Slow food and the politics of pork fat: Italian, food and European identity

This paper explores the emergence of the Slow Food Movement, an international-consumer movement dedicated to the protection of 'endangered foods.' The history of one of these 'endangered foods', lardo di Colonnata, provides the ethnographic, window through which I examine-Slow Food's cultural politics. The paper seeks to understand the politics of 'slowness' within current debates over European identity, critiques of neo-liberal models of rationality, and the significant ideological shift towards market driven politics in advanced capitalist societies.