The spia who loved food [Book review]

Abstract

First paragraph: In 2012, for the first time, two of Slow Food’s major events shared a single space and ticket: The Salone del Gusto, a large commercial food fair, and Terra Madre, a political conference that brings together a worldwide network of small farmers, food producers, activists, and scholars dedicated to biodiversity and “participatory democracy.” In the penultimate chapter of Valeria Siniscalchi’s monograph Slow Food: The Economy and Politics of a Global Movement, she uses the relation­ship between these two simultaneous flagship events to explore a dichotomy that her entire book grapples with: is Slow Food more about “the market” or “the community”? “Competition” or “mutuality”? “Politics” or “economics” (p. 203)? Siniscalchi’s answer is that Slow Food, the inter­national organization that encompasses an events team, a publishing house, a university, a national and international political structure, and more, is about all of the above. In the case of Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre, she argues that if at first these two events seem contradictory, they are actually “complementary spaces presenting ways to create new economic forms, to imagine a new economic order and to determine new food poli­cies” (p. 204). Slow Food is thus hard to pin down, and Siniscalchi argues that anyone trying to do so misses the point: Slow Food contains “two visions with different approaches to the social reproduc­tion of the movement” (p. 222) and the coexist­ence of these visions is the point. From the start, she is interested in exploring the “opacity of this object” (p. 1), and from her unique position of access, she is able to respect its unknowable quality while still bringing the inner dynamics to light. . . .