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The visit to Prairie Fruits Farm, which took place the day after Petrini’s speech before more than 500 at Northwestern Law School, was arranged by Slow Food Chicago, and a set designer couldn’t have manufactured a more perfect pastorality for the Illinois stop of his book tour. Four baby goats frolicked on the lawn, while on the other side of the table a plump speckled Sussex hen clucked and pecked in grass. In attendance were some of the local celebrity farmers championed by the group. There were John and Connie Caveny, Monticello producers of Bourbon Red turkeys and Rouen ducks. Henry Brockman, a fixture at the Evanston farmers’ market was there, and Stan Schutte–named 2006 Farmer of the Year by the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service–was grilling brats with his son on a giant rig beside the driveway. Hosts Leslie Cooperband and Wes Jarrell make the only farmstead cheese in Illinois, which means it is made on the premises with milk from their own goats. These farmers were the real deal. One had arrived with an ugly purple lump on his lower lip, the result of a kick from one of his sheep.
Petrini was accompanied by a small entourage of young organization staffers, including Erika Lesser, director of Slow Food USA. The day before she sat with her hands folded, translating, while Petrini wandered the Northwestern stage, addressing the audience as much with his hands as with his words. An Italian woman later described his oratory, heavily inflected with the idiom of his Piedmont hometown of Bra, as like that of an politician from the 70s, colorful and a little old fashioned. “Cursed be those that reduce gastronomy to the spoon and pot!” he declaimed, meaning those who imagine gastronomy as a narrow focus on recipes and cookbooks rather than the multidisciplinary science he proposes will save the world from itself.
Still, critics of the Slow Food movement, wonder how a dismantling of the agro-industrial complex capable of producing lots of cheap, low-quality food will feed the world. As befits the name of his organization he’s not in much of a hurry. All of this will happen slowly, he said, at a manageable scale. He’s not advocating a Pol Pot-style agrarian revolution–these are market-driven solutions, after all–though some of his rhetoric contains a revolutionary whiff of the late-60s Italian left from whence he came. “We need to increase the number of farmers,” he pronounced. “This is how we will prevail over the capitalist-industrial system!”
