Carlo Petrini (1) (1949–)

The founder of the Slow Food movement lays out the case for why our food should be good, clean and fair, and how it can become so.

I'm not sure whether to blame Petrini or the translator for the diction in this book: the word choice is very academic. (By academic, I mean that there are words like "organoleptic" which strive for precision and instead make the text difficult to absorb and comprehend.) It's an odd tone for a book that's clearly meant to be an argument for a change in the way we perceive some of our daily activities (selecting, buying, preparing and eating food), but it is in keeping with Petrini's eclectic network-building between agro-ecologists, international politicians, rural food producers, celebrity chefs and critics, and family matriarchs. There's a little bit of everything in here: quotations from UN reports, emotional stories about individual producers, esoteric cultural criticism, personal anecdote, analysis of world agriculture and economics.

If the occasional "Under the frenetic impulse of technocratic and reductionist thought, we have fallen into the temptation of neglecting the totality of the processes and inter-relations that enable us to eat every day..." kind of sentence puts you off, then I'd skip this book. I kept a dictionary close by, and made it through with only a few eye rolls.… (mehr)