We all go to the same place. Let us go there slowly.

The Ingredients of Slow Food

"Have you heard the joke about the turtle and the snail?" deadpans Patrick Martins, 28, president of Slow Food's U.S. operations, as he sips his espresso in a cafe in Bra. "In the middle of the forest, a turtle and a snail have a gruesome head-on collision. The snail is rushed to the emergency room, where a doctor asks what happened. On the edge of consciousness, the snail responds, 'I don't know, Doc. It all happened so fast.' "

Martins, a gastronome who wrote his master's thesis on the politics of medieval food sculpture when he was attending the Tisch School at New York University, speaks slowly and deliberately. Having delivered the punch line, he smiles liberally -- a New Yorker who admits that he's lost some of his island edginess after two years in this small town nestled in the hills of the Piedmont region of Italy. "Just the type of joke you'd imagine we'd tell around here, right?"

Sure, considering Slow Food's penchant for all things slow. Not to mention that it is one of the few organizations in the world to select the snail as its logo and ideological symbol. The mollusk is featured in the windows of Italian eateries, known locally as osterie, throughout the country -- a beacon to those looking for genuine, traditional, local cooking. It also happens to adorn everything that comes out of the office of Slow Food Editore, the organization's publishing arm. The folks at Slow Food are anything but slow when it comes to spreading the word. The organization publishes a wide range of materials: "The Snail," a newsletter that is distributed to all 60,000 members worldwide; "Slow: The International Herald of Tastes," a quarterly magazine published in five languages; and several prestigious food and wine guides, such as "Osterie d'Italia" and "Vini d'Italia."

After publishing Guida ai Vini del Mondo, a 1,250-page wine guide that describes 2,000 vineyards and 6,500 wines in 30 countries, Slow Food decided to embark on an equally ambitious project: the creation of an online catalogue of the world's artisanal food products and producers. "We plan to build a worldwide network of artisanal and traditional foods, and to use our network to promote those foods," explains Renato Sardo, 31, director of Slow Food International, which is responsible for coordinating all of the organization's offices and events. "Eventually, we want to offer people an entirely new food-production-and-distribution model -- an alternative to the current big-scale, industrialized model."

So, yes, the joke about the turtle and the snail is the type of joke that you'd imagine hearing in the courtyard of Slow Food's villa on Via della Mendicita Istruita. The joke becomes poignant when you realize that Slow Food traces its origins back to what began, Martins says, as something of a not-so-funny joke. In 1986, McDonald's opened a restaurant at the base of the Spanish Steps in Rome's Piazza di Spagna. Petrini -- who at the time was both a journalist and head of Arcigola, a nonprofit food-and-wine association that he had cofounded -- was outraged. "Petrini loathed the idea of the ugly, neon, golden arches looming large in the middle of this beautiful square," says Martins. "Plus, he was outraged by the odor of fried food." So Petrini and a group of his leftist-intellectual friends protested and arrived at what Petrini calls an "Italian compromise": McDonald's removed its golden arches but continued to feed the Romans.

Over the years, Slow Food has evolved from a gourmet organization concerned solely with exalting food and drink to a movement with a mission to promote food diversity and to prevent the extinction of domestic animals, plants, fruits, and vegetables. In the Slow Food worldview, a loss of diversity -- driven largely by our obsession with speed -- means a gain of one thing: a bland, new world. "At the beginning of the century, for instance, there were about 200 varieties of artichokes in Italy," says Sardo. "Now there are only about a dozen. Each day, we lose several varieties of vegetable or animal species. Not only does that have huge gastronomic implications, threatening the diversification of taste, but it also has profound ecological implications." Given those implications, Petrini and his crew have coined the term "ecogastronomy."

Slow Food has launched two projects under its ecogastronomy banner: the Ark of Taste and the Slow Food Praesidia. The Ark of Taste aims to save and protect small-scale, quality food production from industrial standardization and, as Martins explains, "from hyperhygienist legislation, the rules of modern retail systems, and a modernity which meets 95% of the world's food requirements with fewer than 30 plants." Like Noah shepherding animals onto his ark, Slow Food places certain near-extinct foods on a list: lentils from Abruzzi; potatoes from Liguria; Pardigone plums from the French Alps; Firiki apples from Greece; Sun Crest peaches from northern California. Once a product makes the Ark of Taste list, Slow Food begins promoting that item through its network. For example, the organization was instrumental in getting Time magazine to write about the Sun Crest peach, a fruit with a sublime taste but a poor tolerance for travel. The result? Thousands of people contacted the small producer to sample its juicy gem.