Adrian Peace. Barossa Slow

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Central to the rhetoric of the Slow Food movementis the concept of regional cooking. It gures in the move-ments manifesto, which exhorts members to becomedevotees of regional cuisine: Let us rediscover the avoursand savours of regional cooking and banish the degradingeffects of Fast Food.1 Regional cooking is featured promi-

nently in the literature generated by the movements centralofce in Bra, Italy, especially in the pronouncements of the founder, Carlo Petrini, beginning in the 1980s and con-tinuing into the present. 2 It is used in the Slow Food eventsmounted in some forty-seven countries, where a member-ship of about eighty thousand is organized into convivia, orlocal chapters. Regional cooking and the Slow Food move-ment in general enjoy extensive media coverage, which, inits international scope and afrmative character, must bethe envy of other social movements.

But what is the place of regional cooking in a postmod-ern world in which the denition of regions is becomingincreasingly arbitrary? How is regional cuisine to be concep-tualized in a global epoch in which all kinds of boundaries,especially regional ones, are so easily crossed? If the post-modern era can be said to have one denitive quality, it issurely the facility with which people, capital, raw materials,and processed goods are moved from place to place.3 Canany other commodities rival foodstuffs and drinks in the easewith which they are shipped from one place to another?The more one takes a hard look at the very idea of a regionalcuisine, the more improbable it sounds. At the least it war-rants closer inspection.

One option is to turn from the centralized pronounce-ments of the Slow Food movement and to focus instead onwhat the term means to the local organizers of its manyevents.4 Generally, members of convivia from local commu-nities are the ones who plan, orchestrate, and talk about theregional cuisines that they must literally put on the table. Itis local organizers, too, who must satisfy the expectations of members who are often informed, critical, and demandingwhere all kinds of food and drink are concerned. So, when

those in charge are faced with translating into organizationalpractice the rhetoric of regional cooking, what do theycome up with? What does regional mean for them, andhow do their ideas about cuisine resonate with this culinarymovements membership?

This essay presents a case study of one such event,

Barossa Slow, which was mounted by Australian membersof the Slow Food movement in 2004; I bring to its analysisan anthropological perspective. Like other anthropologists,I place considerable emphasis on how people imagine andconceptualize, construct and constitute, their communitiesin innovative and creative ways, because these activities revealfundamental mind-sets. Rather than assuming communitiesto have an objective existence that can be assessed accordingto a checklist of essential attributes, anthropologists study howpeople at the local level imagine their communities exist inthe world, and then we consider how they talk about thequalities they believe constitute their distinctiveness.5 In thecase of regional Slow Food events such as the Australianone described here, the event may turn out to be as muchabout the manufacture of myth as it is about the consump-tion of cuisine.

The Barossa as Rural Idyll

Mounted in the Barossa region of South Australia from April2 to April4, 2004, Barossa Slow drew together a substantialnumber of Slow Food members from different parts of thecountry and overseas. The high attendance was rather sur-prising since the Barossa is internationally renowned not forits food but as one of Australias premier wine-growingregions. A major center for industrial agribusiness, it is anarea of intensely concentrated corporate capitalism, fullyarticulated into the international political economy.

In the advance publicity for Barossa Slow, however, thedominant representations of the region made no mention of these global economic realities. Instead, much was made of the fact that the Barossa is located in a valley surrounded by

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Barossa SlowThe Representation and Rhetoric of Slow Foods Regional Cooking

investigations | adrian peace

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 5159, issn 1529-3262. 2006 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests forpermission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.


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low-lying hills. Everyone assumes that valleys are often cutoff and isolated from the outside world and that what happensin them frequently lags behind developments elsewhere.Valley inhabitants are often said to possess traits and displayqualities different from those over the hill, downriver,through the forest in short, elsewhere. In other words,valleys are often places of cultural distinctiveness, and itwas this stereotype that convivia organizers of Barossa Slowemphasized in the press announcements leading up to andin the course of the event proper.

Publicity photographs of the Barossa idealized it bydepicting row upon row of mature vines soft focus up front,extending as far as the eye could see into the distance andusing many warm browns and cool greens to capture thesense of a rich and bountiful rural environment. One pho-tograph depicted a mature vineyard in the foreground, at adistance a single-story stone cottage and alongside the cottagean old stone church with a short spire. The entire scene wasbathed in the warm glow of the afternoon sun. People weregenerally absent from this type of romantic representationof the rural, but in one image a sole winemaker mulledintrospectively over a glass of (doubtless his own) red wine.

