【１】そもそも、食べることに強い関心を抱いたのには、遅飯（）コンプレックスばかりでなく、もう十年もイタリアと日本を行き来するような暮らしの中で感じてきたひとつの思いがある。スローフードという言葉が、私の中の曖味模糊とした思いに、あるくっきりとした輪郭を与えてくれた様な気がした。
　【２】たとえば、数百年も前の史跡と呼んで差し支えない石造りの家屋に人が今でも住んでいるフィレンツェのような都市では、新鮮な素材を納得のいく値段で買い、おいしいものを作ることはしごくたやすい。
　【３】肉は肉屋、生パスタなら製麺屋、野菜は八百屋、パンはパン屋とそれぞれ昔ながらの専門店ががんばっている。でなければ、大きな中央市場まで足を運べば、野菜や果物もそれは色とりどりそろっていて、チーズも塊で買えるし、無農薬野菜の店もある。
　【４】取材の合間に暇ができれば、料理に腕を奮い、そんな日にはかならず友を招く。週末や日曜の昼には、食事に招き、また招かれる。夕食時まで仕事に捧げる人は稀で、日本のようにノミニケーションなどといって職場の面々と飲みながら過ごすことは滅多にしない。【５】何はさておき家族で食事である。そんなことをしているからイタリア人男性は妻に管理されっぱなしだという人もいるが、それは当てにならない。彼らはよく外食も楽しむ。それにしたって、前菜に、パスタやリゾット、肉か魚のメインディッシュに野菜のつけあわせ、甘い物にカフェ。【６】人によってはチーズに食後酒までいただくものだから、ゆうに三時間はかかる。
　日本へ帰れば、そうは問屋が卸さない。
　まず友人たちを食事に招きたくとも、みんな何かと忙しい。招かれた途端に、帰りの電車の時間を心配しはじめ、腕時計を覗きこんでいたりする。
　【７】おそらく、日本というより東京といった方がいいのかもしれないが、町が肥大化し過ぎているのだろう。共稼ぎの友人はといえば、残業だらけでぐったりで、とてもではないが平日は夕食の買い物すらできないといって嘆く。【８】その働く女性、忙しい母親たち―∵―もちろん、父親だっていいわけだが――の暮らしの救世主のごとき面持ちで巷に溢れ返っているのが、レンジでチンするだけの冷凍食品、お湯に投げこむだけのレトルト食品お湯を注ぐだけのカップ麺、コンビニエンス・ストアのお弁当、デパートのお惣菜売り場に、よりどり見取りのファーストフード・チエーン店である。
　【９】ところが、それだけ急いで食べる時間まで節約しておきながら、誰もが「忙しい、時間がない」と口にしているのはどういうことなんだろう。家族が一日に一度さえ顔を合わせる時間もなければ、愛情の証だったはずの料理に手間暇をかける時間もない。【０】
　私たち日本人は、いったいいつから、ゆっくりと食事をすることもままならなくなってしまったのだろう。
　四割を越える子供たちのアトピー、若者にまで増えている骨粗鬆症や動脈硬化、サラリーマンの過労死、環境ホルモン、ダイオキシン、名前をもたない現代病……、すでに社会に深刻な黒い影を落としている現象の根っこに、狂った食生活があることに誰もが気づいているはずだ。
　この国は、これで大丈夫なのだろうか？
　私には、スローフードという言葉が、その暗澹たる思いに一条の光を投げ込んだかのように思えた。
　スローフード運動を推進する者たちは、単にファーストフード反対運動というような了見の狭いところに留まらない。スローフーダーの真の敵は、ファーストライフという名の世界的狂気であり、それは、もっと複雑な現代社会の機構の中に妖しく蠢（うごめ）くなにかなのだという。
　それはいったい何なんだろう？
　そんな疑問に腰を押されるようにして、九六年のある日、ふいに思い立った私は、ファーストライフ症候群の巣窟である日本の大都市を離れ、スローフード協会の本部があるという北イタリアの町へと旅立った。彼らの言い分に耳を傾け、イタリア人たちの食卓をゆっくり見つめ直してみたくなった。

There's a funny story that anthropologists tell to demonstrate how many different ways the same things can be named and classified, depending on the culture doing the naming. A group of anthropologists were giving a sort of IQ test to a band of tribesmen. The purpose of the test (and there really is such a test) is to see how someone will group a collection of twenty different objects drawn from four classes: food, tools, cooking implements, and clothes. The test predicts that the more intelligent individual will, for example, group apples and oranges under "foods" and knives and forks under "cooking implements."
In this particular test, the tribesmen consistently chose the "less intelligent" classification, however, grouping knives with oranges rather than with forks. After each classification, they would chant together a phrase in their own language that in translation might run, "This is how a wise man would do this." The anthropologists administering the test finally became irritated and asked the tribesmen "how a damned fool would do it." They immediately regrouped the knives with the forks and the apples with the oranges.
The moral of the story has partly to do with the different ways that various cultures classify the same things and partly with a sense of cultural superiority that causes one culture -- ours -- to judge the intelligence of other cultures by its own standards. It happens to be the case that our western approach to classification is an abstract one; we tend to group things together as concepts rather than as things. A knife, for instance, is a very concrete object and so is a fork, but an "eating implement" is a conceptual abstraction, a generalization rather than a thing. Our understanding of the actual knife and fork, in other words, is shaped by a cultural code that groups things conceptually and abstractly, and we expect all other "intelligent" people to understand such things in the same way.
