A Foodie Who Is Not an Environmentalist Is Foolish | In Memoriam: Slow Food Founder Petrini

The One Who Pressed the Piano Pedal Has Gone First

On 21 May 2026, Carlo Petrini – founder of the Slow Food movement, Italian journalist and writer – passed away.

As someone who spent wonderful years of learning under his wing – and who also aspires to write about food – I want to honour him with this article. From here on, I’ll call him Carlin, the nickname everyone uses for him.

Like me, many of the students who came to the University of Food Studies were drawn in by Carlin’s books and the Slow Food movement. Indeed, Carlin has scattered fine seeds across the world: he launched the Slow Food movement, created Terra Madre – a gastronomy gathering that brings together small-scale farmers and food producers from all over the globe – and founded a university of food.

Formally known as the University of Food Studies, Pollenzo, it was founded in 2004 by Slow Food International. It is based right beside Carlin’s hometown, in the village of Pollenzo in Bra, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. This private university is dedicated to food research, using experiential teaching methods while emphasising the nutritional science, politics, culture, and ecology that lie behind food. My one-year master’s programme is called New Food Thinking, with modules in food philosophy, food ecology, foraging, and world cultures, plus weekly food education sessions organised around a single theme.

My very first class at the university was a lecture by Carlin.

He was already 72 at the time. Three hours of relentless Italian, no break at all. I watched the simultaneous interpreter’s expression shift from cool composure to barely suppressing a gasp for breath, while Carlin grew ever more impassioned. The students below could read it in each other’s eyes when their gazes met: “This old man has incredible energy.” On stage, he was waving his arms, speaking – never pausing for a moment – as if a perpetual motion machine had been installed inside him.

I remember he spoke about the word “sustainable.” He didn’t explain it through its Latin root; instead, he told us that the word shares its origin with the sustain pedal on a piano. When you press the pedal while playing, the sound still trembles in the air, slowly spreading out, so you can feel the music’s lingering resonance. He said, “To build a sustainable world, we must make a sound. Not a random clamour, but a note that resonates – one whose echo can carry on.”

On 21 May this year, he died in his hometown of Bra, aged 76. Early that morning, when I saw the news on my screen, all that echoed in my mind was the lingering, swirling resonance of a piano – it was just that the one who pressed the pedal had gone first.

“McDonald’s, Get Out of Italy!”

On 20 March 1986, the first McDonald’s in Italy opened near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome and quickly became a sensation among local young people. Carlin, then a food column writer and journalist, was among a group of friends who handed out plates of tomato pasta to passers-by in the square nearby. They wanted this down-to-earth act of protest to express their anger and prompt the public to reflect: why could fast, industrialised food take the world by storm – even “invade” Italy, a country that prides itself on its cuisine – while fresh, naturally grown, nutritionally balanced food was left on the shelf?

In December 1989, Slow Food International was formally established in Paris, its emblem a snail. Carlin explained that they chose the snail not to make people eat slowly, but because a snail moves slowly, savouring the journey at an unhurried pace. More importantly, it carries its home on its back – wherever it goes, its home goes with it. Home means local, seasonal food; it means traditional recipes and the ritual of people gathered around a table to eat together.

The core of Carlin’s Slow Food was never simply “eating slowly.” On the contrary, he repeatedly stressed: “Slow Food is not about food – it’s about us.” What he came back to again and again was the central spirit of the Slow Food movement: Good, Clean and Fair.

Good, because food should deliver genuine sensory pleasure, not the standardised numbness of an industrialised palate. Clean, because the production process should respect natural ecosystems, not accelerate everything with hormones and chemicals. Fair, because the people who grow crops, raise animals and make food deserve a dignified wage and should not be squeezed to the very bottom of the supply chain.

In 2004, he pushed forward two more projects: first, founding the University of Food Studies in Pollenzo, close to his hometown, to establish gastronomy as a serious, cross-disciplinary field of study; second, creating the Terra Madre gathering – a biennial global food-community meeting held in Turin that brings together farmers, fishers, herders, chefs and researchers from more than 150 countries.

In Carlin’s eyes, food was never a mere pleasure; it was a political question – one about who owns the land, who does the labour, and whose tastes are being systematically erased.