The text accompanying this pictorial idealization intro-duced two terms that laid the groundwork for the conceptof a regional culture specic to the Barossa. Both traditionand heritage became intrinsic to Barossa Slows discourse:The Barossa is the heart of Australian wine and home to

the countrys oldest and richest food traditions. The combi-nation of this rich European heritage and the fresh vitalityof Australia is embodied in its lifestyle and landscape.6

Aboriginal settlement and indigenous food were thus instantlyerased in favor of a historical perspective in which nothingof cultural consequence preceded the arrival of Europeansand their imported foodstuffs. With this historical baseline inplace, an avalanche of terms and phrases could be unleashedto drive home the idea of a historically encompassingregional culture in which food had played a prominent part.Oldest food traditions, rich in food traditions, the heritageof food, rich European heritage, and (of particular note)the preservation of culinary authenticity were some of thephrases that entered into circulation.

A specially produced map of a Food and Wine Trailsent out with the events main brochure especially reinforcedthe idea of the Barossa as a distinct valley, a separate placein its own right. The trail linked some twenty-nine vineyardsinto a tour of a seemingly bounded, internally connectedregion. At each stage, Slow Food members could acquire anenhanced sense of the valleys tradition and heritage status,so that at historic Chteau Tanunda, for example, it waspossible to come face-to-facewith25smaller, family-ownedproducers representing the time-honoured community, historyand avours of Barossa wine. At Veritas Winery a similarbut more hybrid experience was in the ofng: The Bindersbrought traditions of food and wine when they arrived in

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the late 1940s. Adapting ingredients to Barossa producetheyhave maintained centuries of Hungarian rituals.

Guardians of Tradition

Under more normal circumstances, many Barossa residents,

especially its older and long-standing population, primarilyidentify with particular localities inside the valley or on itsmargins. They usually feel that they belong to small townslike Tanunda or Angaston or to tiny settlements like Moculta,Lyndoch, or Keyneton, where property ownership, businessinterests, and extended family residence are intertwined.But this by no means precludes or qualies identicationwith the Barossa as a broader region. Their sense of attach-ment and identication simply functions at a different leveland in other situations. For the representational ambitionsof Barossa Slow to be realized, however, this regional sense

of place had to be emphatically elaborated. In particular,the Barossa Valley was to be presented in distinctive ways,such as having convivia organizers identify themselves asespecially heritage-minded folk.

The European settlement of the area by Lutherans andAnglicans from Germany and the United Kingdom, respec-tively, took place in the early to mid-nineteenth century.Whenevent organizers hosted meals, introduced tours, or simplywelcomed visitors to Barossa Slow, they conscientiouslyassociated themselves with this heritage by announcing thatthey were fourth-, fth-, or even sixth-generation Barossans.Not only was thickness of Barossan blood held up as a keyattribute, it was also linked with the claim that these peoplehad been involved in many ways for a number of years in asustained effort to recuperate Barossan traditions and cul-ture. These were the folk on the ground, in short, who hadpreserved the regions cultural heritage from outright loss.7

The claim of heritage became one of the recurrentmeans of endowing specic foods and drinks with an auraof authenticity. Few organizers boasted of having helped res-cue more than one sphere of food or wine production. Eachwas considered intricate enough to demand any one indi-viduals full attention. Not least relevant was the notion thatthe valleys culinary secrets had not been easily rendered upto those who were now the custodians of this cultural her-itage. Visitors were expected to treat seriously the idea thatolder residents by now quite a few deceased had allowedtheir folk wisdom to be written down only by people theyhad come to trust over time. As the regional newspaper putit: After generations of keeping family recipes secret, theBarossans have been persuaded to share them around.8

Getting to that point had required time, effort, and commit-

ment, hence the concentration on individual rather thanseveral items. All this was grist to the mill that allowed theevents chair, Kath Newland, to declare: Weve got a realfood culture that is still thriving today.9 This claim upheldand reinforced the rhetoric that Barossa Slow celebratesthe heritage, the avours, the rituals and the regions pro-

duce in a weekend of authentic experiences.10

Oral History and Authentic Experience

Working to preserve the Barossas original food culture wasclearly considered the essence of community-mindedness.In this way residents could express their sense of belongingto the region as a whole over and above their attachmentto specic locales inside the valley. Just as the region hadbeen settled by community-minded Europeans of ruralorigin who placed a premium on quality food and drink,

a commitment to maintain this 150-year-old culture was arecognized marker of contemporary membership. Statusdistinctions, business rivalries, and political differencesthe cultural stuff that anthropologists have detailed as ubiq-uitous in socially intricate rural locales were all put toone side in favor of such homogenizing, unifying terms asthe Valley and we Barossans.

