In their emphasis on personal responsibility and the central role of community Slow Food and Pope Francis appear to be less distant that one may think. Food and pleasure provide a shared terrain to discuss sustainability, biodiversity, and other urgent issues.

“There is a great variety of small-scale food production systems which feed the greater part of the world’s peoples, using a modest amount of land and producing less waste, be it in small agricultural parcels, in orchards and gardens, hunting and wild harvesting or local fishing. Economies of scale, especially in the agricultural sector, end up forcing smallholders to sell their land or to abandon their traditional crops. Their attempts to move to other, more diversified, means of production prove fruitless because of the difficulty of linkage with regional and global markets, or because the infrastructure for sales and transport is geared to larger businesses. Civil authorities have the right and duty to adopt clear and firm measures in support of small producers and differentiated production.”

With their focus on systemic issues and politics, these words would fit perfectly in any food activism manifesto or in declarations from the camp of the so-called “food movement.” Instead, they are an excerpt (section 129) of the Pontifical encyclical letter Laudato si’ (Praise be to you), published by Pope Francis in May 2015. This paragraph is followed by a discussion about biotechnology and a whole chapter on “integral ecology,” “one which clearly respects its human and social dimensions” (section 137)  The title of the encyclical comes from the thirteenth-century Canticle of the Sun, a poem (among the first ones in Italian) by Francis of Assisi, a figure in the history of the Catholic Church that is well known both for his close relationship with nature and his critique of the social inequalities of his time, which he implicitly condemned by embracing poverty as his call.

Considering these premises, it comes as no surprise that Carlo Petrini, founder and leader of the international association Slow Food, recently published Terrafutura (future earth), a book — so far only available in Italian — that contains three interviews he held with Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, between 2018 and 2020. The conversations between the two are followed by five essays that Petrini penned on themes such as biodiversity, economy, migrations, education, and community, each followed by documents by Francis on the same topic.

The very structure of the book clearly indicates dialogue as the main mode of communication between the two men — “an agnostic and a Pope, a former communist and a catholic, an Italian and an Argentinian, a gastronome and a theologian” (18), as Petrini states in the introduction of the book. They are also representative of two very different organizations, with distinctive goals and values which, nevertheless, seem to overlap in their approach to quite a few contemporary issues.

The book came under the spotlight of international media for one single passage, which I translate in its entirety, in which the Pope declares responding to Petrini’s jab on the Church’s historical position about pleasure: “The Church has condemned inhuman, coarse, vulgar pleasure, but instead it always accepted human, sober, moral pleasure. Pleasure comes directly from God, it is neither catholic nor Christian, it is simply divine. The pleasure from eating allows to keep ourselves in good health, just like sexual pleasure is meant to make love more beautiful and to guarantee the continuation of the species. What you say refers to a bigoted morality, a kind of moralism that does not make sense and that at most could have been, in certain epochs, a bad interpretation of the Christian message. On the contrary, both eating pleasure and sexual pleasure come from God” (59)

Although such reflections do not particularly surprise in Pope Francis’s discourse, they have raised quite a few highbrows in that they seem to deny centuries of Church history in which sexuality and pleasure were vehemently denied and even prosecuted. To this day, many currents in the Church still stick to these perspectives. The Pope’s attempts to project his own take about these issues on the past of the institution he now leads and is ostensibly trying to change are likely to rub many in the wrong way.

That said, in the interviews Bergoglio seems to show great appreciation for food. Besides swapping memories with Petrini about their family cooking traditions and the culinary skills of their grandmothers’ from Piedmont, he says: “Food is a tool of conviviality; to break bread is the most emblematic gesture, you break bread and give it to your guest first, you share it” (55) This appreciation resonates well with Slow Food’s strive to achieve the goal of “good, clean, and fair food” for everybody.

As I discussed elsewhere, the attention to food pleasure as a path to changing contemporary life has been part of the Slow Food DNA since its inception. Its 1989 manifesto reads: “A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude that mistake frenzy for efficiency. Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food.” From the beginning, this attitude draw criticism from the Left and, to this days, the association is often accused of elitism, despite its growing commitment to social justice, agrobiodiversity, and sustainability.

Petrini identifies four important points in his reading of Laudato si’: “the concept of integral ecology, dialogue as a method, biodiversity as a value and, maybe the node that most fascinated me, the value of good individual practices in generating virtuous changes” (29). He further explains the concept: “Every day, we all make individual choices that nevertheless have an impact at the global level, they are never neutral. Choosing one’s food is one of such choices, it is a powerful mechanism forchange: it means to reward one productive and economic model rather than another.” Despite the role that community and communal action play in the organization, Slow Food at times seems to consider its members more as consumers –albeit responsible and well-informed ones– than as citizens, highlighting the “vote with your wallet” approach. In this, Slow Food’s approach is not very different from the Catholic Church’s emphasis on personal ethos and individual choices as the road to salvation and a Heaven to come.

In fact, imagining a different future has been a way for Slow Food to engage with its members. In this, its tenets not very different from the revolutionary ideals of many of its original members from the Leftist parties, who fought for a classless society, and from the Church’s focus on the afterlife, often offered to counterbalance the injustice and sufferance during our mortal life. As the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai observed, imagination and fantasy have become fundamental social practices, which play an important role in daily life especially through the media.

From this point of view, Slow Food uses the horizon of gastronomy to engage citizens and coach them into action. By creating projections for the future, envisioning alternate realities, and generating all kinds of desires, attachments and aspirations, Slow Food intends to demonstrate that culinary imaginaries – both individual and communal – can provide an important basis for mobilization and activism. In this sense, these imaginaries are deeply political, because they constitute an organized field of social practices and discourse. The association has built a new gastronomic imaginary around daily experiences, in particular around the quiet enjoyment of food consumed in good company, with all the connotations of authenticity, nostalgia, and cultural heritage that are inherent to it. Pleasure is at the center of Slow Food’s imaginary not to numb the intellect, but to let the spirit participate more intensely in the life of the body, transformed into a hermeneutical key.

This is another important value that Petrini and Francis seem to share. The Pope observes in one of the interviews: “Today we observe some degenerations, when it comes to food. In a time of opulence, we sometimes exaggerate, on the one hand by spectacularizing of the act of eating, on the other hand by adopting a ravenous and unbridled attitude… This attitude is an expression of fundamental egoism and individualism because it considers food for food, putting it at its center instead of the relationship with other people, toward which food should instead be a tool” (55). Petrini echoes these concerns: “When Slow Food was born, it defined itself in its manifesto, among other things, as ‘a movement for the protection and the right to pleasure.’ But we had in mind a pleasure that is not crapula (here Petrini uses the Italian word that means intemperance and excessive indulgence), a pleasure that is not abundance but temperance. In crapula, as you were saying before, there is no pleasure but greed” (59). Both men points to pleasure as an important ethical dimension toward community ties, one that is fundamentally positive if it is not just an expression of self-centeredness. The more anarchic and disruptive aspects of pleasure, as well as it potential to destabilize mores and institution, are not taken into consideration.

Although I have limited myself to just a few of the themes emerging in the interviews, there is so much more in this book that deserves attention: the conversations about the Laudato Si’ communities, recently launched by Slow Food with a strong emphasis on sustainability, migrations, populism, neoliberalism and globalization. Petrini’s essays and their counterpoints in Pope Francis’ texts are rich and complex. Maybe another time…