In Honor of Carlo Petrini
Carlo Petrini the charismatic founder of Slow Food died last week.
I moved to Bra, Italy in 1998 to work with Carlo to help achieve his goal of establishing a Slow Food headquarters in New York, which we did in March of 2000. For a year Carlo and I shared an office in a medieval courtyard on a cobblestoned street named Via of the Educated Mendicant, separated only by a thin pain of glass. I was the annoying American at the office of 60 or so people, tasked with raising membership, opening chapters, and promoting beautiful Slow Food publications in the birthplace of fast food. Carlo was the poet and leader of this movement, driven by a passion for quality food and overflowing with ideas that were riveting when he explained them. Over the years I listened, learned, and imitated Carlo, both in life and when translating his Italian to English at big events and on our U.S. tours. He was a titan — a once in a generation or century trailblazer whose message was to slow down and experience the pleasure of the table.
Carlo was a great orator, a revolutionary, and charisma poured out of him. His rousing remarks inevitably led to standing ovations and crowds gathered around him at his local café to hear his thoughts about the news of the day. His speeches would rise to a crescendo with calls for justice for artisans producing quality food, and outrage at the mediocre effects of monoculture on our lives and palates. “Ours is a pleasure movement”, he would say and “…since we all end up in the same place anyway, we might as well get there slowly.”
I used to think baby Carlo spontaneously combusted out of the harsh, sandy, clay-like soils of Piedmont itself. He was crude and he came up with outrageously hilarious outbursts when he got riled up — but it was not aggressive as there was humor behind his screaming. Plus, he was always right. Carlo was an absurdist, taking his topics in hilarious directions one did not expect. The laughter he could generate could last for hours. For even more comic effect he would use words from his local Piedmontese dialect, a mash up of French and Italian. I could not understand a word except for a few curses that he appeared to sometimes invent as he went along, to the great delight of everyone present.
Carlo’s best friends, both passed, Azio Citi and Giovani Ravinale formed a trio that roamed the countryside bringing hilarity everywhere they went. Carlo was an expert in the medieval tradition of Commedia dell’arte – which they brought to modern times using gestures and acting out tales and stereotypes as old as time, of the miser, the priest, the whore, the industrialist, the town idiot, a role once bestowed on me as the foreign visitor! He was the walking embodiment of carnival and the carnivalesque, turning conventional thinking about big issues and everyday quotidian observation upside down, often centered around drinking and a feast. When these moments happened, it was a time of absurdity, gluttony, and laughter so regenerative and deep it was heard across space and across time.
As the leader of Slow Food, once a group of smaller gastronomic clubs that united under Carlo, he taught that quality was a human right and that “good, clean and fair” food was key. He disliked the sameness of fast food and he loved Mother Earth that grew food traditionally out of her soil. And as a result he loved all Mothers who he said were responsible for carrying food traditions forward. One of the first Noble Prize-type ceremonies he organized at a beautiful theater in Milano honored an old restaurant worker who had pinched literally millions of agnolotti del plin over the years at his local osteria, using a difficult to master technique that very few know how to do. She accepted her prize wearing rolled down stockings and work clogs, and she thanked the standing ovation in dialect.
Education for Slow Food was the secret to eating well. The group was famous for conducting educational seminars led by experts where guests sat school style for note taking and guided tastings. Slow Foods’ Editore published thousands of magazines and books rating traditional foods and describing their taste characteristics in great detail. One of their chief tasters and authors was Piero Sardo (the father of giant identical twins, both of whom worked at Slow Food over the years) who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and wouldn’t stop out of fear it would alter his perceptive palate.
Carlo delivered so many concise absolutely true revolutionary thoughts to the world. It is impossible to convey them all and with the wit and building momentum that they were delivered. His ideas are the core grammar of how we talk and think about food today. Before foodies, he alone in many ways, set the groundwork.
For heritage breeds, he called for us to “eat them to save them.” GMO seeds, he argued, had been presented as temporary solutions, not permanent ones, and he called for a return to native heirloom seeds, especially in the developing world where dependency on corporations for crops was dangerous.
Mandatory pasteurization was evil to Carlo. It destroyed microbes that delivered distinctive flavors, he said, and flattened the taste of cherished local foods. It is a process that might be needed at massive factories but a crime to mandate for smaller quality establishments that rely on uniqueness of product in the marketplace. Carlo often called for a “universal defense of microbes,” slamming his fist on the podium.
