Remembering Carlo Petrini, Father of the Slow Food Movement

Last time you sat down to eat at a local restaurant, did it have a list of the farms it sources from on its menu? This is pretty commonplace now, but it wasn’t always so. Activists spent decades working to get local produce into the spotlight. And possibly the biggest contributor of all was Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, who passed away last week in Italy.

Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Founder and Spaghetti Activist

Petrini was an Italian journalist, author, environmentalist, and local food advocate. In 1986, he joined a group of other Italians to protest Italy’s first McDonald’s, which replaced a coffee shop in Piazza di Spagna in Rome. They passed out plates of piping hot spaghetti to show that fresh, local food was better than fast food. That protest became a manifesto and eventually transformed into Slow Food, a global grassroots movement that promotes locally, sustainably sourced food and traditional cooking. Petrini was its founder and president.

The FruitGuys Meets Slow Food

I first learned about Slow Food around 18 years ago when The FruitGuys launched our annual Gravenstein Apple Box. The Gravenstein is a sweet-tart heirloom apple that’s part of Slow Food’s Ark of Taste—a catalog of foods on the verge of extinction because commercialization is threatening their production.

Gravensteins grown in Sebastopol, California, made the list as the apple fell out of favor and growers moved to other varieties that were easier to ship and store. Pledging to sell Gravensteins and give an additional 16% of the proceeds from every box back to the farmers was our way of joining Slow Food’s mission.

Carrying on Petrini’s Legacy

For me, Slow Food’s power isn’t just in saving or promoting specialty items like the Grav. It’s also in starting conversations about where our food comes from and how to make fresh, local food easily accessible to all. There’s still lots of work to be done in improving our food system, and here at The FruitGuys, we’re continually looking for ways to make our supply chain more sustainable. But we’ve come a long way since the 1980s, and Petrini was pivotal in making the movement mainstream. He may be gone, but I know that Slow Food and all of us who support it will carry on his legacy. Thank you, Carlo!