Can the delicious revolution reach out to the uncommitted?
For an organisation that puts the pleasures of taste on equal footing with concern for environmental and ethical issues, it is only natural that my interview with Slow Food begins with a glass of Prosecco. At L’Anima, a swish new Italian restaurant near London’s Liverpool Street where we meet, I’m whisked into the bar area and chef and owner Francesco Mazzei approaches, gushing about Slow Food UK’s new General Secretary, Catherine Gazzoli. Francesco’s previous efforts to get involved with Slow Food UK were snubbed, he says, but barely two months after meeting Catherine, he’s been appointed a Slow Food ambassador chef. His restaurant’s simple, southern Italian dishes use seasonal British produce and epitomise the Slow Food mantra of ‘good, clean and fair’ food. What? Slow Food in the UK? In Italy, where Slow Food originated in 1986 as a protest against food’s homogenisation and degradation by fast food culture, it occupies an important space. It’s a household name for its published guid
