Slow food’s slow road to change — gourmet elitists for social justice?

The two worlds of slow food on display at the Turin "Terra Madre" event. Photo on left by Giuseppe Cacace/Agence France Presse/Newscom. Photo on right by Lisa Abend.

To add to the theme we started in our last post, here’s an excerpt from a report on that Slow Food event in Turin Italy at which the visiting school children were drinking raw milk from a vending machine. But first a brief introduction:

While the Slow Food movement has long found favour among the culinary cognoscenti, Slow Food’s agenda has also inadvertently highlighted the economic disparity between those who can afford an enlightened way of eating and those who subsist on the margins of society while growing food for the rich and discerning. Lisa Abend explores this theme in her recent story for the Christian Science Monitor, dated November 24th. Here’s some of what she says:

“Turin, Italy – Somewhere between the exquisite vial of 25-year-old balsamic vinegar, fermented in cherry wood, that Modena’s Acetaia del Cristo sells for roughly $150 and the few dusty potatoes that Ann Petroni hawks on a blanket she brought with her from Burundi, lies the future of Slow Food, founded in 1989 to counteract the pernicious effects of fast food.