I lived in Bra during the time that the European Union was being formed. It was a stressful time for artisan producers who needed to comply with new European regulations including the writing of HAACP plans that defined the entire process of production. I asked Carlo if it made sense for Italy to join the E.U. and he responded that I was an idiot for even asking the question since he needed to bring a full wheel barrel of Italian lire just to purchase an espresso! Carlo believed in the importance of establishing traceability to help differentiate quality products from their lesser counterparts. He was a firm believer that government seals like D.O.C. and D.O.P were crucial to artisans and to maintaining the cultural identity of Italy, just as important as a landmarked church or piece of art. But at the same time, he fought the E.U. for there to be no standard blanket regulations, one size fits all, that threatened to put smaller establishments out of business. Broad stroke laws should not be applied everywhere. For example, he would ask, how can a one-man cheese operation be required to have two bathrooms?!
Carlo lamented that corporations feed poor people low-quality unhealthy food while getting rich, meanwhile local artisans produce high quality healthy food for rich people but remain poor. The most sophisticated technology he said was a hand dragging through warm milky water to make mozzarella, and he asked why an expensive machine was needed to do something so simple. He believed in respecting product names like Parmigiano Reggiano whose cheap imitation in the U.S. is called parmesan. When touring the U.S. he would complain that Italians missed the boat on dominating coffee culture here — Starbucks should have been an Italian company he said since Italy is the nation of coffee.
As he refined his famous Ark of Taste project, which cataloged the diversity of the world’s endangered ingredients, he would tell the crowd: “There used to be twenty types of eggplants in Italy and now there are only two, and there used to be ten kinds of radish and now there are only three…and there used to be two kinds of ass and now there is only one, and it walks on two feet!” His Ark focused attention on historic foods in an effort to revive appreciation for them. As a follow up to the Ark he conceived Presidia, garrisons designed to directly intervene on behalf of certain rare foods. Maintaining biodiversity and the flavor palette of the food supply was important to Slow Food — when you lose difference, you lose identity, Carlo would say.
Carlo was convinced that mass producing slow foods would not decrease their cost. Slow food will always include all the costs of production and be more expensive than foods that don’t consider the quality of the ingredient, environment, or workers in their price. Years before we met, Carlo argued with his local wine makers to wait longer to pick grapes and to discard grapes that were not perfect. The advice of Carlo and others was heeded, turning Barolo and Barbaresco into among the highest quality and most expensive wines in the world. Even if more expensive, quality he believed was as an inalienable right. And if people complained that quality cost more, he would say that all great social movements started with a small group of educated people who overcame obstacles.
Carlo claimed Americans come from a tradition of tortured ecologists who lament to a sad violin the damage to the environment, and as a result often eat poor tasting food. Meanwhile Europeans come from a tradition of gluttony, care little of where their food comes from or how it is raised, and are as a result destroying the environment. The best is a combination of the two, and Carlo called for eco-gastronomy by eco-gastronomists. He simultaneously railed against the lowering of quality in Europe’s bread, cheese, and especially beer culture — and said Europe was cutting corners and getting lazy. He commended American’s efforts to producing these foods well, even though we did not have long history doing so.
He taught me to never insult fast food or to talk about it as if it was the standard. He also taught me to be proud of the path we were on: they take their path and we take ours. Industrial food is the newcomer that must prove itself over centuries, the old ways have always worked.
I spent many days riding around Italy in one of three Mercedes that Slow Food had been given. The entrance to the Slow Food courtyard was so small I never knew how they got in and out of there. While riding in the passenger seat, if hungry, Carlo might comb through his Osterie d’Italia book — the only book you need to eat well in Italy — and call out the name of a place. The driver would take side roads at 100 miles an hour to arrive to a mom and pop establishment in a hillside town where Carlo was greeted like a conquering hero. And then we would eat.
On our U.S. tours Carlo relished seeing me run off secretly to eat a McDonald’s hamburger, accusing me of being a mole. He always ordered soup wherever it was offered as he thought it was a great way to judge a place. Even at Denny’s he ordered a soup — he took one spoonful and that was it. When the waiter asked him if it was good or not Carlo wagged his finger from side to side in a way that made our souls shudder.
In New Orleans a major sponsor of Slow Food, the President of the Region of Piedmont, came along with his wife and son who got food poisoning from a bite of alligator and he had to be taken to the hospital. Carlo was standing in the hallway of the hotel in his underwear accusing me of sabotage since I was annoyed that they were even there in the first place as it complicated the tour I had organized! “You killed him,” he yelled at me “…just so that you could be rid of having to take them along.” The boy ended up being fine. Me and my colleague laughed so hard since the boy hardly tried anything local until that tragic moment. That night we called headquarters to explain what happened and proceeded to rack up a phone bill that was astronomical. The next morning Carlo had to use up his two credit cards and we still had to go to Western Union to get money from headquarters to pay the bill. Carlo was ballistic, but we were laughing so hard as there was always a comic energy behind him that made it all harmless.
