Rhetoric of Slow Food
- Vivian Li
- Jan 8, 2024
- 11 min read
Have you ever stopped to think about the food you eat? Like, where it comes from, the origins of the dish, or the native place of where an ingredient comes from? Like, have you thought about the eggs you scrambled this morning, or how Caesar salad was first created in Tijuana, Mexico; or how people developed the understanding that yeast helped bread rise in an oven? Most people take food for granted, and with the advertising we see on a daily basis, it’s not a surprise that all this information can get overlooked sometimes. But there is a silent movement that’s taking the world by storm. But it’s a movement that is so silent and so slow that it seems like there’s nothing happening. But what if I told you that this is taking place on a global scale, and yet, the people who know it, are few and far between?
“Slow Food” is a movement that started in Italy by a group of activists led by Carlo Petrini, in the 1980s. The initial aim was to defend regional traditions, good food, gastronomic pleasure, and a slow pace of life. But, in the last few decades, the organization have discovered a new challenge in their communication space and have found out that in order to change the world, people’s perception and understanding of food needs to change. Their new initiative is to help educate the masses on how important it is to learn about the food we consume, “[Slow Food] understands the strong connections between our plate, politics, and culture,” and therefore, the Slow Food’s movement’s new goal, “is to ensure good, clean, and fair food to everyone, while influencing how food is cultivated, produced, and distributed; and also making sure food cultures, traditions, and biodiversity lives on.”
So far, according to an infographic displayed on their website, the Slow Food organization has been able to defend 817 indigenous products, while ensuring the protection and promotion of local food heritage in indigenous areas. They were also able to create 3,513 gardens in Africa in 35 countries, grow 984 different kinds of foods in 113 new urban farms, while increasing biodiversity and improving livelihood in their local communities by 90%. They have also hosted 1,146 events in 75 countries, that reached over 120,000 people in the Terra Madre, in 2020. Additionally, 45% of the respondents that attended the Terra Madre event, in 2020, declared they were new to Slow Food, and “88% of them said they were willing to act based on what they had learned at the event.”
Despite all the campaigns, projects, events and the millions of little pieces working together to bring food education to everyone, many people still aren’t learning about this movement. Initially, when they first started out, the rhetoric displayed a “love” for the produce,
ingredients, and food that small-batch farmers and producers grew. But now, according to a
scholarly paper by Bruce Pietrykowski, it is probably as an inevitable outcome from the
commercial industry for the masses, and the collective’s hope to become faster and bigger, the original initiative that’s has focused on food first and foremost, has become a diluted version of its previous self. The movement, despite its impressive statistical proof and hundreds of people involved, from personal experience, the normal everyday person doesn’t know anything about this organization, at all. The rhetoric used on their website and social media, namely Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, all share the same need for improvement if they want to impact their local communities more effectively; and to gain new followers and attendees to their events, which from speculation, is what they’re trying to achieve.
According to the University of Texas, most of the information we get is from nonverbal
communication, about 55% of everything we retain from conversation, is through nonverbal
ques. So, using this theory, the rhetoric in study doesn’t only include the actual words on their
website or social media, but includes the design and the message they try to express through everything else on their platforms. Their homepage, in terms of design, is fun, creative, and approachable. There is visual and font hierarchy guiding the eyes without difficulty, the bold reds and oranges blend very well with the darker muted blues and black; making the colors work together very well. The composition, with the help of text boxes and graphics, is easy on the eyes and is intuitive to the audience – the paragraph starts with a new sentence when a different topic is being mentioned, or another textbox is introduced, or an image is place as a pause or a breather of sorts. Every page, whether on the website or on social media, on a computer or on a mobile device, is consistent and constant as well.
Overall, the “nonverbal communication” the organization is expressing through its online
presence, is welcoming; and therefore, attracts people to their page whether it’s by email
subscriptions, social media notifications, word-of-mouth, etc., and will end up spending a good amount of time reading through the information offered. However, as one browses through more of their pages, it is very clear that all of their platforms are only used, to advertise.
