(Claude Auguste / Manfred Klimek / Editorial team)
Carlo Petrini has died. And with him passes one of those rare European figures who not only founded a movement but also transformed the culinary and food-policy thinking of an entire era. Petrini was 76 years old. He died in the village of Bra in Piedmont, the very place where his ideas took shape: amongst farmers, trattorias, markets, vineyards and that part of Italy which never viewed food merely as a simple and incidental act of nourishment, shaped by the misfortune of Protestantism, but as part of life itself.
Today, much of what seemed almost subversive forty years ago takes for granted: regional produce, small-scale farming, biodiversity, provenance, heritage varieties, producers’ pride, and a slower pace of gastronomy. Yet all of this was once a counter-movement. And Carlo Petrini was its most significant organiser.
We must not forget the world from which Slow Food emerged. The post-war decades in Europe were characterised by industrialisation, standardisation and technocratic rationalisation: food was increasingly viewed in functional terms – preservable, cheap, standardised, efficient. Agriculture became industrialised at a pace that radically transformed historic cultural landscapes within a matter of decades. Supermarkets displaced traditional markets, industrial yeast displaced sourdough, standardised grape varieties displaced old clones, and global corporations began to think of flavour in terms of tables. Petrini realised early on that far more was being lost here than mere culinary diversity. A way of life was disappearing.
His resistance to this did not begin in an academic way, but physically. When a McDonald’s opened near the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1986, Petrini organised protests against it. Today, that seems almost harmless. Back then, it was a cultural uprising against the idea that food had to be the same everywhere. Slow Food emerged from this protest.
Suddenly, something began to shift. For Petrini did not speak like an ascetic: he never wanted to do away with enjoyment, nor to impose moral discipline. That was precisely where his enormous appeal lay. Slow Food was not a movement of prohibitions, but of rediscovery. Food should be ‘good, clean and fair’ – good in flavour, clean in production, fair to producers and to nature. This was not some nostalgic romanticisation of rural life. Petrini thought in political, ecological and cultural terms all at once. He understood that agriculture is never merely an economic activity. It shapes landscapes, communities, traditions, dialects, family structures and identities. Industrialising a cheese changes not only a product, but often an entire region. Petrini’s thinking therefore had a particularly strong impact in areas where a sense of place was already deeply rooted: in viticulture.
Without Slow Food, today’s natural and biodynamic wine scene would be almost inconceivable. Not technically – but in spirit. For Petrini restored to an entire generation of winegrowers the cultural legitimacy that the industrial wine industry had taken from them for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, viticulture was widely regarded, in many places, primarily as a matter of technical perfection: cellar hygiene, selected yeasts, temperature control, international styles, barriques, and scoring systems. Wine became increasingly standardised. Large sections of the wine world began to optimise themselves just like industrial products. Slow Food countered this mindset with an idea that seemed almost revolutionary at the time: provenance matters more than perfection.
Suddenly, winegrowers were once again taking an interest in old grape varieties, spontaneous fermentation, local traditions, small family-run estates, biodiversity in the vineyard and individual styles. It was no coincidence that many of the natural wine movements that later became famous emerged precisely in the regions where Slow Food had a strong presence: Piedmont, the Loire, the Jura, parts of Burgenland, Slovenia, Styria and the Penedès.
Naturally, a great deal of ideology developed from this later on. The natural wine scene sometimes gave rise to its own dogmas, its own orthodoxies, its own vanities. Some wines became flawed, some movements became proselytising. Yet the original impulse stemmed from a deep longing for authenticity. It was precisely this longing that Petrini had understood early on: he realised that modern people are not just looking for products, but for connections. Connections to origin, producers, landscapes and stories. That is why Slow Food was never merely a movement centred on enjoyment. It was also an attempt to reverse alienation.
This was particularly evident in the world of wine. Biodynamic viticulture, for example – which many traditional oenologists had long spoken of derisively – gained cultural momentum through Slow Food. Small-scale winegrowers were suddenly able to explain why they wanted to work differently. Not because of technical backwardness, but out of conviction. Today, many biodynamic estates are among the world’s most renowned wineries.
Petrini himself remained, in all this, remarkably free of cynicism. Whilst large swathes of modern food culture eventually veered off into lifestyle trends, luxury marketing and Instagram aesthetics, he held fast to something almost old-fashioned: the shared table. For him, eating meant time. Conversation. Community. Slowness. Mindfulness. Not optimisation. Not self-promotion.
And this is precisely where his relevance lies today, for the world that Petrini criticised has since accelerated even further. Today, food is photographed, rated, algorithmised and turned into content. Restaurants struggle with online shaming, chefs become brands, wine (now less so) becomes an investment, and dining experiences turn into digitally exploitable status symbols. Petrini, by contrast, thought in an almost radically analogue way. For him, a good meal was not ‘content’. Rather, it was an interaction between people. The fact that such a figure is now gone feels like the end of a chapter in post-war European history, in which enjoyment was still understood as cultural enrichment. Not elitist. Not ascetic. But human.
Carlo Petrini leaves behind more than just an organisation. He leaves behind a different understanding of food and drink. One that continues to have an impact today through Europe’s vineyards, farmers’ markets, cheese cellars, small restaurants and family-run businesses. It is likely that it will be some years before we fully understand just how profound this influence actually was. For much of what seems self-evident today was once an act of resistance.