An Interview between Editor and Creator of SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town

Published by Welcome Books, October 2009

Katrina Fried: What is the meaning of the title, "SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town"?

Douglas Gayeton: I moved to Italy at the end of the 90s and settled in Pistoia, a Tuscan town between Florence and Lucca. The first thing that struck me about this new life was how different time worked in Italy. Life in a Tuscan town is, well, it's slow. It's broken up into a series of discreet, appreciable ritualistic activities. The American idea of working and eating a sandwich at one's desk for lunch simply doesn't exist in Italian culture because people put a very high premium on the life that's outside of work and on the quality time spent with friends and family.

Each day, as soon as dawn breaks in Pistoia, the town comes completely alive, but at one o'clock everything suddenly shuts down. The stores close and people go home for lunch. Everyone re-opens just as suddenly at four in the afternoon. The activity in the center of town becomes positively electric until seven o'clock, when the stores close for the evening and people congregate in bars to have a pre-dinner drink [un aperitivo] or simply to walk and admire the shop windows [una passaggiata]. By eight the town is quiet as everyone has gone home to dinner.

Being from Los Angeles, these imposed pauses in the day were totally foreign to me, but I soon came to cherish having my life broken down into these passages. No matter how much acceleration I experienced in the morning, or whatever ambitious plans I had for the day, the fact was this: at one o'clock I had to stop for lunch, which often went for an hour or longer. And even if I was motivated to do something in the afternoon, no stores would be open until 3:30 or 4, so why not take an afternoon nap? The Italian way of life gave me no choice but to slow down.

When I began living there, I quickly realized it wasn't only going to be about learning a language or re-structuring how I put together each day, but also watching lots of television, reading newspapers, listening to music, following sports teams and fashion designers and political parties and culinary trends ... in short, understanding what everybody was talking about and preoccupied with. And I really enjoyed getting completely immersed in the culture and certainly getting caught up in the rhythms of a day, of an Italian day.

KF: In Italy there is actually something called the Slow Food Movement, which plays a pivotal role in SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town. How did this movement begin?

DG: Founded by Carlo Petrini, Slow Food was really a response to the introduction of fast food in Italy in the 80s, specifically to a McDonald's that went in, right near the Spanish Steps in Rome, and if I'm not mistaken, directly below the atelier of Gucci, the fashion designer.

KF: One of the things Petrini says in the preface to your book is that he doesn't believe it's a matter of luck to live a slow life, but instead a matter of choice. Yet isn't this choice pretty difficult for some people?

DG: Look, the worst thing that can happen is that people make the mistaken conclusion that the Slow Food movement is quaint and quintessentially Italian, and ultimately not a lifestyle they can apply to their own way of living, because that couldn't be farther from the truth. I think most of the underlying principles behind Slow Food are universal. It's good to have a direct relationship with your food, to be conscious about what and how you eat. Being part of a local food system is important, but it's also about celebrating quality of life over quality of work. "Living to work" is more of the American model while "working to live" follows the slower European model. These foundational ideas are something that to some degree you do have control over. You can find small ways to reframe, restructure your life so that it's more in balance.

Perversely, it's easier for somebody to have a slow lifestyle in New York City than it is in Provo, Utah. I say that because New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, these are cities that have large outlying agricultural areas that are nearby. People living in these cities can very easily connect with these growers, either by buying a CSA box or by going to their local farmers market. The people that I worry about are those living in middle America, places dominated by Kmarts and Wal-Marts that make it more difficult for people to forge direct relationships with their food producers. The saddest irony is that there are people living in the American farm belt, where it's mile after hundreds of miles of corn or soybeans, yet they don't see the same variety of foods that you'd find in an urban farmer's market.

KF: So how do you reach these people? Is it possible?

DG: Michelle Obama made a very powerful statement when she planted the Victory Garden at the White House, because the garden is a fantastical symbol for taking matters into your own hands and being responsible for your destiny. Even in urban areas, there are community plots of land where people farm together. I think the CSA movement, which really began in England, is also a great way to enter into a direct relationship with the person who's raising your food.