As a civilization, we see, on average, about 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day. That is about three to eight ads per minute, depending on where you live, the nature of your job, and other factors, like how you commute to work, or where you eat your lunch, or how much time you spend on your laptop or mobile device, etc. People see so many ads on a daily basis that we have become desensitized to the adverts we see. According to an article written by Forbes.com, Millennials, in the advertising world, are dubbed as “digital natives,” and because of their ad consumption, they have become oblivious to advertising; and “has turned traditional advertising on its head.” Millennials are the age group people want to advertise to simply because they have the purchasing power and the disposable income, in comparison to all the other generations. “Advertising agencies are on the hunt” to find the “best” way to advertise to Millennials in a way that “guarantees” they keep buying products.
A big part of the Slow Food organization is the Terra Madre network. The Terra Madre event, or the “Salone de Gusto” that is held biennale in Italy, is an event that invites groups of “smallscale producers, other farming communities, like fishers, breeders, chefs, academics, young people, NGOs, and representatives of local communities,” to show how they’re working to establish a system of good, clean, and fair food, from the grassroots level. These international network of food communities was first “launched in 2004 in an attempt to give those around the world, whose approach to food production protects the environment and communities a platform to express their voice and vision.”
In the past, just as Petrini’s original initiative was to slow down and appreciate the food we eat and enjoy the time we take to make dishes from scratch. From an academic article written by Adrian Peace, the central rhetoric of Slow Food was about expressing this devotion to food and educating people by, “rediscovering the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.” The rhetoric, in Slow Food’s early years, showed this passion for food and love for those who were devoted in making dishes the traditional way or the way grandmothers made something, or how a culture used to use a certain ingredient. They highlighted the beauty and the importance in cultural biodiversity. This article poses very good questions that the Slow Food organization has long tried to help the collective think about, like how can Slow Food fight for this idea of slowing down and appreciating food when people want a faster, more efficient way to mass produce?
As a civilization, we are always looking to improve and better ourselves in a more industrial aspect, we never really think about slowing down, even though that is advised. I think that it’s because of this idea of always finding ways to be more convenient and efficient; while using the commercial way of advertising goods and products that have diluted the way Slow Food is using it’s rhetoric to communicate to its communities. And now, it’s rare to hear about restaurants making everything they have on their menu in-house, or the amount of time people use to cook meals, or, according to a Master of Science (MS) thesis written by Anthony Epter, a student attending the University of Vermont, most people would rather go out to eat, than eat at home. All of this change and desire to accelerate our lives have taken a toll on the movement, even if the people involved, realizes it or not.
“Indigenous Terra Madre” is similar to the original “Terra Madre,” but it’s a smaller event. They used a quote from Winona LaDuke who is an American economist, environmentalist, writer and industrial hemp grower, to better illustrate why Slow Food and Indigenous Terra Madre events were so important because “[the Indigenous communities] produce food in the same way their great-great-great grandparents. They know how to live off their land, taking care of the soil, the water and the air.” And it is believed by the Indigenous community that “this is the future of food because within 50 years, we will no longer be able to eat the polluted food of industrial agriculture and we will only be able to feed ourselves, if we take care of Mother Earth.” This was the rhetoric that was used in the past, just when Petrini started the movement, and this is the type of “devotion to food” that was able to move people to join. People are selfish and they don’t change unless they’ve got something to do with whatever it is that’s being talked about. With food, it’s a little easier because everyone’s got to eat.