But can't we look at knives and forks differently? After all, you use a knife, not a fork, to cut an orange, and so there would seem to be a perfectly good -- and intelligent -- reason for grouping the knife with the orange rather than with the fork. This, in fact, is precisely what the tribesmen in the story did: they classified the objects placed before them according to their concrete relations to each other. A knife, in other words, is concretely related to an orange because it is used for the physical act of cutting. Within the terms of a cultural code made up of concrete rather than abstract ideas, it is perfectly reasonable, and only common sense, to group the knife with the orange.
Even the most trivial of classifications can be seen sometimes to conceal a particular point of view. Several years ago, for example, the U.S. government created something of a sensation when it decided to classify tomato ketchup as a "vegetable" in order to save money on school lunch programs. At the time, a feeble attempt was made to defend this reclassification of ketchup from "table sauce" to "vegetable" on the grounds that since ketchup is made from tomatoes (which means, of course, that it is really derived from "fruit," but that's another issue) it could be seen as belonging to one of the four major food groups (which, if you're old enough to remember, were once the seven major food groups: meat, fish, dairy products, grains, green vegetables, yellow vegetables, and fruit). This attempt to change a classification was quickly abandoned, however, in the face of protests from parents and sneers from administration critics.
In the ketchup case, we find the conflict of two political interests. One believes that it is not the role of government to aid nutritional programs, and one believes that it is. From the former perspective, there may be a need to reclassify ketchup, but the decision to do so is determined by political rather than natural reasons. Conversely, keeping ketchup in its place as a "sauce" can also be seen to be a political decision because there is nothing to prevent us from viewing it as "food." It does have some nutritional value. The question is simply where we draw the line, and where that line is drawn will be determined by our interests, not by some "natural" power outside those interests.
In fact, all the most basic distinctions represent some human interest. Is a one-minute pause in a school classroom a "moment of silence" or a constitutionally forbidden "prayer"? Is a fifteen-year-old killer an "adult" or a "juvenile"? Are nuclear arms "offensive weapons" or "peace-keepers"? In each of these controversies you will find two sides equally certain that their designation is the right one, that they alone have drawn the line strictly according to the "truth." It would be nice if the truth were that easy to come upon, but in each of these cases the line we draw is only ideologically true.
The interests served by a classification scheme can sometimes be harmlessly personal. I was once told the story of a certain retired Harvard professor who, somewhat against his own more idle inclinations, had been persuaded by his wife to take up the fashionable hobby of bird watching. Wishing to avoid the labor of having to distinguish among, and remember the names of, too many species, he radically simplified the usual scheme by employing only four basic names for the classes of birds he was able (or willing) to recognize. These four classes included "crows," "gulls and robins," "small brown birds," and "other." That simplified things. Crows, gulls, and robins are easy to spot. So are small brown birds. Anything more complicated -- say, a scarlet ibis can be effortlessly put into the class of "other." But even this harmless approach to classifying animals contains ideological implications. As long as we are only talking about recreational bird-watchers, there's no problem at all. But if the question of where to draw the line appears in the context of a controversy over environmental protection, it can be quite another matter.
In the mid-1970's, for instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority's plan to build a dam on the Little Tennessee River was halted when it was discovered that the dam would threaten the survival of several local species such as the snail darter. Proponents of the dam argued that the snail darter was not an endangered species since there were plenty of closely related darter species scattered throughout the region. Opponents of the dam argued conversely that the snail darter was an irreplaceable component of the biological diversity of the earth and was accordingly covered by the Endangered Species Act of 1973'. The differing political interests of each camp were reflected in the way each chose to classify the darter. The pro-dam forces took a more general approach -- once you've seen one darter you've seen them all -- while the anti-dam forces insisted on detail. The whole issue depended on where you chose to draw the line. The line was finally drawn, and the snail darter was saved.
One reason we disagree so often on where to draw the line is because there are so many different ways to categorize objects and images. Thus, we usually classify them in terms of how they affect and serve our individual or cultural interest. An individual horse, for example, can be classified in quite a number of ways that are not all necessarily biologically based. There's nothing to stop us from seeing a horse as a rather oversized, short-eared donkey -- after all, with a little help from a breeder, horses and donkeys can interbreed -- but that would decrease the value of horseflesh, which would hardly be in the interest of the horse-breeding industry.
But what about the horse's potential to end up on your dinner plate? We eat cattle, after all, and horses, like cattle, are grazing animals generally classed as fit for the table within the terms of our code of cooking. This is the way the French draw the line to include the horse in the class of meats suitable for eating, and if you were a horsemeat butcher with an interest in opening up the U.S. market with fillet de cheval, you'd want to get Americans to think this way too.
How we choose to classify things may seem to be a trivial matter, but its implications can be very serious. For when one powerful group of people classifies another less powerful group as either inferior, or, even worse, not quite human at all, the result can be deadly. We only need to look at what happened to the American Indians in the nineteenth century, or to the European Jews in the twentieth century to see what horrible disasters can result from classifying human beings into groups.

anthropologist 人類学者
ibis トキ科の鳥
Tennessee Valley Authority テネシー渓谷開発公社（TVA）
snail darter タニシを常食とするスズキ科の小魚
Endangered Species Act of 1973 1973年の絶滅の危機にある種の法
fillet de cheval ［フランス語］馬のヒレ肉