From The Market: “Greetings from the Non-Barcode People”, p 259-260

This is precisely the mission that Slow Food has set for itself: to remind a generation of industrial eaters of their connections to farmers and farms, and to the plants and animals we depend on. The movement, which began in 1989 as a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, recognizes that the best way to fight industrial eating is by simply recalling people to the infinitely superior pleasures of traditional foods enjoyed communally. The consumer becomes, in founder Carl Petrini’s phrase, a “coproducer”–his eating contributes to the survival of landscapes and species and traditional foods that would otherwise succumb to the fast-food ideal of “one world, one taste.” Even connoisseurship can have a politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It’s all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

For more info on Slow Food, see Slow Food USA.