects: the Master of Food, a study syllabus in the wine and food sector split into 20 theme courses, and the University of Gastromic Sciences in Pollenzo, the world¡Çs first academy of ¡Æeno-gastronomy¡Ç, with campuses in Pollenzo, near Bra, and Colorno, near Parma.