Translating for Carlo I never let more than a few words go by so that he could keep his flow going as he built his audiences into a state of ecstasy with his oratory skills. People understood him even if they didn’t speak Italian, even little kids. He understood English and could speak it roughly but said he didn’t want to make a bad speech, he wanted to make a good speech and trust a translator. He often complained about translators assigned to him at foreign events. A couple of times he warned the audience not to trust my translating, explaining that in Italian “tradure” (translate) and “tradire” (betray) share the same root!
Carlo could also make us cry. When his friend Giovanni passed away, he gave a moving speech at the cemetery lamenting how his play with Giovanni ended at the beginning of the third act, well before the intended conclusion. And that he was not in heaven in a better place but that he was simply a decaying body in the soil. There was no good that came from this, unlike what was said in the church hours before. Everyone in the crowd was sobbing, tears pouring out of their eyes. Together Carlo and Giovanni were refurbishing a castle in Pollenzo with ambitions to start an accredited university of gastronomic sciences, which was eventually completed and has since graduated thousands of eco-gastronomists.
When I told him I was moving on from Slow Food he looked at me and said “You will always be part of the history of Slow Food,” with the stress on history, and it broke my heart. The winds would carry him forward at a quick clip and we were not collaborators anymore. But I have tried to stay true to his ideals. My company Heritage Foods is a branch of Slow Food through its efforts to rescue endangered ingredients, in our case, rare breeds of turkeys, pigs and lamb. We have grown branches too including the Heritage Radio Network which was modeled after Carlo’s rogue Radio Bra Red Waves network in 1974. And more recently the Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund which places apprentices on farms, fully paid, for a month, an idea loosely connected to his calls for agri-tourism in the Americas where people can live and work on a farm.
Carlo was loved by his team. He had a vast circle around him, but a very tight inner circle. They were loyal to him and most of them worked for him well. He taught to never be too critical of anyone who buys into your cause and who helped get you to where you are, even if they are different. Friends he said came from all places and should be accepted and cherished.
Slow Foods’ large events were legendary. The Salone Del Gusto in 1998 brought to Turin’s Lingotto, where Fiat cars are made, 120,000 people and was followed by full page articles in every publication you can imagine. The walls of the wine hall literally collapsed from the hoards and the room had to be closed temporarily. Carlo was so happy he rode a bike around the Salone after it was over, the first athletic thing I saw him do. He had become an international star. Meanwhile around the world thousands of local chapters, or convivium as he called them (places to be convivial), organized events locally to promote Slow Food values and quality farms and artisans. When I was there Slow Food boasted over 150,000 card carrying members, and in the U.S. over 10,000. Membership cost $60 and the network was built by an amazing array of convivium leaders attracted to Carlo’s ideas.
Every two years Cheese is the largest cheese festival in the world, in his hometown of Bra. Cheesemakers come from everywhere to showcase their best. To many this was the favorite of his large-scale events. His Terra Madre brought together 5,000 farmers under one roof. His work with Alice Waters of Berkeley, California increased hope that food will become an established part of the curriculum here.
Before I knew Carlo, he had founded an international folk festival modeled after a medieval tradition in which peasants would sing for eggs in the Spring, called Cante J’Euv. Joan Baez performed there one year. He founded a radio station using a discarded transmitter from an American tank. At his trial for the illegal station, which took up actual space on the state-run radio dial, many of the leftist greats came to support him like Dario Fo and Roberto Benigni, as he was a luminary. In 1989 at the historic Paris Opera, he launched a Manifesto of Slow Food, and chose the snail as its mascot, while calling for a slowing of rhythms and a respect for tradition, the very opposite of the Futurists movement exactly 80 years before. His pasta eating protest on the Spanish steps of Rome in 1986 that truly launched Slow Food might have started as a bit of a joke but it became something that changed the world forever.
At Giovanni’s funeral Carlo said that he never once told his friend that he loved him, because his friend already knew it, it didn’t need to be said, and that he would not say it there. Now, almost 30 years after I met him and I have dedicated my life to his causes, I won’t say it to him either because he knows! Thank you Carlin for all the doors you opened. —— Patrick Martins
