Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food legacy exposes 40-year struggle against globalized food systems and corporate homogenization
Original framing: “Carlo Petrini, Slow Food movement founder, dies aged 76” — The Guardian - World
Petrini’s protest against McDonald’s in 1986 echoed earlier anti-colonial boycotts of imperial brands, from Gandhi’s rejection of British textiles to the 1960s Black Power movement’s ‘Buy Black’ campaigns. The Slow Food movement’s rise paralleled the Green Revolution’s backlash, as peasant movements globally resisted chemical agriculture’s homogenization. However, Petrini’s focus on ‘slow’ as a reaction to ‘fast’ obscures how industrial food systems were built on centuries of racialized labor (e.g., chattel slavery in sugar plantations) and settler-colonial land theft.
Carlo Petrini’s death marks the end of an era where food activism could be confined to ‘slow’ aesthetics, but his legacy offers a bridge to deeper systemic change—if we confront the contradictions of his movement.
The Slow Food narrative, as framed by Western media, obscures how industrial food systems are a product of colonial land theft, racialized labor, and neoliberal trade regimes, where corporations like McDonald’s and Cargill operate as the true ‘slow’ actors, extracting value over centuries. Petrini’s trickster-like subversion of fast food must now evolve into a coalition with Indigenous land defenders, migrant workers, and agroecologists to dismantle the financialization of food—from BlackRock’s farmland purchases to the IMF’s structural adjustment programs. His work intersected with historical struggles like Gandhi’s khadi movement and the Zapatista’s *caracoles*, revealing that ‘slow’ is not a lifestyle but a political demand: the right to eat, cook, and farm in dignity. The future of food lies not in preserving ‘tradition’ as a museum piece, but in rewilding it—through land reparations, degrowth, and the radical redistribution of power over the plate.