'Slow Food' Battles Against The Bland, Bad and Boring

AP 20nov00

SAN MARTINO, Italy -- Virgilio is 2,513 pounds of prize Piedmontese bull, a sterling example of an impressive breed that produces low-cholesterol beef.

He's also a passenger on a modern-day "ark" -- the Ark of Taste campaign to draw attention to regional and local edibles that are endangered by a globalizing economic world of mass-produced foods.

It is the newest project of the "Slow Food" movement in its fight against the bland, the bad and the boring.

Slow Food was born 14 years ago when the "barbarians" breached the gates of Rome -- McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Italy, a still booming concern near the foot of the Spanish Steps.

The group's symbol is the snail, a creature both slow and edible. It has grown from a tiny band of Italian food lovers into an international movement with more than 60,000 members in dozens of countries. In the United States alone, it is growing by about 300 members a month.

Slow Food publishes a quarterly magazine in five languages, cookbooks and guides to food, restaurants and wine. Local chapters sponsor dinners, tastings and cooking classes, and they patronize small producers of quality foods.

The group has just opened a lobbying office in Brussels, Belgium, headquarters of the European Union, to battle a food bureaucracy whose rules often strangle small, artisan producers.

Globalization is Slow Food's enemy, but there are no anti-free trade rampages, no smashing and thrashing of hamburger outlets. The knife and the fork are the group's main weapons -- along with a steely determination to live life in the slow lane, where the food is a whole lot better.

The biggest showcase for the Slow Food style is a vast food fair held every other autumn in Turin, capital of Italy's wine-producing Piedmont region. This year's five-day Salon of Taste attracted more than 130,000 eager-to-eat visitors.

The aisles were jammed with people wandering around with wine glasses dangling from their necks in pouches and lugging bulging shopping bags. T-shirts proclaimed defiant slogans like "Raw milk cheese doesn't kill people, people kill people."

More than 500 food producers offered samples at an indoor market that sprawled over 350,000 square feet. More than 3,000 different wines were uncorked for tastings, and dozens of special dinners were offered, along with workshops on everything from couscous to chocolate.

Pride of place this year went to a special section devoted entirely to the first group of "passengers" picked for the Ark of Taste: farmhouse cheeses, chickens, sausages, squash -- and Piedmontese beef.

"We got 250 orders for beef in the first two days," exulted Sergio Capaldo, a veterinarian who is Slow Food's point man on livestock and utterly devoted to saving this cattle breed from his home region.

Piedmontese beef is special. It's not just lean and tasty; it's as low in cholesterol as skinless chicken. The animals, which have an extra layer of muscle and surprisingly delicate bones, also produce more meat per pound than traditional breeds.

It would seem to be something that, in the words of one breeder, "sells itself." But Piedmontese are in danger of dying out because of competition from cheaper-mass produced beef and because thousands of farmers switched to dairy cattle for a quicker profit.

Fifteen years ago, there were more than 600,000 head of Piedmontese cattle, almost all on small, family farms. Today there are half that.

About 40 miles from the food fair, oblivious to the hubbub, Virgilio lounges in his stall, putting on extra weight for Italy's livestock show. He was the national champion last year.

The huge silvery animal with the thick mantle of extra flesh that is the breed's trademark is the pride of the Delsoglio family, which has been raising Piedmontese for generations. With help from the Ark, they hope to continue.

"I'm sticking with it," said Roberto Delsoglio, youngest of the three brothers who run the farm. "And my kids are, too."

To help people like the Delsoglio brothers, the Ark is looking for new ways to promote Piedmontese beef, which is sold only by a few specialty butchers. The group is also providing scientific and technical advice.

In the United States, the Slow Food movement's list of Ark products ranges from a barley wine from Brooklyn Brewery called Monster Ale to tree-ripened Blenhelm apricots too fragile to ship.

The group hopes to start a Web site to put consumers in touch with producers.

"These endangered products are often typical of a specific region, imprinted by its soil, climate and human history," said Patrick Martins, head of Slow Food USA. "Industrial standardization is depriving the world of regional foods."