Story of a Snail, by Luis Sepulveda

Between literature and Slow Food for rethinking food sustainability

Present food system and climate change

“Agriculture and food consumption are among the main threat agents to the environment, with distinctive effects on ecosystem and climate change, water usage, and toxic emissions,” said Slow Food – an international nonprofit association that promotes the value and pleasure of food – in the Position Paper presented at COP21 and at following meetings, based on a study conducted by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

The paper points out that in order to estimate the food system’s effects on climate, it is necessary to consider all the aspects of the supply chain, from production, manufacturing, and distribution to consumption and waste disposal. By evaluating all the different stages, it appears that the agribusiness industry is the main cause of deforestation and, at the same time, of the emission of more than 30 percent of global greenhouse gasses, thus contributing to global warming and biodiversity loss.

Slow Food’s answer

Slow Food’s response to the current system of food production and consumption is as simple as it is disorienting: slow down. In fact, in Slow Food’s Manifesto, first published by Gambero Rosso on November 3, 1987, one can read:

“If ‘Fast-Life’ in the name of productivity, has altered our lives and threatens the environment and the landscape, ‘Slow Food’ is today’s avant-garde answer.”

In the Manifesto, “fast-life” is described as a virus that is driving humans to extinction; slowness, on the other hand, is presented as the only possible vaccine. In order to achieve a future in which biodiversity is conserved, and monoculture and industrial agriculture are countered, Slow Food suggests that we restart from the preservation of small local producers and traditional knowledge.

However, to do so, it is essential to move away from the accelerated pattern imposed by the current food industry. Therefore, the symbol of the entire Slow Food movement – and philosophy – had to be the slow snail. Today, this little red snail has become a synonym for “good, clean and fair” food.

Story of a snail who discovered the importance of slowness

Story of a Snail that Discovered the Importance of Slowness (2013), a long tale by writer Luis Sepúlveda, who recently passed away, features a nameless snail – “just as the other snails had no name” looking for the meaning of slowness, a condition inherent to her yet incomprehensible.

On the journey to find its identity, the snail comes across a turtle, and it is through this encounter that it is finally able to understand and appreciate itself. In a passage that seems almost contradictory to us, the snail is surprised by the turtle’s speed, making us realize how slowness is always relative. Unable to keep up with the turtle’s pace, the snail climbs onto the its shell:

“So, while the snail watched the grasses of the meadow pass by at an unknown speed from up there, the turtle told her that it came from the oblivion of humans.”

In fact, the turtle had been abandoned by his human owners because they were too caught up in their own fast-paced lives. Through this story, Sepúlveda reminds us that, by exchanging efficiency for hustle, humans have forgotten the importance of spending time on relationships, carefully nurturing them: encounters with others can only truly take place – and thus be meaningful – if they are given the right amount of time.

An idea of happiness

This very text and the love of slowness have allowed an encounter: the one between Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, and Sepúlveda, in the book An Idea of Happiness (2014). In this text, which is both a conversation and a manifesto for the future, Petrini states:

“Another of the pillars on which Slow Food is founded is the right to pleasure. Which ties in seamlessly with slowness: they are necessary to each other.”

Indeed, to Petrini, the right to pleasure is a fundamental and universal principle that must be guaranteed to all. For this exact reason, pleasure must be measured, proportionate, like the snail. In fact, Sepúlveda emphasizes how the snail is in many cultures a symbol of balance, because “it has the right space in which to inhabit, its exoskeleton: if it has to grow two millimeters, its exoskeleton grows two millimeters, no more.”

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in the last pages of Dialectics of the Enlightenment (1944), speak of the snail’s antenna “with its probing sight, which also serves it to smell“, as a symbol of a knowledge that is physically situated. We can find this kind of wisdom in those who work every day in touch with their land and its products, deeply knowing its rhythms, which are always slower than those imposed by intensive production.

To preserve this knowledge, the local products and the environment, Slow Food currently has 644 Presidia around the world, 369 of which are in Italy, and promotes projects such as Terra Madre, a network of farmers, fishermen, breeders and producers who meet every two years in Turin, at the Salone del Gusto, to discuss and debate the issue of food sustainability. It is the slowness that makes this international meeting of food cultures possible.

Slow Food’s snail, as well as Sepúlveda one, teach us that slowness can become a philosophical principle, a life value, and an active response to rethink the food system.

Agnese Martini

A graduate in Philosophy (UniBo), she is currently a master’s student in Environmental Humanities (UniVe). She is interested in Critical Animal Studies, Multispecies Ethnography and Ecocriticism. She carries out an ethnographic research project on traditional ecological knowledge of fishermen in the Venice lagoon.