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Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European
Identity by Alison Leitch
• an international consumer movement dedicated to the
protection of “endangered foods”
• lardo (pork fat) nominated as a key example of an “endangered
food”
• In America fat is regarded as poison but in Europe it was a
delicacy
• Slow food has a snail as its logo, and it outlines its dedication to
the politics and pleasures of slowness and its opposition to the
fast life
• Food has a potency as a political symbol particularly in periods
of great economic and social change
• Collective action around food are often motivated by ideas of
social justice within moral economics, rather than more
pragmatic concerns such as hunger or scarcity
• Food and other items of consumption have been central as
cultural symbols in colonial and post-colonial nationalist
struggles
• Deepening concerns in Europe over food and policy are linked to
questions of European identity, indeed with moral economies
and with the imagination of Europe’s future as well as its past
• Slow food is a response
• Lardo was an essential daily source of calorific energy in the
quarry worker’s diet
• Lardo was though to quell thirst as well as hunger and was
appreciated for its coolness on hot summer days
• Lardo was adopted for a cure for any number of health ailments
• Lardo can be seen as the perfect culinary analog of a block of
marble- both materials convey parallel ideas of metamorphosis
• Marble allows the pork fat to breathe while at the same time
containing the curing brine
• the calcium carbonate in the marble is a purificatory medium
which extracts harmful substances from pork fat, including
cholesterol
• lardo takes 6-9 months to make
• slow food started to imagine itself as an international
organization concerned with the global protection of food tastes
• a threat to lardo was copying of it by lardo wholesalers
• lardo is no longer an element in local diets but now a luxury food
element privately patented by a group of people who may be
entitled to sell the recipe
• haute cuisine has become a new metaphorical reference point
for the reappraisal of indicidual, local and national identities
• slowness becomes a metaphor for a politics of place: a
philosophy complexly concerned with the defence of local
cultural heritage etc
• food is no longer a private pleasure