O caminho do caracol: o slow food da realidade à construção da filosofia

Abstract

The food theme in Latin America follows patterns dictated by the world economy and the internal pressures of policies aimed at the commodification of food. Institutions and services directly focused on food production are surrounded by a series of factors that converge to an apparently immutable structure of commodification of food, relationships and resources. In the construction of an alternative reality, Slow Food emerged in Italy in 1980 as a way of opposing the way of life that distanced food production from its real function of maintaining life, whether human or natural resources involved, connecting this bias to a process of social construction capable of boosting it. The scenario built by Slow Food can be characterized as a counter-movement, a space for the construction of alternative development processes. The present research will analyze the Slow Food movement, in the context of counter- movements and its effective participation in the construction of a new concept of development in Latin America. Developed based on qualitative and quantitative research instruments, the study considers the stages of area delimitation, development of field instruments and analysis and discussion of development indicators. The results obtained allow us to characterize Slow Food as a counter- movement. They affirm its importance in the construction of development processes, register its structuring and permeability in the food theme and also its strong connection with family farming and with traditional food production systems, having these as the foundation of food production in the dimensions of the philosophy of the movement. In the results, it was possible to verify a certain distance between the philosophy and the reality of the food producers, the development agents and the institutions that make up the formation network of the movement. The lack of knowledge of the different actors in the network and, transversally, the lack of development agents, facilitators, ATER agents, important for the realization of possible results, makes the philosophy of food centrality in the development processes affirmed by Slow Food distant from the reality of subsistence. and isolation found in the communities visited. An important element, however, is the identification of farmers and technicians with the philosophy of the movement, which makes it possible to map the essential elements of the principles, good, clean and fair, in the daily production and action of these actors and through them to propose actions of strengthening of this counter-movement in Latin America based on safeguarding the food producer.