The gastronomic world has lost its most patient prophet. Carlo Petrini, the man who convinced the human race that wolfing down a microwave lasagne while staring at a spreadsheet might be missing the point, has shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 76. He leaves behind a legacy that, much like a properly fermented sourdough, took a remarkably long time to rise.
Petrini, who founded the Slow Food movement in the mid-1980s after watching a McDonald's franchise spring up near the Spanish Steps in Rome like a particularly aggressive patch of fungal rot, dedicated his life to the radical notion that what you put in your mouth matters. Not just the taste, mind you, but the entire sordid backstory: where it came from, who grew it, whether the pig that became your prosciutto had a good life, and crucially, that you take at least twenty minutes to chew the bloody thing.
His legacy is, if you'll pardon the pun, a mixed salad. On one hand, the man practically invented the concept of 'food politics.' He turned the simple act of eating a locally sourced apple into a middle-fingered salute against the global corporate food machine. He championed the Ark of Taste, a catalogue of endangered foods that sounds like something out of a hobbit's version of Noah's Ark, and he lent his name to the 150,000-strong Terra Madre network of small-scale producers. The man had more farmers on speed dial than a ketchup manufacturer has supply chain managers.
But let us not canonise him as a saint of the soil just yet. Because the truth, dear reader, is that Slow Food became a victim of its own success, or at least its own branding. It was inevitably pirated by the very forces it sought to oppose. Every smug hipster cafe that charges you nine pounds for a 'heritage' sausage roll and a 'foraged' salad owes Petrini a debt, but they also represent a gentrification of his ideals. Slow Food started as a protest and ended as a premium pricing strategy. It was the fate of Giordano Bruno, except with more artisan gouda.
And let us not forget the inherent contradiction at the heart of the movement. Slow Food is, by its nature, an elitist luxury. In a world where billions struggle to afford any food at all, championing the right to spend three hours preparing a risotto is a privilege few can afford. Petrini was always disarmingly honest about this tension, but the movement never quite resolved it. It became a comforting echo chamber for the already well-fed, a gastronomic version of 'thoughts and prayers.'
Yet, for all its contradictions, Petrini gave us something vital: a sense of outrage. He made us realise that the way we eat is not a personal choice but a political act, a vote for the world we want. And he did it with the aggressive joy of a man who had never met a convivial glass of wine he didn't like. His funeral, one imagines, will be a wake of biblical proportions, with cheeses and cured meats that have their own genealogies.
So farewell, Carlo. You may have been preaching to the converted, but at least you preached with passion. And somewhere, a farmer is raising a slow-roasted glass to your memory, taking a moment to savour the taste of a job well done. It would be churlish to rush through that toast. After all, we have time now.
