The Piedmontese visionary, Carlo Petrini, who turned a protest against McDonald’s into a global food philosophy leaves behind a movement active in 160 countries and an enduring legacy of culinary conscience.
Carlo Petrini, the Italian food activist, journalist, and writer who founded the Slow Food movement, died on Thursday in his hometown of Bra, in the Piedmontese countryside where his life’s work began. He was 76. No cause of death was given by the organisation, though Petrini had revealed in recent years that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
The death was announced by Slow Food on Friday, triggering an immediate outpouring of tributes from Italian political leaders and from the international network of farmers, food producers, and activists whose lives he shaped.
From a Roman piazza to 160 countries
Slow Food was set up in 1986 in protest against McDonald’s opening of its first fast food restaurant in Italy, in Rome’s historic centre. What began as a group of friends and food lovers rallying against the incursion of industrialised eating into Italian culture rapidly became something far larger. The movement spread to 160 countries in its mission to promote good taste, defend biodiversity, and promote a healthy food model that respects the environment and local cultures.
The organisation’s guiding philosophy was distilled into three words: good, clean, and fair. Food should taste of something. Its production should not damage the planet. And those who grow and make it should be justly rewarded. It was a deceptively simple manifesto that proved to have enormous reach.
Petrini told AFP in a 2016 interview, “The most important work Slow Food has done is to restore the concept of gastronomy to its holistic, multidisciplinary form. The idea of gastronomy as merely recipes and Michelin stars is a very limited one.”
What the Slow Food movement built
Over four decades, Slow Food grew from a grassroots protest into a sophisticated international institution. It now has over 100,000 members and more than 1,500 local chapters — known as convivia — worldwide.
Among its most significant initiatives is the Ark of Taste, launched at the first Salone del Gusto in Turin in 1996. It is a biennial international fair dedicated to small-scale food producers reflecting local culinary traditions. The Ark of Taste is a global catalogue of food biodiversity at risk of extinction due to the pressure of the industrial food system and the standardisation of diets. It functions as a kind of living inventory of threatened flavours: heirloom varieties, ancient breeds, artisan products, and regional preparations that risk disappearing not through natural causes but through the homogenising pressure of industrial food production. More than 2,000 products from over 100 countries have been identified and catalogued under the project.
Alongside the Salone del Gusto, Petrini founded Terra Madre, the international network and biennial gathering that draws more than 5,000 farmers and food producers from around the world to discuss their work and methods of improvement. Terra Madre is now widely regarded as the largest international event dedicated to food politics, sustainable agriculture, and the environment, organised by Slow Food, the Piedmont Region, and the City of Turin.
He also established the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, near Bra. It was the first institution in the world to offer academic degrees in the study of food as a cultural, environmental, and political phenomenon. Through his campaigning, Petrini became friends with King Charles III and the late Pope Francis. In 2004 he was named a hero of the year by Time magazine.
Petrini led Slow Food as president until 2022.
The organisation’s tribute
Slow Food described its founder as “a visionary leader and public intellectual with a profound commitment to the common good, human relationships, and the natural world.” The statement praised his ability to connect “communities, farmers, food artisans, cooks, activists, and young people across the world” through a shared vision of food as culture, not commodity.
The organisation cited a phrase Petrini returned to throughout his life: “Those who sow utopia reap reality.” “He firmly believed that dreams and visions, when they are just, capable of inspiring collective participation, and pursued with conviction, are not impossible to achieve. He combined the ability to dream with a deep sense of joy and collective purpose, paving concrete paths toward social change.”
The Slow Food statement noted that he knew how to dream and have fun, to build and inspire, “working with people — young people in particular — towards tangible social redemption, and calling for fraternity, emotional intelligence and a disciplined anarchy.”
Mattarella and Meloni pay tribute
President Mattarella called Petrini’s death a loss not only for the world of food and wine, but for Italian society and beyond. “His insights and constant advocacy for sustainability, the need to preserve traditions, the valorisation of local cultures, and respect for the environment have generated a new awareness of food culture and its production, inspired by criteria of quality, authenticity, and ethics,” Mattarella said.
Premier Giorgia Meloni offered her own tribute. She described Petrini as “a visionary, an innovator, a man ahead of his time” who had “left a profound mark on the Italian agri-food and gastronomic collective consciousness.” Meloni noted that Petrini was “among the first to promote the concept of food sovereignty and to defend the right to quality food for all, enhancing the connection between identity, territory, and traditions.” She added that the government had formally recognised his contribution by awarding him the title of Master of the Art of Italian Cuisine.
Nicola Zingaretti, head of the PD delegation in the European Parliament, wrote on social media: “Goodbye Carlo, gentle visionary who explained to the world how wrong it is to live only to consume life and the planet. Thank you for standing alongside the least of the Earth with passion. With your concrete ideas you pointed to a better path… the common good, respect and love for the land are revolutionary and change things for the better.”
Carlo Petrini is survived by the movement he built and the millions of people, in Italy and across the world, who will continue to consider their food choices because of him.
