ABSTRACT
Mexico has a distinguished revolutionary tradition, but is the land of Emiliano Zapata ready for the “delicious revolution” of Slow Food? The question may sound a bit facetious at fi rst, but given the movement’s origins in the Italian Communist Party, a disquisition on class consciousness in a postmodern era seems appropriate. Of course, class has been virtually banished from postmodern academic discourse, perhaps from the sheer embarrassment of an intellectual vanguard discovering itself to be a petit bourgeoisie on the brink of proletarianization by the forces of global capital. In the script of contemporary revolution, only the villain-global capital-retains its traditional role. Slow Food speaks the lines of the reformist Social Democratic Party (SDP) to José Bové’s militant Bolshevism, the international proletariat is now politically suspect for its consumerist tendencies, and the peasantry has become the progressive motor of history. Although Slow Food offers an admirable program for personal life, it will never represent a genuine revolution until it confronts the dilemmas of class that have been complicated but not obviated by increasing globalization. Indeed, the Mexican case reveals the impossibility of drawing a clear dichotomy between slow and fast food in markets where global and local capital compete for the trade of middleclass tourists and equally cosmopolitan “peasants.”
