Abstract
Slow Food is an Italy-based international organization that aims to save the varieties, breeds, and foods threatened by the standardization and homogenization of agriculture resulting from the widespread use of conventional practices. Through an analysis of one of Slow Food’s projects, a Basque Presidium, this paper examines the effects of Slow Food’s efforts on the products, producers, and agrobiodiversity it is trying to save. Drawing upon Igor Kopytoff’s descriptions of commoditization as process, this paper argues that the products and the values they embody, which Slow Food has identified for their singularity, are commoditized through a variety of mechanisms. This paper then argues that commoditization makes the endeavors of Slow Food resemble the conventional agricultural system it is trying to oppose, as well as undermining the very agrobiodiversity the organization seeks to protect. These effects create a disconnect between the organization’s goals and its actions on-the-ground, indicating that Slow Food is not as alternative as it claims to be. This paper ends by examining Slow Food’s role within the overall agricultural system, and suggests that the organization’s producers are important guardians of the global agrobiodiversity which conventional production erodes.
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Notes
Name has been changed.
In this paper, the term “alternative” is used to describe efforts to create patterns of production, distribution, and consumption that are different from those of the dominant type of agriculture. It is not used in the way that Sonnino and Marsden (2006, p. 192) do when they ask whether new food strategies are “significantly oppositional—i.e., limited in their efforts to incremental erosion at the edges of political-economic structures that constitute the agri-food landscape—or are they primarily alternative—i.e., seeking to create a new and more autonomous structural configuration.” Slow Food does not aim to make a new system or create one with “alternative conceptions to a hegemonic and all-conquering ‘global capitalist economy,’” but rather aims to change characteristics of the current one (Leyshon et al. 2003, p. 6). Slow Food, for example, does not oppose or shun globalization, a hallmark of contemporary neoliberal economics; it wishes instead to make a “virtuous globalization” in which farmers from across the globe participate in a good, clean, and fair agriculture and in an international market (Petrini 2006).
Given that the focus of the paper is on the commoditization of value, the discussion on taste does not attempt to theorize ways that Slow Food’s products become symbols of good taste, understood as the culturally-defined habits and attributes of a subsection of society, often times the élite. Slow Food products do become symbols of good taste, and this fact often leads to accusations of elitism, but that discussion is not within the scope of this paper.
Crossing between different breeds is also important because it protects against genetic bottlenecks. Genetic bottlenecks are undesirable because over time a population becomes more vulnerable to disease and disturbance as the gene pool is reduced, and because they decrease the fitness of a population.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the Program in Agrarian Studies and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for funding the research that supported this paper. I thank Carol Carpenter, Michael Dove, Jim Scott, Adrián Cerezo, Valentine Cadieux, and Stephanie Paige Ogburn for their invaluable comments and critiques on earlier drafts. I thank Sara Tramontini, Germán Arrien, Mariano Gómez, and the Slow Food Basque Country producers for hosting me in Italy and in the Basque Country.
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Lotti, A. The commoditization of products and taste: Slow Food and the conservation of agrobiodiversity. Agric Hum Values 27, 71–83 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9213-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9213-x