CARLO PETRINI’S EPIPHANY

THE CARACAZO, GAMBERO ROSSA, AND THE POLITICS OF SLOW FOOD

In February 1989, Carlo Petrini, the slow food advocate and organizer, had an epiphany. He was in Caracas, Venezuela to meet with potential recruits for his emerging global slow food organization.

It was a chaotic time in the country. Thousands of people had been in the streets for several days protesting the IMF-mandated austerity policies of the country’s unpopular President, Carlos Pérez. Martial law had been declared, and the military took to the streets to stop the protests. This sequence of events would come to be known as the “Caracazo” (or the big one in Caracas), resulting in as many as 3000 protestors killed, and eventually toppling Pérez and leading to the ascendance of Hugo Chávez.

Petrini’s epiphany was recognizing the contrast between his scheduled Caracas gathering to socialize “with the well-to-do,” as he put it, and a hungry population that had taken to the streets. Instead of the haute cuisine that would be provided, Petrini felt a more appropriate menu offering would be the low cost, national dish of meat and beans, or “pobillion.”

Petrini’s efforts to identify a new “slow food” movement had its roots in a left wing critique of the food system. It drew upon the Gambero Rosso (the Red Prawn or Red Shrimp) publication insert of the left-wing Italian newspaper Il Manifesto that first appeared in late 1986. Petrini hoped to base his new movement on environmental, pro-labor, and sustainability approaches while also celebrating the idea of fresh and local (or good!) food, approaches he characterized as “gastronomical politics.” The new movement’s slogan of “Clean, Good, and Fair” resonated with various food movements in the EU and the US, as well as in many parts of the developing world where the parallel concept of food sovereignty represented a call to action against a food economy and culture that focused on “fast” food and a type of globalized, homogenized food.

Twenty years after Carlo Petrini’s epiphany, I had the occasion to go to the Slow Food movement’s educational center, the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG), in Pollenzo, just a few kilometers from Slow Food’s headquarters in Bra, Italy, and about 50 kilometers southeast of Torino (Turin), itself a legendary region for working class and left-wing activism. I was asked to give a talk and meet with the UNISG students, several from developing countries, about the emerging food justice movement in the U.S. and how it corresponded to the global food sovereignty politics associated with such groups as Via Campesino. The relationship between food and climate politics was key to those discussions. That same year, in 2009, the food sovereignty groups, including Via Campesino, issued a manifesto at a Climate Conference in Bali, identifying the links between food and climate issues based on the notion of sovereignty.

Those links between food, climate, labor, indigenous rights, and environment were obvious and crucial to the UNISG students I met, and it also became an important part of slow food politics and its various international gatherings. One such gathering, in 2017, took place in Chengdu in China at a time when food politics in that country was experiencing multiple transitions, ranging from the Rural Reconstruction Movement to the country’s increasing integration into global economies and an urban-oriented global food culture.

The Chengdu Slow Food Conference attracted 400 participants from countries around the world. For some of its participants, including some in the U.S. delegation, it included a pre-conference tour in the outskirts of Beijing of the Sharing the Harvest farm where I had also been visiting after giving a talk hosted by Sharing the Harvest farm’s founder, Shi Yan.

Sharing the Harvest was at the forefront of China’s rural reconstruction movement whose core principles included the promotion of “agro-ecology, sustainability, and rural regeneration,” as described by one of the movement’s founders, Wen Tiejun. Sharing the Harvest farm was also one of the first examples in China of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and by the time the Chengdu gathering took place, there were more than 1000 participants in a separate gathering of China’s CSA farmers and advocates.

The visit to Sharing the Harvest and the Chengdu conference was an important and revealing encounter for the Slow Food participants who could see themselves as part of a global as well as local politics, and where food system issues played such a critical role. It also helped shape my own work, contributing to the search for a new political language that I would later describe in my book on care politics.

I never directly participated in the slow food political world even as I encountered many of its participants. Yet I recognized the importance of Carlo Petrini’s epiphany, whether for the slow food groups; the continuing debates in China about food, rural reconstruction, and what some in China described as the need for an “ecologicial civilization;” or for the importance of linking food to climate as part of a care-centered politics.

When Carlo Petrini died on May 22, he was recognized in many of the obituaries about him as a visionary who also sought to develop a politics of everyday life. “Those who sow utopia reap reality” was one of the phrases he loved to say. He also recognized early on that there was a danger that slow food could acquire or be seen as elitist, as “representing no more than a haute bourgeois amusement,” as he wrote.

It was that tension he grappled with that was also reflected in descriptions of his role as well. Ben Wells, the New York Times restaurant critic put it this way: “Mr. Petrini had been a communist, and there was an anticapitalist strain in all this. But the solution he proposed was not seizing fast-food companies and turning them over to the workers. Instead, he argued for cultivating a network of small local food businesses by directing more profits to the people behind them — conscious capitalism with a side of hedonism.”

But Petrini was not into conscious capitalism. He spoke for the producers, for those who worked in the food system, and for changing the food system itself, and not just for the consumers and the act of consumption. It was not hedonism for the well-to-do he was after, but system change.

“Etes-vous des consommateurs ou bien des participants,” (Are you consumers or participants?) was one of the graffiti slogans in the walls of Paris during the May, 1968 events. It’s a statement that Petrini had also concurred.

LINKS

Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Nation: Why our Food Should be Good, Clean and Fair. New York: Rizzzoli, 2007

Fabio Parasecoli. “Postrevolutionary Chowhounds: Food, Globaliation, and the Italian Left.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Winter 2003

Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi. Food Justice. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2010

Slow Food International Congress in Chengdu, China (blog): https://www.slowfood.com/blog-and-news/slow-food-international-congress-2017/ “Slow Food International Congress, 2017.” June 29, 2017

Wen Tiejun. Ten Crises: The Political Economy of China’s Development (1949-2020). Springer Nature. Open Source Book available at https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50066

Pete Wells. “For Carlo Petrini, the Point of ‘Slow Food’ Wasn’t the Food. It Was Us.” New York Times, May 24, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/dining/carlo-petrini-slow-food.html