By Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan. Lexington Books, 2023.

The Cultural Roots of Slow Food: Peasants, Partisans, and the Landscape of Italian Resistance focuses on the work of a variety of intellectual activists, related food justice literature, and documentary films, and argues that contemporary forms of environmental activism, as they are rooted in local food and sustainable farming, are built on Italian peasant culture and its contributions to the Resistance movement during World War II.

This book looks to the hinterlands to demonstrate that peasants, by sharing their knowledge of the land and traditional practices, produce their own organic intellectuals. Some examples examined are Alcide Cervi, Nuto Revelli, and Ermanno Olmi. Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan argues that their work, personal experiences, and visions of resistance foreground the cultural roots of the Slow Food international grassroots movement. She posits that today, Slow Food and the food communities of Terra Madre in Italy and around the world represent one of the many examples of these new organic intellectuals committed to rebuild a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the land.

Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan is a teaching professor at Arizona State University. She is the co-editor of the volume Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures, published in 2021, and several articles on food culture, farming, and food activism. Her research focuses on the relationship between food and farming cultures and the land through the lenses of environmental cultural studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, bioregionalism, degrowth, postgrowth, and posthumanism. At ASU Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan teaches courses on food and sustainability, Italian language, literature and culture.