Sit back and hear the story of the castrated rooster, known to cognoscenti as the capon, a bird of stunted hormones and tender meat. Few places produce more per capita than the Italian village of Morozzo, whose farmers are masters of the trade. By the late 1990s, however, their traditions were fading. Competition from industrial agriculture made raising capons hardly worth the cost. The local fair, long an annual showcase for the village’s poultry, had become a forlorn event. Among the casualties of modernization, it seemed, here was another: the capons of Morozzo risked going the route of a once-proud rooster’s private parts.

Into our tale steps Carlo Petrini. A former food and wine writer from Bra, Italy, Petrini first gained attention when he spearheaded a failed protest against the opening of a McDonald’s on a piazza in Rome in 1986. By the time he learned of the capon’s plight, he had emerged as the leader of a grassroots gastronomic movement that now claims about 80,000 members, operating around the globe under the banner of Slow Food.

Petrini urged Morozzo’s farmers to put aside their worries and produce 1,000 capons for the following year. In turn, he pledged to find buyers who would purchase the birds for almost twice the going rate. The farmers, at first suspicious, raised the capons. Consumers loved them. Retrieved from the brink of extinction, Morozzo’s capon festival thrives today.

The details of this story make uplifting reading in Petrini’s new book, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair, a mini-memoir wrapped inside a manifesto. Alternating in style between a diarist and a dabbling academic, Petrini depicts the dreary state of modern food production, a system so poisonous and pervasive that, he argues, it threatens much more than what we eat. In his account, poultry problems are just one symptom of an epidemic ravaging the planet and ruining our healthy way of life.

Like its corollary, Eric Schlosser’s 2001 best-seller Fast Food Nation, Petrini’s book can stir your outrage or spoil your appetite, but it offers more solutions. Petrini takes gastronomy, a term larded with elitist connotations, and presents it as a populist notion, available to anyone interested in food in its full context
of culture, politics, and economics. Though he argues ardently for the pursuit of pleasure, he sees pleasure without knowledge as a waste, and vice versa. His “new gastronomy” crosses disciplines and datelines, emphasizing our connections to one another and the earth. It’s a more compelling distillation of two phrases: “We are the world” and “You are what you eat.”

Flipping the pages of his book, Bay Area readers may feel like converts subjected to an obvious sermon. We hold, after all, these truths to be self-evident: that our food should be local, seasonal, sustainable; that politics are tied to what we put on our plates. We understand that when butter lettuce flaps its leaves in Sonoma, ripple effects are felt in Shanghai.

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That event is sure to draw a number of people whom Petrini has managed to offend. When Slow Food Nation first appeared, the blogosphere buzzed with indignation at the section on the Ferry Building farmers’ market, which Petrini describes as an “exclusive” place of “well-to-do” farmers and prices that would impoverish the Medicis. He says Ferry Building shoppers acquire fruits and vegetables like “status symbols” and declares, bizarrely, that most of those picking through the produce when he was there “seemed to be actresses.” His comments aroused such bad feeling that a Ferry Building book signing was scratched. He later issued a nonapology (“I feel bad that you feel bad” was the gist) that inflamed matters further, but both sides now seem to agree that the blowup was just that, and besides, more important questions are at stake.

In his book, though, Petrini occasionally distracts from more serious subjects with his patronizing tone, particularly toward Americans. At one point, he smirks at an American for thinking that Alba was close to Florence. (A few chapters later, he confuses San Francisco with L.A.) Though it’s hard to take umbrage at the thrust of his judgments—any country that consumes as much as we do deserves dressing down—Petrini is most compelling when he steers clear of ill-informed personal impressions. His main critique of the Ferry Building is that the potential for profits in, say, high-end olive oil risks encouraging a monoculture. This makes richer fodder for discussion than his take on the farmers themselves, most of whom he perceives to be “former employees of the Silicon Valley.”

And Petrini’s accounts of the grotesqueries (literal and figurative) of big food are both vivid and appalling. In illustrating the demise of a flavorful Piedmontese pepper, for instance, he describes how local farmers have abandoned a traditional crop in favor of tulips, which they ship to Holland—a country that sells its own bland peppers to Italy. All around our Monsanto-mad world, the diversity of crops is dwindling. The locally grown meal has given way to the quick processed dinner that bears no resemblance in taste, smell, or texture to real food. “So,” Petrini writes, “we have reached the absurd situation where there are children today who eat chicken nuggets but have never seen a live chicken and don’t even know what one looks like.”

Against this tide stands a small but swelling army
of reluctant soldiers, people

Some parts make for slow reading. Translated from Italian, Petrini’s writing has baroque embellishments that could pass for stilted academese. “Under the frenetic impulse of technocratic and reductionist thought,” he writes, “we have fallen into the temptation of neglecting the totality of the processes and interrelations that enable us to eat every day, considering only the result…”

Like, dude, tell it to Derrida.

Strong convictions can come with contradictions, and Petrini snares himself in a few. He scorns pretension but refers preciously to his first “important” bottle of wine. After decrying the long distances farmers travel to the Ferry Building, he gushes over a meal at Chez Panisse, which celebrates the local but sometimes imports pork from Oregon. There is, in other words, a fine line here.

Still, the glitches in Slow Food Nation are small potatoes compared with its achievements. Petrini is not the first to push for a smart, sustainable relationship to food, but he may be its most effective advocate.

What’s more, his arguments are easier to take for granted in the Bay Area than they are when you take to the road. Last month, work sent me to Michigan and into a farm-rich county where the dining options drove me swiftly toward despair.

On my last night, my host took me to his favorite
restaurant, which turned out to be part of a chain. I’d been reading Petrini on the plane, and there I was experiencing the bane of his existence: flavorless ground meat, defrosted fries, iceberg lettuce shipped from who-knew-where. “How do you like it?” my host asked.

There was so much to the question, and so little I felt I could say without offending him. The problems of big food can seem so entrenched, it’s hard to know where to begin. Carlo Petrini has found the starting point, and he’s invited us to join him. Meantime—capon, anyone?