His attention to social justice in food is also tied to his background. His father came from a family of railway workers; his mother was a primary school teacher from a rural background. When he was young, he studied sociology, working alongside his father by day and attending lectures by night. His deep, passionate focus on food, though, came from his grandmother. In his memories, she would often gather up the breadcrumbs scattered across the table, making sure nothing was wasted.

As he later put it, “A foodie who is not an environmentalist is foolish; an environmentalist who is not a foodie is pitiable.” What Slow Food defends is what McDonald’s simply cannot offer – local, seasonal food, and the ritual of people sitting down to eat together.

When I was studying in Italy, 90 per cent of students lived in Bra, the birthplace of the Slow Food movement. In a sense the town was a kind of “Slow Food bubble”: no McDonald’s, no KFC – just traditional Piedmontese restaurants and a scattering of Turkish and Chinese eateries run by immigrants.

Now and then, when we had grown tired of eating in Bra, classmates would fancy a trip to Turin, 50 kilometres away, for McDonald’s. We would joke among ourselves: “We’re this poor – what’s the harm in a McDonald’s meal?” Rumour had it that if you went, you had to go sneakily, or you’d be expelled.

More often, though, we learned about food and understood Slow Food through ordinary everyday moments.

For instance, we could take on a plot at the school’s organic farm, working alongside classmates to tend the plants and understand the soil.

In spring, we took foraging classes out in the village, learning to identify and eat the hundreds of wild vegetables that grow locally. I never expected that a stretch of farmland and hillsides just a 30-minute walk away would offer so many things to eat.

After class, classmates would spend hours cooking and chatting; a single table might hold dozens of dishes from different countries and regions. Sometimes Carlin would drop by on his way past and casually join a meal or an impromptu dance party.

At weekends, everyone would clear out their fridges, bring out their leftovers, and head up to an old abandoned pizza oven on the hill to bake pizzas and bread, make salads – the works.

The university also organises study visits to rural communities across Europe – to see how local organisations protect seed varieties, to talk with farmers, and to get a sense of the small, specific worries that shape their lives.

Looking back on these moments, I can feel that the philosophy behind the Slow Food movement Carlin championed is not the idealism it might sound like at first. It lands in the fabric of real life – in meal after flavourful meal, and in the happiness glowing on everyone’s faces.

Eating Is an Agricultural Act

For me, Carlin’s greatest influence was his insistence on the importance of agriculture in the food system. He deeply admired a line from the American writer Wendell Berry: “Eating is an agricultural act.” Consumers, through their food choices, steer the direction of agricultural markets and production and, in doing so, become almost imperceptibly part of the producer. Within the Slow Food framework, they call consumers who hold principles and act on them “co-producers”.

In autumn 2025, I attended the Slow Cheese festival in Bra. Held every two years, it is the world’s largest raw milk cheese festival. It was through this festival that I first learned that just three ingredients – milk, rennet and salt – can produce more than 2,000 different cheeses, and that cheese is itself a symbol of food diversity.

Carlin gave a street speech on the topic of “Why Raw Milk Cheese Matters.” He argued that pasteurisation is a form of industrial logic – standardised, replicable, eliminating variables. But the diversity of raw milk cheese comes from different landscapes, pastures, livestock breeds, and the skills of herders and cheesemakers. Raw milk, as a living food, retains its inherent properties – nutrients, vitamins, enzymes, lactic acid bacteria – along with all the flavours and aromas of the grass and hay the animals have eaten. Most of the farmers who produce raw milk cheese are small-scale operations. They play an important role in protecting the diversity of meadows, pastures and animal breeds.

During the cheese festival, the streets and squares of Bra transform into cheese markets. Behind each stall stands a producer from a different country. The air is thick with the mingling scents of milk and greenery – a smell that belongs only here, one you would never find in any supermarket.

I loved that year’s Slow Cheese theme, “C’è un mondo interno” – the world is right beside you. The joy of being absorbed in learning about food lies precisely here: from a single bite, countless topics branch out. An old man from Sardinia was explaining why his sheep eat only a certain kind of wild grass, while a student stood beside him taking notes. Walking through the market, it felt more like an open classroom than a marketplace.