As we move into an era where people are increasingly environmentally conscious, I think sustainability is the next evolutionary step towards a slower way of life. Because in a way sustainability is about realizing that while certain consequences of our urban and industrialized culture can't be reversed, we can still adapt and have a much more harmonious relationship to the environment.

KF: And that's the mission of Alice Waters in a nutshell really, isn't it. How did she come to this project—to write the introduction for the book?

DG: If there's a figurehead for the Slow Food movement in America, it would have to be Alice Waters. She's probably America's first quality-of-life-through-food advocate and is the leading light in the progressive food movement. The idea of eating and buying local, of reducing the carbon footprint of the food in your grocery store—I think we have Alice Waters to thank for that.

KF: And you participated in her inaugural Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco...

DG: Slow Food Nation introduced America to the principles behind Slow Food. It took place Labor Day weekend 2008 in San Francisco. They mounted a photographic retrospective of the images you now see in SLOW. It was a well-attended event. Tens of thousands of people. The whole thing took me a bit by surprise.

KF: How much did you know about Slow Food before you started working on this project?

DG: When I began, I certainly didn't know much of anything about it.

I think most people in our culture don't know what Slow Food is. In a way, this book is really made for them, because it's a story that goes from knowing nothing to meeting dozens of people who exemplify, who actually practice the defining principles of the movement.

KF: How did you go from simply observing and experiencing it to documenting it in a book?

DG: The project began when Cara Mertes at PBS heard I was living in Italy and suggested I do something about Slow Food. Instead of getting in my car and driving to the north of Italy to interview the heads of the Slow Food movement I realized that the essence of Slow Food was actually encapsulated in the lives of the people all around me in Pistoia. Ironically, most of them had never heard of Slow Food.

But what began as potential documentary quickly took an odd turn. I always snap location photographs when researching the project, except this time I started writing notes directly on the images as I worked. The results intrigued me. I liked them better than the film I was contemplating, so I went off on a tangent and found myself shooting photographs. Lots of photographs. Right away, the medium of photography struck me as very limiting. As a filmmaker I've always been used to telling stories, things that have a beginning, middle, and end. With a photograph it's different. You only have a single moment. Time doesn't exist. So I thought, how can I introduce time, the idea of a story with a beginning and end, into a single photograph? That's what really attracted me to the process used for the images in SLOW, because if you look closely, each image is never just a single photograph. Many are composed of up to a hundred photographs taken over the span of minutes or even hours.

KF: What would you say to somebody that feels in any way hesitant about approaching this book because of its Italian nature and roots?

DG: Well, you know, first of all, I never met an American who's from America. All Americans come from someplace else, and many come from Europe. Besides, we were a global agrarian society until the 19th century, so we are not that far from the farmers in our recent pasts, whether it was our great grandparents or grandparents or even our parents. My own grandfather had a vineyard. The principles and the images in the stories that are expressed here are universal. The idea of somebody making wine or raising chickens, or pigs, or living a rural life is something that is not exclusive to Italian culture, it exists in fact in any agriculture society.

KF: So you moved back from Italy to live on a farm in Petaluma...do you think you could've or would've chosen that life before your experience in Pistoia?

DG: No. Actually, as a matter of fact, I was preparing to buy a house in the hills above Pistoia with a thousand olive trees when i finished this project. I really had this idea that I was going to start making olive oil. I had it all very clearly mapped out and I had a few friends that were in that business so they were going to be my advisors. But then I met my wife, Laura, and our path brought us back here to America, to Sonoma that's not more than 10 miles from where I was raised. It's very similar to Tuscany, the Italian area where the photographs are taken. Sonoma is an hour north of San Francisco in America's great wine growing region and we live on a farm just outside of a town called Petaluma. We came here because my wife, for dietary reasons, couldn't have cow's milk and really missed ice cream, so she began making goat milk ice cream, first for herself, and then after she realized many other people were in her same situation, as a business.

KF: So they say can't go home again, but apparently you can.

DG: Especially if your wife calls the shots.

June, 2009

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