Paper short abstract:

I propose a critical analysis of the role of the Slow Food movement as an 'ethical food' management agency in the contemporary Tuscany. I will focus on the practices and rhetoric that Slow Food produces from below, where the movement's philosophy encounters the local capital.

Paper long abstract:

I propose a critical analysis of the role of the Slow Food movement as an 'ethical food' management agency, based on the results of a broader research I conducted in Tuscany on the heritage process of traditional food. Slow Food creates strategies to protect local heritage as an alternative ethical paradigm to globalised consumption. The patrimonial goods relaunched by Slow Food stand for "certainty" because they are protected by a brand which guarantees place of origin and production techniques.

Typical products have become a metaphor for ethical consumption embodying immaterial attributes such as naturalness, historical authenticity, territory, social justice etc.

I will also discuss the practices and rhetoric that Slow Food produces from below, or in other words, where the movement's philosophy (or rhetoric) encounters local social, historic an economic capital.

From the research results it appears that ethical consumption meets individual rather than collective needs. In Tuscany, issues of social justice and relaunch of marginal productions seem to be overshadowed by the aesthetic value given to objects (and subjects) involved in this consumption.

The question that comes to mind is whether products invested with immaterial surplus, such as ethical values, represent a possible alternative to the global crisis. For now they remain "trapped" in a consumption of distinction and personal well-being which Slow Food, as agency, helps to produce.