Cooking Up a Reply to Big Mac

Some people seek the perfect wave, the 26,000-foot mountain, Class V white-water rapids. For Rosalyn Voget and Philip Neumann of Santa Barbara, gourmets and converts to the movement known as Slow Food, the quest is the ultimate meal.

In May 1997, the California couple, who for a decade constructed plastic palms for theme parks, casinos and movies such as “Jurassic Park,” plunked down $12 a month to have phone calls and e-mail forwarded, and headed east.

They tasted barbecue in Texas, conch chowder in Florida, roast oysters in South Carolina, savory fish soup in the south of France and dark, viscous 25-year-old balsamic vinegar in Parma, Italy.

Almost inevitably, the way wildlife is drawn to a watering hole, they came to Slow Food’s Salone del Gusto (Hall of Taste), a sort of summit meeting of epicures held this month in a noisy Turin building that once housed the Fiat automobile factory.

“We all go to the same place, so let us go there slowly,” Carlo Petrini, 49, the rumpled bundle of energy behind Slow Food, has said.

It was 1986, and McDonald’s had announced plans to build a restaurant on Rome’s celebrated Piazza di Spagna, near the Spanish Steps and the building where English poet John Keats died.

A newly assembled association of Italian gourmets, including Petrini, was aghast. It organized in opposition. Ultimately, the U.S. chain overcame the gourmets, and Big Macs are being dished out on Piazza di Spagna even today.

But the seed of a cause was planted. Petrini, an astute promoter who as a young leftist used a war-surplus transmitter from a U.S. tank to start a pirate radio station, had picked a quarrel that guaranteed enormous publicity.

In food-conscious Italy, where the two-hour lunch is no rarity, opposition to the standardized and unsatisfying form of modern life that fast food seemed to typify struck a chord among many. From Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, but also from faraway America, came echoes of support.

In December 1989, an assembly of worried gourmets met in Paris and approved a manifesto at the Opera Comique. “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, invades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods,” delegates from more than 20 countries said.

“A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life,” the manifesto declared. “Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food.”

A banquet for 500 then followed.

Nine years later, the Slow Food movement, based in Petrini’s hometown near Turin, claims more than 70,000 members and supporters in 35 countries. Its symbol is the epitome of slowness itself, the snail. Not surprisingly, the symbol is edible.

For five days this month, Slow Food threw the biggest event in its short existence: a carnival of foods, mostly Italian but with some imports, meant to promote small-scale producers and to awaken and educate the public’s taste buds.

More than 100,000 people visited Lingotto Center, the former Fiat plant, to sample more than 3,200 wines and hundreds of artisanal products, from prosciutto made of smoked kangaroo to liqueurs distilled from lemon juice to formaggio di fossa, a cheese buried in the ground while aging.

“This is about preserving the pleasures of food and what it brings to people, in a world that’s moving toward convenience and nothing else,” said one enthusiastic visitor, Denis La Touche, who runs a five-room hotel near Montpellier in the south of France with his wife, Sarah.

Slow Food does not view itself as being about pigging out; rather, it sees the movement as great cuisine with a conscience. Its accent on quality means protecting small-scale farmers or salami makers from European Union regulations that favor wealthy multinational food producers such as Kraft Jacobs Suchard and Nestle, members say. It runs programs to educate children about different tastes, and by 2000 plans to open Europe’s “only university of gastronomy” in Pollenzo, south of Turin.

Slow Foodies have founded “fraternal tables” to help feed the needy in Italy, Brazil and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1997, the movement launched the Ark of Taste program to ensure the survival of animal breeds, cheeses, cold cuts, edible herbs, cereals and fruits endangered by the global convergence of consumer tastes.

“We’re trying to preserve drinks and foods that are in danger of extinction,” movement spokesman Patrick Martins said. “We say to the producers, ‘Look, you’re a small producer and you’re feeling pressure to cut back on quality and to become more industrial, but don’t do it.’ ”

Consider, for example, the case of the rusty-coated Reggiana cow, present in Italy for 1,000 years. In the pre-machine age, the strong and stocky Reggiana was useful as a beast of burden, but each cow gives only 1,400 gallons of milk a year, two-thirds the output of another breed, the Frisian.

Reggianas, dominant in Italy’s northern Reggio Emilia province until World War II, dwindled in number to 900 by 1980. Helping the breed make its comeback is the passion of cheese maker Luciano Catellani, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the animal.

According to Catellani, Reggiana milk is special, with a unique protein makeup. The crumbly type of Parmesan made with it is sweeter than cheese from other milks, he said, and can be aged longer, for 28 months. The number of Reggiana cows in his region has doubled in the past 20 years, and Catellani and other owners have joined in an association to explain to consumers why they should spend $9.50 a pound for the Reggiana cheese--$3.60 more than the run-of-the-mill Parmesan.

“It’s not the case that people aren’t ready to pay more for an interesting variety of potato or other food,” said Kate Singleton, an Englishwoman who edits the English-language edition of Slow, the movement’s quarterly magazine. “They just need to realize what’s out there.”

The underlying reason for Slow Food is unease about the times we live in, about the replacement of face-to-face contact with Internet and e-mail, about the joy of sharing good food and wine being menaced by the convenience of “nuking” a store-bought dish in the microwave.

“We’re fast losing our grasp on the real things in life,” said movement member Darina Allen, who runs Ireland’s Ballymaloe Cookery School and has been compared to noted California chef Alice Waters.

For teacher Vanda Bonnaci, 52, who makes her own commercial line of jams, pickled mushrooms and bottled olives, virtual life now too often supplants the real thing. “My 9-year-old’s at school, all day they are already playing Nintendos and computer games and fiddling with those electronic pets, Tama-whatever-they’re-called,” said the woman from the Calabria region at the toe of Italy’s boot. To trick her 19-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter into spending more time at home, she uses her gifts in the kitchen.

“They may go out for fast food, but not on the nights when I make my gnocchi [dumplings] with sausage sauce,” she said.

As well as a cause and a movement, Slow Food is a business--and a booming one. Headquartered in Bra, about 30 miles south of Turin, Slow Food has 60 employees. As editor in chief of its publishing house, Petrini has been responsible for more than two dozen books, including five cookbooks and guides to food, travel, wines and Italian osterie (traditional inns). Slow, the quarterly magazine, is published in English, Italian, French, Spanish and German.

Slow Food, which has its own Web site (at https://www.slowfood.com), organizes gastronomic events, including an upcoming cheese show in Bra and a festival of German food and wine in the Baltic port city of Luebeck. It has a travel agency, which next May is offering a tour of San Francisco restaurants and California’s wine country. Four Italian cities, including Bra, have been the first to declare themselves zones of “good living.”

“We are not talking so much now of Slow Food, but of Slow Life,” Petrini explained.

During the five-day fair in Turin, a plethora of Slow Food merchandise, from wine-tasting glasses in neck slings to aprons, was on sale.

Stars of international gastronomy--from Paris chef Alain Senderens to British beer expert Michael Jackson, who dubs himself “The Beer Hunter”--attended to give seminars and demonstrations and canvass for business opportunities. Italy’s new prime minister, Massimo D’Alema, came and tasted some mortadella sausage.

An initial attempt in the early ‘90s to implant Slow Food in the United States faltered, but now there are 700 members organized in 15 chapters, or convivia. “Other [gourmet] organizations are elite supper clubs, or want to know, ‘How can we fly in some foie gras?’ ” said David Auerbach, a 50-year-old professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and a Slow Food pioneer in the New World. Instead of taking a chichi approach, he said, Slow Food supports farmers markets and a healthy profit to encourage producers of quality foods.

Voget, 50, and Neumann, 41, the Santa Barbara couple, said that when they return to the United States after Christmas they plan to help organize Slow Food convivia in California. In a midlife career change, they also want to start a bed-and-breakfast in the Napa or Sonoma valley, where they will give cooking classes and cater to customers who have illnesses that can be alleviated through better eating.

Their 1 1/2-year odyssey, though, has confirmed a tenet held by Petrini: simple food, such as slices of mozzarella cheese and fresh, ripe tomato, can be just as sublime as a five-course dinner in a pricey restaurant. In fact, for Voget and Neumann, the high point in taste so far has been on a Rome street, where they bought sandwiches made from crisp, twice-baked focaccia, a flat bread, stuffed with air-cured beef and arugula. They washed them down with cold beer.

“That is what we are looking for: something with great taste we can eat with good conscience,” Neumann said.

In the last century, French magistrate and gourmet Anthelme Brillat-Savarin expressed the conviction that “the destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves.” In this age of increasing globalization and standardization, that’s truer than ever, Slow Food members say.

“The more Europe moves together, the more identities fuse,” said Lothar Tubbesing, a restaurateur from Luebeck. “But you need to remember where you come from. You need to know your own soil.”

* ‘SLOW’ COCKTAILS, SNACKS: A north Italian bar owner at Slow Food festival shares cocktail and snack ideas. H14