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"We have lost our sense of time," intones Carlo Petrini, in mellifluous Italian. "We believe that we can add meaning to life by making things go faster. We have an idea that life is short -- and that we must go fast to fit everything in. But life is long. The problem is that we don't know how to spend our time wisely. And so we burn it."

In an age of acceleration, Petrini, 50, is a staunch champion of all things slow. Over the past 14 years, he has built an international organization in reaction to the stark reality that, as a culture, we have become enslaved by speed and have succumbed to what his group's manifesto calls an "insidious virus: Fast Life."

Slow Food, a Bra, Italy-based nonprofit organization with more than 60,000 members in 35 countries, promotes and defends "slow," local, artisanal food traditions that have become victims of speed, technology, supermarket standardization, and homogenization. And this slow movement is growing fast. Slow Food recently opened an office in New York City -- adding to its network of offices in Germany, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, and Switzerland -- and will expand into France in 2001. Among its members, Slow Food boasts food luminaries from around the world, including Alice Waters, owner of Berkeley's Chez Panisse, as well as such bigwigs as Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema and 1997 Nobel laureate in literature (and friend of Petrini) Dario Fo.

But the backbone of the movement is what Slow Food calls its Convivia -- grassroots, transcontinental, "hypercaloric" groups of people from Sweden to Turkey, from Australia to South Africa, and from Singapore to Silicon Valley. Convivia members meet regularly to achieve back-to-basics goals: to have fun, to spread the Slow Food philosophy, to promote local traditions and superior local products, and to immerse themselves in pleasure. It's an epicurean's ideal. At the root of these hedonistic activities, however, is something more profound: a fundamental desire not to forgo what makes us human, a sense of our natural rhythms, and a participation in the simple rituals of life.

The carefully cooked ideas behind Slow Food are beginning to appeal to people outside gourmand circles. These ideas are a feast for those hungry for a respite from the blur of a connected economy -- and, as Petrini puts it, an antidote "to the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency." How so? As the group's manifesto (which was ratified in Paris by delegates from 15 countries) proclaims: "A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life."

Ah, la bella vita. Leave it to the Italians to create an organization devoted, as its Web site states, to "the Defense of and the Right to Pleasure." And where better to begin this firm defense than at the table -- with the quiet material pleasure of food? Slow food.

But Petrini, a charismatic Italian who looks as if he has just walked off the set of a Fellini movie, explains that Slow Food is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to the homogeneity of fast food; it's a call for serious consideration of the effect that speed has on our lives. "Fast food is not our enemy," he says. "We can all eat as we want. If we have an enemy, it is the abnormal rhythms in which we are living our lives."