And yet, this was not the kind of classroom we are used to. After finishing his speeches, Carlin would pull students and visitors from all over into song and dance. A man in his seventies, dancing a cheerful Italian folk tune in the middle of the crowd. The joy and energy were utterly unreserved, and in that moment I could understand why so many people felt inspired by him.

Is Slow Food Really Just Elitism?

At that edition of the festival, I attended several forums. They should have been spaces where diverse voices converged – producers, researchers, and activists from more than a dozen countries were seated in the audience – yet the stage was time and again monopolised by long monologues from a handful of Italian men. They called and answered each other up there, their voices growing ever louder, ever more caught up in their own performance.

Near the end of the event, the host finally passed the microphone to a shepherdess from North Macedonia. She had perhaps only five minutes. She showed a few photographs: sheep on a hillside, a stone-built shelter, herself and her children making cheese. She spoke in unfluent English, concise, poetic, carrying a quietness that belongs only to someone who has truly lived on the land. Those five minutes were the richest moment of my days there. But as I walked out, I felt a mixture of emotions.

Since then, I have been thinking: how could Slow Food give me two such completely different experiences, both happening in the very same place?

Critical voices about the Slow Food movement have never gone away: it seems to carry a kind of Italian-centrism, an arrogance that treats the food traditions of one particular region as the standard. Genuinely good, clean, and fair food often means higher prices in real life, and not everyone can afford that “fairness”.

Carlin himself was not unaware of the elitism critique. In interviews he repeatedly emphasised that Slow Food is not about turning food into a luxury, but about changing society’s entire hierarchy of food priorities. His intention was never to serve the wealthy. But how to put that into practice, to reflect on one’s own class position and cultural biases? Perhaps that is the part he left for us to keep thinking about.

Lingering Piano Resonance

The Movement Yet to Be Completed

Bra is a small city – it takes no more than twenty minutes to walk anywhere, which also means everyone’s lives are close together. My classmates and I would often run into Carlin in town. Even though he could not speak English, that did not stop him from talking with students from all over the world, because he communicated through food. As soon as you told him you were a student at the university, he would stop, and in Italian with hand gestures ask you: What have you been eating lately? What did you pick up at the market? What have you been busy with? Warm as a next-door neighbour.

One winter, when a heavy snowstorm hit, a group of us students huddled under a colonnade in Bra’s town centre, waiting for the snow to stop. Carlin was passing by, spotted us, waved enthusiastically, and invited us to come to his house for a drink. And just like that, a group of students found ourselves in his home, opening his wine cabinet, gathered together drinking and chatting while the snow fell quietly outside the window.

The last time I saw him was a year ago, in a café in Bra’s town centre. I joked and asked him: In Italy, do people really roll their eyes if you order a cappuccino in the afternoon? He laughed heartily, got up, walked to the counter, and ordered me a cup. When he came back he said: If you want it, drink it! In that moment, hearing his bright, open laugh, I was thinking that this tiny city of Bra is like a time capsule – the cafés are no different from what 19th-century posters depicted, and you would still bump into the café owner or a familiar teacher on the street.

Carlin would often say after a talk or a lecture, “Now it is your turn to step up.” At the time I was confused – what could I possibly do?

After leaving university, I drifted for two years across different countries and regions – learning about soil on organic farms, working in cafés, cooking in kitchens, and even delivering food for a while. Learning through work like that felt like a kind of extension of practising “Slow Food.” Perhaps I am still not ready to truly carry on a “Slow Food spirit,” but at least I am on the road.

But I believe that the North Macedonian shepherdess’s five minutes should also be part of Slow Food’s transformation. Those voices given too little time, those people who never get to be on stage, those practitioners excluded in the name of “tradition” – what the Slow Food movement leaves us is not only the part it has completed, but also the part it has yet to complete, or even the part it has sidestepped.

Because once the piano pedal is held down, the resonance keeps drifting.

Ciao Carlin, buon viaggio! Goodbye – may your next journey be a smooth one.

– This is Foodthink’s original article No. 810  –

Unless otherwise noted, all photos taken by the author.

Editor: Pei Dan

Layout: Xiaoshu