Never in the last 15 years has the western world paid so much attention to the quality of food and wine, to typical local products and their protection, and to wine and food tourism. Among the foremost figures of all this, a position in the front row has to go to an international organization - Slow Food - and to its charismatic leader, Carlo ("Carlin") Petrini. Slow Food founded in the North-Western small Italian town of Bra in 1986, became a worldwide movement with its 1989 conference in Paris, whose "Manifesto" proclaimed: "Against the flat uniformity of fast food let's rediscover the wealth and aromas of local cuisines". In this book Petrini, recounts the origins and developments of an organization that has grown to have 83,000 members in 45 countries and a flourishing food and wine guidebooks publishing company; has just inaugurated the University of Gastronomic Sciences with bases in Pollenzo and Colorno (Italy); organizes enormously popular events such as the Salone del Gusto Food Fair and the Terra Madre conference in Turin; and the Urban Harvest and New Amsterdam Market every October in New York.
Thru direct testimony of several protagonist, the authors also take us in a voyage to discover ethnic delicacies of the world (region by region in Italy, in each country of Europe, as well as in the USA and Canada were Slow Food is trying to save Red Fife wheat, American traditional chesses, wild rice, the oysters of Cape May and the Native American Turkey; in South America, Africa and Asia (including Afghanistan). The book also lists all the "Presidia" of Slow Food (national teams devoted to the safeguard of specific kinds of endangered foods) and the addresses of all their leaders.