The Writer Who Foresaw Slow Food

In exploring Joseph Conrad’s general views, political ideas and sentimental feelings on food, the aim of this chapter is to analyze how the Polish British writer thought about what we eat and how his conception anticipated perspectives on food that are widespread and popular today, especially thanks to the work of the Slow Food movement. Conrad and Slow Food never met each other, as Conrad died in 1924 and Slow Food originated in the second part of the 1980s. Slow Food, a movement rooted in themes of localism, is considered to be a reaction to globalized system of food distribution and the 1980s success of the fast food industry. In analyzing Conrad’s perspectives on food, this chapter finds that many of Slow Food’s ideas were, in fact, already present in the work of the novelist and that the roots of the movement can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century.