So, with this technique and emotional language, it was able to wake people up and realize that if we don’t do anything “my food will be gone,” or “I will go hungry.” When you talk in a way that involves everyone and it taps into their emotional psyche, you will be able to make people hear your message. There are many ways that companies use to advertise that are effective at attracting people, but one way that Slow Food could use that includes their “pathos” or emotional relationship with food and their “logos” or logical and statistical ways of showing their impact, is by using what Simon Sinek, an American author and an inspirational speaker that has written books like “Start with Why,” and “The Infinite Game,” said on a TedTalk; advertise with more empathy and relatability to your audience. He describes the “golden circle” concept, which he explained that people are emotionally more invested in Apple because they believe what the company believes, and the more a company is able to tap into the emotional “hunch” that people feel, the more effective their advertising becomes. Also, he explains that “the more vivid and “alive” a company can describe their vision of where the company is going, or what they’re trying to do, the more believable their campaign becomes, as well.”
The rhetoric used on their website is fun, well-designed, and easy to read; they use simple everyday language, which may be appreciated because it makes sure that, for the most part, people can understand them. Throughout the Slow Food research, the “call-to-action” is to either attract people to their page so they read their manifesto, be a part of their growing number of subscribers or followers, or to ask people to attend the next Terra Madre event, or Slow Food event, or to hear about the next Slow Food campaign. Most of their advertising techniques is to use as much logos as contextually possible, so that it impresses people on how much this movement or organization actually impacts its communities all over the world. The difference in how the movement was like and how the movement is like now is that in the 1980s, Petrini didn’t really care if people followed, he didn’t care if anybody else had the same vision that he did – sure, he was grateful if people thought the same, but for the most part he only had a few activists beside him, and that was it.
For Petrini, it wasn’t about how many followers he had, or how many went to the event, or if he had events at all; it was about supporting the people that grew produce, who made food the way it was made for hundreds or thousands of years; it was also about taking the time to appreciate the ingredients and savor the way we eat now. It was never about “head-count,” it was about “heart-count,” as Sinek said in an interview of what the difference was between a “great” leader and a “good” leader.
In the last few decades, the Slow Food movement has created many other parts that makeup the whole – with campaigns, projects, events, etc., that are run by local communities. These local communities are “united by the will to defend biodiversity, educate the wider world, sustain efforts and influence the public and private sectors, in order to achieve good, clean, and fair food systems for all.” Furthermore, in the last few years, Slow Food’s local communities are trying to take on new challenges on top of the old ones they’re continuing to change, like climate change, the pandemic, and thoroughly preserving food and cultural biodiversity, inspire behavioral change, and propose sustainable solutions to governments and companies, on a global scale.
And to a certain extent, the audience does need a numerical proof that the movement has made changes for the better, in terms of what they set out to do; but, to certain people this isn’t enough to engage with the audience on an emotional level. Instead of just relying on the numerical evidence, using personal accounts in a “diary-entry” structure to give audiences a vivid description of what the vendors showed at the events, or what the food taste like, how the recent Terra Madre 2022 experience differ to the one in 2020. Instead of telling the audience what will be there, or what’s happened in the past, using experience stories, if Sinek’s theory on creating empathy and relatability through pathos and belief works, would be a lot more effective for Slow Food now.
According to an academic article written by the assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Stephen Schneider, “there has also been a slow turn away from industrial food in the marketplace. The rise of organic labels in supermarkets, the growth of local farmers markets and the emergence of chains such as Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and Trader Joe’s,” is because of the collective’s desire to avoid commercialized mass-produced goods. But this still hasn’t stopped Slow Food’s rhetoric changing since it first started in 1980s Italy, and over the years they have definitely affected the world by educating the masses about food and heightening the significance of what we eat and how we cultivate produce.
But, because of the direction our lives are going, their initiative has been diluted by the overly commercialized lifestyles we’ve all been accustomed to. However, with a few changes on the delivery, techniques and the introduction of empathy to promote audience engagement, their movement’s impact may benefit even more communities around the world. After all, it’s essential to care about what you’re consuming because investing in the food you eat, in a way, is investing in you; and if you don’t take the time to nourish your body with good, clean, and fair food, you’re neglecting your body from the nutrients it needs to be healthy. And it’s important to educate people about the food they eat, where it comes from, and the investment you’re putting in yourself, because if you’re not investing in you right now, who is going to invest in you later?
More on Slow Food International: Website link:
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