Carlo Petrini, the Italian gastronome and journalist who founded the Slow Food movement in 1986 as a response to the opening of a McDonald's in Rome's Piazza di Spagna, died on Friday May 22 at his home in Bra, in Piedmont, at the age of 76. [1] His Slow Food International confirmed the death in a statement issued Friday. [2] The movement Petrini built from a manifesto signed by representatives from fifteen countries at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1989 today operates in more than 150 countries with more than 100,000 members and supporters.

Petrini was born in Bra in 1949 and trained as a journalist in the regional Piedmontese press before the founding act that defined his life. The Slow Food Manifesto, signed in Paris in 1989, articulated a philosophy of "good, clean, and fair food" that has since structured everything from the Salone del Gusto biennial fair in Turin to the University of Gastronomic Sciences, which Petrini founded in Pollenzo in October 2004 as the first university devoted to the study of food and culture. The Ark of Taste project — Slow Food's catalogue of more than 6,000 food products identified as at risk of extinction — and the Presidia farmer-protection program are the durable institutional artifacts of Petrini's four decades.

He stepped down from the presidency of Slow Food in 2022 at the eighth International Congress in Pollenzo, after thirty-three years, and was succeeded by Edward Mukiibi, an agronomist from Uganda. [3] Petrini was named a UNEP Champion of the Earth in 2013. He is survived by the movement and by the institutions he built around it.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles