John Pattison: From Slow Food to Slow Church

<p>In 1986, the Italian journalist Carlo Petrini organized a protest of the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Holding bowls of penne pasta, the protestors chanted, “We don’t want fast food, we want slow food.” </p> <p>By one standard, the protest was unsuccessful: the McDonald’s opened as planned. (It was apparently <a href='https://www.lifeinitaly.com/culture/business/mc-donalds/'>such a big deal</a> that teenagers “nearly stormed the restaurant, stopping traffic and causing havoc in the streets.”) Yet not all was lost, because out of that demonstration was birthed <a href='https://www.slowfood.com/'>Slow Food</a>, an international movement that now has 150,000 members worldwide. Slow Food helps save endangered foods and food traditions, promotes local food and drink, and re-educates industrialized eaters on how to enjoy real food again. We’re so far removed from where our food comes from that we literally have to re-learn how to taste.</p> <p>Slow Food has also gone on to inspire other Slow movements, including <a href='https://slowmoney.org/'>Slow Money</a> and <a href='https://www.cittaslow.org/'>Slow Cities</a>. While these movements differ in subject, scope, and strategy, what they have in common is their opposition to what the sociologist George Ritzer described as McDonaldization, or “the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society.” Ritzer identified four core values of McDonaldization:</p> <ol><li style="font-weight:400;">Efficiency</li> <li style="font-weight:400;">Predictability</li> <li style="font-weight:400;">Calculability (a focus on countable results)</li> <li style="font-weight:400;">and Control, which runs through all the others.</li> </ol><p>Food, money, and cities aren’t, of course, the only areas of life to have ceded ground to the <a href='https://bookshop.org/books/in-praise-of-slowness-challenging-the-cult-of-speed/9780060750510'>“cult of speed.”</a> According to