Being Barossan clearly meant more than appreciatingwholesome foods. The ability to work with ones hands, toimprovise when the right technical equipment was unavail-able, to engage in cooperative manual activities to realizecommunity goals all were mentioned at one time or another.Barossan sociability as an inherent trait was frequently dis-cussed in the context of food appreciation, which was seenas a public expression of that sociability. Particular eventswere highlighted because they brought conviviality andcuisine together. Thus, the Saturday morning farmersmarket was incorporated into the Barossa Slow program onthe grounds that, according to the events brochure, thisthriving market is known for its social buzz as well as itsproduce, so you will probably chat with new friends, dinnerhosts and familiar faces.

Not all social relations within the regional communitywere accorded the same merit, however. Equally intriguingas the foodstuffs that were held up as authentic was theprominence of certain roles that, more than others, wereconsidered to embody commitment to community identityand continuity. All convivium members had in commonan appreciation of oral history: this was the cultural capitalthey were putting on display. Accumulating the mostprestige were the Barossas local historians, because theirresearch had allowed them to populate the valley with

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exceptional residents whose chief connectedness wasthrough the culture of food.

The historians representations of the Barossa includedtwo dimensions. First, in the run-up to Barossa Slow, articlesbegan to appear in magazines that clearly connected thepast and the present and accorded responsibility for these

links to especially innovative individuals. For example, AngelaHeuzenroeder, the best known of the local historians, wrotein Snail Pace, Slow Food Australias magazine: In our val-ley people are still using methods and recipes that were partof a whole food culture brought by the rst German-speakingsettlers arriving from1837onwards. Thirty years ago, thesefoods were a common sight on Barossa tables and they arestill known today.11 Subsequently, a couple of weeks beforethe event, the same historian was the main source for anarticle that appeared in the states only daily newspaper.After lamenting the extent to which we have been forgetting

traditional foods and how good they taste and reectingon avour, on fruit from the tree, on real tomatoes, Ms.Heuzenroeder cites pork as another example of lost avor,one that is being salvaged by Barossa tradition.

White pigs with little fat have been developed in recent years. Its the

kind of pork you buy in the super-market. Flavourless.

But there is renewed interest in bacon with avour, in looking at

the old breeds of black pigs such as Berkshires which go back to the

18th century.

They produced marbled esh with a lot more avour. Joy and

Colin Leinert have been a success story with thisthese farmers have

kept the old breed alive, they have kept tradition going.12

Evidently Heuzenroeder is doing much more than merelydescribing developments inside the community. Havingpreviously established her credentials through publicationof a well-researched salvage study of Barossa foodstuffs,13

she now provides an especially unied view of the regionalcommunity (in our valley), an equally integrated approachto its foodstuffs (a whole food culture), and a particulartake on the critical role of keeping tradition going by hon-oring individuals for their contribution.14 The prepossessingimage proffered is that of a harmonious and integratedregional place less than an hours drive from the state capi-tal yet fully committed to maintaining the genuineness of its original cooking practices.

The second and more substantial contribution fromlocal historians became obvious as Barossa Slow got underway, for the locals doubled as guides on the events tours.These activities are among the most popular of Slow Foodprograms in different parts of the world, and with good

reason. In making clear the physical and symbolic bound-aries of a Slow Food region and its community base, a tourdoes not simply recognize such boundaries but establishesthem denitively through its route. In our predominantlyocularcentric Western culture, 15 tours to the specic sites inwhich specialized foods and drinks are produced can scarcely

be equaled as a means of authenticating them before theyare consumed.

The ostensible purpose of tours through our valley wasevident enough: to draw visitors attention to the cooking skillsof individual residents and their families and to sample theproducts of their labor. Some of the tours available weretitled the Pig, the Vine, the Orchard, the Wood Oven, andOffal,Offal, and More Offal. But in the many verbal exchangesbetween local notables and tour takers, it became clear thatmore was going on than these simple titles implied. Beingcelebrated in these encounters was the technology of the

past and the social relations required to make it work.Time and again, the solid, reliable, and durable qualities

of productive equipment made decades earlier in a fewinstances as far back as the nineteenth century were verballyextolled and manually displayed, and always by comparisonwith the failings of their present-day equivalents. At onelevel, the detailed appreciation of old technology was anexercise in nostalgia, but that could be said about the SlowFood event as a whole. More revealing, as butchers, bakers,chefs, winemakers, and others detailed the merits of thetried-and-tested ways of doing things, as one guide putit, they simultaneously established their identities as ruralartisans who would not readily succumb to the ease orprotability of modern food-production techniques.

