In American food literature, discussions and portrayals of local, organic, and slow food often rely more on its aesthetic than its practical value. Nowhere is this transcendent quality more in evidence than in the “back-to-the-land” narrative. Often part polemic against industrialization, part nostalgic yearning for tradition, part tale of personal growth, and part practical guide, this genre reveals the many cultural and philosophical influences that converge on the newly minted, yet deeply rooted, American slow food movement. My research focused on how four back-to-the-land narratives – Second Nature (Michael Pollan), Coming Home to Eat (Gary Paul Nabhan), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver), and The Good Life (Scott and Helen Nearing) – engage with these influences to reveal the structure of a growing cultural phenomenon.

I first established the two central paradigms guiding how Americans relate to nature: Romanticism, championed by Thoreau, and agrarianism, by Jefferson. Though these two ideologies contradict one another in their conception of how humans should behave in nature, they have equally shaped the American psyche and consequently the American slow food movement. Because slow food is deeply associated with the health of the earth and soil, understanding our historical relationship to the land was essential in understanding how we view slow food today. The remainder of the paper delved into more specific cultural aspects of slow food, such as back-to-the-landers’ tendency to idealize and to appropriate other food cultures – namely Native American and Italian – in constructing a vision for American slow food. I also discussed how slow food has defined a strict moral and aesthetic code that determines the “goodness” of foods and agricultural practices according to a “slow” ideology.

Ultimately, I concluded that the extent to which slow food has developed with respect to American history and culture suggests that it could become a compelling alternative to the reigning industrial food system. Not only does slow food hearken to beloved American concepts like Thoreau’s wilderness and Jefferson’s self-sufficient agricultural nation, but it also responds to specific cultural impulses today, particularly the “green” movement and ensuing backlash against industrialization. As a result, I believe slow food is poised to gain even greater prominence in society and acceptance in our collective consciousness.

After introducing the concept of interrelation between nature and agriculture, in later sections of my paper I decided to focus on how the slow food movement as imagined in back-to-the-land narratives constructs itself. While researching in Italy, I had been attentive to how the local food producers that we visited chose to portray themselves and their mission: what words did they use? What aspects of their work did they emphasize? How did they talk about other types of food, such as industrial or home-grown (unlike back-to-the-landers’, their products were being sold rather than consumed on the premises)? These questions placed me in a frame of mind to look at slow food critically, as an ideology filled with contradictions and inconsistencies that its advocates attempt to present in its best possible light. Like any other passionate group that claims to have the solution to social problems – democrats, republicans, proponents of anything from home-schooling to universal healthcare – slow food must sell itself in order to reach a broad audience and win converts.

At the most basic level, slow food portrays itself as “good”: morally, spiritually, physically, and socially good. Many advocates speak of going back to the land as a “cure” for our culture’s ills, and also as a “restorative” for the individual’s mind and body. These claims certainly have at least some basis in reality, and as a supporter of local and organic agriculture myself I am not one to argue with anything that encourages more people to do the same. However, in slow food the emphasis on the good is so preponderant that it could ultimately become problematic. At Coppini Arte Olearia, an olive oil museum operated by oil distributor Paulo Coppini in Parma, I had the opportunity to consider this potential.

The sheer existence of an olive oil museum speaks to the bond traditional foods forge between past and present, and the sense of food history as social history; olive oil presses from centuries ago approaching the present were displayed side-by-side in a massive oil-based timeline of cultural evolution. Oil even afforded a connection to Biblical history, as marble columns displaying gospel verses on oil’s sacramental nature suggested. However, binding a food so tightly into a culture’s history can, to my mind, be risky. If foods such as olive oil are deemed inherently “slow” by association with the “goods” that slow food claims – tradition, authenticity, nativity – there is a risk that industrially-produced oil will co-opt that traditional label without the consumer’s knowledge. Furthermore, linking “traditional” and “good” is doubly dicey in that tradition itself is not an unquestionable good; for example, a video of Coppini’s olive groves in Sicily showed workers gathering to harvest the fruits by hand. Though the harvest had the air of a community cheerfully coming together in shared labor, the workers’ dress indicated that they themselves could have ill afforded Coppini’s bottles. Do traditional methods reproduce a feudal class system of peasants and masters? The danger of nostalgia lies in blinding us to tradition’s hidden wrongs; after all, female subservience was once defended as “traditional.” This is not to say, by any means, that I believe Paulo mistreats his workers; however, seeing how his olive oil was produced and marketed and later reading slow food literature allowed me to consider issues I never had before. In framing itself as an unmitigated good, a cure for all that ails us in society, slow food runs the risk of constructing a seemingly inherent association between “good” and the foods or ideas that slow food tends to ally itself with. That link could easily lead to whitewashing as “good” extends its sanctifying umbrella over things we would do better to question.

Narrowing down my literary sources to a manageable number was surprisingly challenging, considering my initial worries about finding enough material for this project! I ultimately decided to focus not on food literature in general, which is a vast genre spanning everything from restaurant reviews to chefs’ memoirs to advertising on food packaging to cookbooks, but on back-to-the-land narratives. I realized that this was an identifiable category of literature that may never before have been taken as a whole; furthermore, this style has had a strong presence throughout American history. It was fascinating to draw connections between writings by such great American thinkers on farming and nature as Jefferson and Thoreau, and modern authors like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.

I also chose to focus on works by back-to-the-landers – people who choose to remove themselves from the industrial food system and live “slow” and self-sufficiently – because their writings allowed me to explore interconnection between the land and food. More than any other dietary ideology, slow food preserves and advertises its close connection with the earth. This immediate rapport between land and food, to the point that writers often speak of food inheriting the land’s characteristics (a phenomenon known as terroir) suggests that our relationship to the world around us deeply informs our relationship to slow food. In fact, this is the very premise of the back-to-the-lander; in order to fully experience slow food, they insist on the necessity of growing it themselves, communing with the dirt from which they draw sustenance (rather than purchasing local and organic foods from one of many other sources, such as farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture programs). Thus, I found myself beginning my paper not at the dinner table where slow food is consumed, but in the garden where it is produced. Recognizing the connection between nature and agriculture was key for me in understanding how thinkers such as Thoreau, who disapproved of farming’s drive to subdue the wilderness, could have influenced slow food.

Starting with the garden also allowed me to suggest larger themes of the dichotomy between nature and culture, and where farming and particularly local/organic farming fits into that binary. That overarching conflict was at times difficult to grasp, but I was able to turn to modern philosophers whom I had read in classes, and who did not directly write about food but were nonetheless influential in my thinking about it. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes were both unexpectedly useful in defining and discussing such abstract terms as “nature” and “culture,” terms on which my paper relies but are notoriously difficult to pin down. As I develop and revise this paper, I hope to share more surprising themes that develop!