Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair

A great book for anyone wanting to know about the 20 year old revolution of slow food that began in Italy...buying locally grown and produced foods to provide the healthiest foods for our bodies and to take care of our planet as well. If you're into agricultural and ecological sustainability or your not, but you either want to be a part of it or are curious about it...this book is the one to start with. An easy read and highly recommended.

A very important book for all who are interested in real and healthy food for the planet.

Carlo Petrini has been attempting to preserve a more traditional view of food for a long time, this book lays out his current thinking in a clear and concise layering of understanding food in culture (gastronomy), understanding quality (good, clean, fair food), and the tools to put these ideas to work in the world going forward. As we reconstitute a food culture based on transparency and quality in the USA and hopefully across the globe, this book provides key ideas related to respect for diversity of food products, respect for food in culture, and respect for the work associated with food that can serve to guide us. This book made me think and laugh, and I recommend it highly.

More than a reaction to Fast Food's arrival in Italy, Slow Food has evolved into a global movement encompassing many different actions to improve what we all taste and eat. It's not about eating well in the privileged, Michelin-starred table sense. It's about recognizing everyone's barriers to eating well and judging the quality of our food on three levels, asking whether it is good, clean and fair. (The book's original title is just that: Buono, pulito e Giusto). The movement's founder wrote this book to set out a new definition of gastronomy, enumerating some of the issues facing our food supply and helping to turn a thinking eater to positive action. Beautifully translated, Slow Food Nation is a cogent & readable introduction to what Slow Food is about. Highly recommended!

Carlo Petrini gave a lecture at NCSU in Raleigh earlier this year. His talk was in Italian, but his ideas were universal: if we want happiness and peace, we're going to have to change the way we eat. The book is fantastic. It is beautifully written, powerful, and balances scientific data and understanding with cultural histories and sensible aestheics. His proposal of a new branch of science, gastronomy, is as revolutionary as Freud's proposal to study the human psyche or David Kelley's efforts to study design as a science. This book is The Inconvenient Truth for those who eat. But it is also a far more optimistic book, for the solution to the problem of industrial agriculture is to seek out good food, to meet and learn about the farms and farmers who grow it, and the reward is pleasure. The Introduction by Alice Waters is, like the food at Chez Panisse, a sensual as well as a sensible delight. This is a great book to buy, read, and then share with others, all around the world.