Across the board, these culinary craftsmen cultivatedpersonae quite different from those of the mass manufactur-ers whose standardized and inferior products lled localsupermarket shelves. In one case, an apiarist with a smallfarm at Moculta talked at length about the superiority of hishoney and the quality of processed goods (glazed ham, forexample) from his family-staffed rm. He traced his Germanorigins back to the mid-nineteenth century before declaring:Were a very traditional Barossa working farm, moretraditional than most, probably more traditional than inGermany itself. From the design of his ancient hivesthrough his use of queen bees to his extraction techniques,his reliance on tradition was integral to the quality of aproduct incomparable with mass-produced ones.

Especially important for virtually all concerned wasthe character of the social relations of production in theseselect enterprises. In addition to the producers continuallyemphasizing that a craftsman is only as good as the tools of

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his trade, they established the complementary point thatan artisan works best if surrounded by similarly committedcolleagues. Whether butcher, baker, or winemaker, eachunderscored the importance of working with others of equally deep conviction and of the close relations that bindthem together. One winemaker, for example, gave eighteen

Slow Food devotees dinner in a huge, high-ceilinged roomjust off the kitchen of the main house. In the course of theevening, he pointed out that, this being harvest time, itwould normally be my crew of wine-making staff whowould be eating together at the long table: they would bringwine from other vineyards and overseas, which they woulddiscuss over the meal. Apart from encouraging everyone toproduce still better wines, this tradition was one the wine-maker had inherited from his own mentor, arguably the bestknown of all Barossa winemakers: This is a tradition I pickedup from Peter. Its about keeping everyone on his toesbut

its also about respect and loyalty, and eating together underthe same roof is part of that.

Drawing On All the Senses

Thus, a concern with product quality, traditional technology,and close social relations of production were established asimperative to the success of original regional produce. Thelast, possibly denitive but certainly unanticipated, require-ment was that the artisans had to have all their senses aboutthem. Repeatedly addressed in tours was the notion that,whether the end result was a loaf of bread or a glazed ham,a clear honey or a rich Shiraz, each producer drew extensivelyon a multisensual process of production. Creating regionalproduce was a wholly aesthetic activity in which looking,listening, smelling, tasting, and touching were all indispen-sable. Any contribution to the table of Barossa cookingrequired a well-developed sense of the aesthetic qualities of ne food and drink. But drawing on all ones sensibilitieswas not something that came easily: it, too, was the productof personal commitment and training by well-establishedgures accustomed to investing their very beings in high-quality regional produce.

Following naturally from the aesthetic dimension wasthe necessary and willing expenditure of enormous amountsof labor and time in ones work, an occupational ethos atodds with the attitudes presumed prevalent in the regionsfully modernized businesses. The idea of labor as a resourcethat could be restricted to an eight-hour workday, for example,played no part in the way this economic eld functioned:Anybody who watches the clock when hes at work aroundhere wont last very long, was the rm judgment of the

winemaker mentioned above. Winemaking isnt a job, its away of life, youre devoted to the business of making the bestyou can, was the reinforcement provided by another. Implicitin these comments and others along similar lines was theunderstanding that out there somewhere beyond the arti-sanal enclave of the Barossa work and nonwork were

clearly distinguished, hours spent at the former were clearlylaid down, the relation between employer and employeewas clear-cut. The result was that the goods produced outthere were of little intrinsic value. By contrast, the culinaryartisans of the Barossa were immensely proud of what theyproduced, in substantial part because their very selves wereinvested in the products of their sense-replete labors.

Field Notes from the Wood Oven Journey

The Apex Bakery is located in the center of Tanunda, the

valleys main settlement. The shop front looks directly ontothe street, and the bakery proper is under the same roof tothe rear. Building and dcor are as unassuming as possible,with scarcely no advertising in evidence. The bakerys repu-tation is such that publicity is unnecessary: it is famous forits wood-red oven, which was installed in1924, and forbeing a family-owned enterprise that Keith Fechner boughtfrom the local man who had trained him there.

