Appetite For Slow Food

Corby Kummer's article, "Slow Food, High Gear", discusses the Slow Food movement in the context of the Slow Food's University bike trip. The piece is personable and casual right from the beginning; "'Vuoi pedalare?' Do you want to pedal? That was the insinuating, irresistable question put to travelers on the month-long Viaggio sul Po, a bike trip 150 students at Slow Food's University of Gastronomic Sciences took across northern Italy last fall following the valley of the once-mighty Po". Kummer gives detailed descriptions about Carlo Petrini, Slow Food's founder, the school and their experiences through out the piece. He includes snippets of quotes from Petrini that make him easy to imagine and connect to as a reader, telling us how he referred to the endless parade of cooking shows on TV as, "'idiots with spoons'", explaining his anger by explaining his genius, "Gastronomy is interdisciplinary, he insists, involving economics, environmental science, history, biology, and anthropology - and social justice, the ideal that got him started in politics in the 1970s...".

Kummer tells us how the school is comprised of students from 28 countries and explains Petrini's hands-on learning method, and the extensive travel that Petrini makes a part of the curriculum. Kummer shares with the reader how successful and useful the bike trip was from a journalist's point of view, in search for information by saying, "In a few days of pedalling in 20-40-kilometer spurts, I learned more than I usually would in a week of driving around doing research on my own".

There was one quote in particular that I liked of Petrini's that Kummer included, I found it very poignant and very telling of his character and the whimsical dreams he has for the school and movement. On achieving holding the Slow Food conference in Puebla he said, "On such 'beautiful lies,' are dreams built". Then Kummer reiterates this touching sentiment at the closing of the piece by referencing the idea of a "beautiful lie" once more, bringing the piece to a neat close, and leaving me thinking about the truth that is behind so many of life's beautiful lies....