This week, I read Slow Food and the Politics of “Virtuous Globalization”, and I must say, it was quite boring, and there’s no way I could recommend this to anyone who wants to read it for fun. There were some very interesting bits, but those were not very often, and oftentimes, when I read this article, I had to take an espresso shot just to stay awake. Alison Leitch very rarely uses personal anecdotes and chose to go with a mostly analytical analysis of Slow Food. Yet, I would like to talk about the things I liked about this article, but also the things I didn’t like. 

To start off, I will talk about the things I liked. This paragraph may be short, but I think any unbiased

review of anything should include the parts that are done well. To start, I do think that Alison does a very good job analyzing the history of slow food and why is started up. She brings up very specific points in history that legitimately

lead to the creation of Slow Food. This is imperative to any essay, because any author can make a fun, interesting piece, but unless it is based in truth, it cannot be viable in the assessment of its topic. She talks about the fact most people think that slow food is just a protest of fast food, but it is so much more than that. It was a continuation of the socialist idealism that was starting to spring up in Italy and many other European countries. Oftentimes I am critical of people who unnecessarily dive deeper into things just to feel like they are different, yet I think this deeper dive is worth diving into. Alison also talks about the rise of fast food due to uncertainty of food because of the wine situation
and Chernobyl, both causing distrust in government by the majority of people. People were panicking about their food, so people turned to capitalist chains like McDonalds because people knew they were safe. These were all so important to the rise of slow food, and it was interesting to learn.

Yet on the other hand, I was very bored with the article. The author fails to make this article interesting for me. As someone who loves history and whatnot, I couldn’t help but stop every couple paragraphs due to how boring it was. The word choice was bland, the sentences seemed to just go on forever, and there wasn’t any personality in the majority of the article. It really was hard to read. That isn’t to say its not worth reading, but I just couldn’t recommend this to anyone and feel good about myself. It

was only 12 pages, but it seemed to take me hours to read. As interesting as slow food can be, this article is the opposite. I came into reading this hoping that I would like it, but there was no way I could.