The Foundation of Slow Food

Slow Food is an international not-for-profit association founded in Italy in 1986 as an alternative to the contemporary fast-paced lifestyle, a growing fast-food culture, the disappearance of local food traditions, people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how food choices affect the rest of the world – people, communities, animals, plants and the environment.

Slow Food promotes food and wine culture, linking ethics and pleasure, ecology and gastronomy, but also defends food and agricultural biodiversity worldwide.  It's about using local seasonal produce, restoring time-honored methods of production and preparation, and sharing food at communal tables.

Slow Food encourages environmentally sustainable production, ethical treatment of animals and social justice. Slow Food members seek to better appreciate how our lives can be improved by understanding the sensation of taste, and to celebrate the connection between plate and planet.

Slow Food organises national and international events to further its cause.

They include: the Salone del Gusto, the world’s largest quality food and wine fair, held very two years at the Lingotto Exhibition Center in Turin; Cheese, a biennial cheese fair held in Bra, in the province of Cuneo; and Slowfish, an annual exhibition in Genoa devoted to sustainable fishing. The Ark of Taste was founded to discover, catalogue and safeguard small quality food products and defend biodiversity.   The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity is an entity with the mission to organise and fund projects that defend our world’s heritage of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions.  

Slow Food’s major international initiative is Terra Madre (Mother Earth), the world meeting of food communities, a biennial forum for all those who seek to grow, raise, catch, create, distribute and promote food in ways that respect the environment, defend human dignity and protect the health of consumers.

More about how Slow Food got going in  Australia - Good, Clean, Fair

Slow Food Victoria - via  http://www.abbotsfordconvent.com.au

Slow Food Australia - http://slowfoodaustralia.com.au/

International Slow Food - http://www.slowfood.com/