The bakerys wood-red Scotch Oven is the centerpieceof this tour. About forty Slow Foodies (as convivium mem-bers by now refer to one another) cram around it as the localhistorian who organized this encounter introduces Keithsson, Johnny Fechner, as Nipper, nicknames, of course, beinga dening feature of rural community life. Nipper explainsthe simplicity of the wood re burning at one side of thecavernous oven that features an elementary arrangement of ues and dampers around it. The baker explains how hebuys his basic ingredients, especially the highest-quality our,from the surrounding farms, which are also the free sourceof rewood he personally gathers to ensure its suitability forthe oven. Even the long-handled ladles16 for moving traysaround the oven are the same ones that were in use whenhe became an apprentice at the age of twelve and wasinstructed not to ask questions but to just watch, whichwas how he learned his trade.

The dozen workers in the Apex Bakery are not referredto as employees because they are all relatives or very closeassociates. Jimmy, for example, is Nippers right-hand manand has been with him (note, not employed by him) formore than twenty years. As Nipper talks, his father, who isninety and remarkably upright for his age, walks in and isintroduced to the group as Chiney. Nipper has already

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explained that his father still has secrets about bakingwhich he hasnt let me in on yet. He reveals in an ironictone how in the 1970s, when I was young and ambitious,he tried to persuade his father to modernize the business.His father refused outright. The lesson Dad taught meback then was never to take on the transnationals because

youll always lose. He was right, of course. Were still goingstrong. But lots of others have gone to the wall.

The group applauds the old mans perspicacity beforemoving through the bakery to hear Nipper detail the con-siderable age of other machinery. He describes how hebegins his day at four oclock each morning by lighting thewood re, and then, well yknow, Im here until the dayswork is done. A good deal depends on the performance of the oven because, even after all these years, there is always adegree of uncertainty as to when the baking will be done.The original Scotch Oven is valuable and unpredictable: it

needs to be constantly monitored. Nipper speaks about theoven as if it has a mind of its own. Most assuredly, he willnot leave the wood oven unattended: Once I start work,this is where I stay until were nished for the day. You cantjust throw the [electric] switch like they do at Tip Top, andleave it. You have to stay with the job.

Nipper then regales his visitors with several anecdotesabout how Chiney and his predecessors refused to takeeven an annual holiday; they could not face the prospect of entrusting the oven with its idiosyncrasies to anyone else.On the very few occasions when they were forced (by exas-perated spouses) to take a break from their labors, the worsecame to the worst. You have to be on top of the oven allthe time, Nipper insists, stressing the need to watch and lis-ten to the oven and its re and to smell, feel, and nallytaste the breads, cakes, and pastries that emerge from it. Bydrawing on all the senses, he is able to produce foodstuffs of the highest quality and thereby ensure that at the end of each day all the bakerys goods have sold. There is no wastagenow, just as there was no wastage in the past.

Middle-Class Culture

and the Myth of a Regional CuisineTaken as a whole, Barossa Slow was a great success. Attendeesespecially enjoyed the performative nature of many of theencounters, their theatrical dimension, which raises thequestion of how to assess the appeal of Barossa Slow as notso much a culinary event as a cultural experience.

The rst point to emphasize is that Barossa Slow meantdifferent things to different people. It was an event of multi-ple meanings and multiple signicances, among which the

quality of food and drink was only one component, albeit acritical one. For some of its organizers, for example, BarossaSlow was a transparent opportunity for expanding theiralready established niches in the tourist trade or other formsof regional commerce; for others (as one young housewifeexpressed it to me), it was just a labour of love, something

thats good and benecial for Barossa folk generally; for yetothers, the effort expended proved worthwhile through somecombination of material interests and cultural concerns.

Second, among those who attended but did not organizethe events, an even broader range of interests and motives wasat work. Quite a number of these people had unambiguouslyeconomic reasons for being present. With tourist enterprisesalready established elsewhere in South Australia or fartheraeld, these participants approached Barossa Slow as a sourceof fresh ideas and new contacts that could be incorporatedinto their current marketing strategies. A number of people

attended in the company of local or interstate conviviamembers, allowing them to speak of their participation asan extension of the interest in food and drink that unitedthem at home. For many and especially the majority fromthe state metropolis Barossa Slow was mainly an entertain-ing and informative break from the routines and pressuresof everyday middle-class experience, although even withinthis category differences were apparent, such as those between,for example, people connected with Adelaides burgeoninggastronomy industry and those who went just for the food.

Thus, both rational and emotional forces ran inextrica-bly together under the capacious umbrella of Barossa Slowas a cultural event, and this conuence provided anotherreason for its appeal. In interactional terms, a good dealof satisfaction and pleasure was derived by nding outwhy others were present and what their expectations were.One of the striking properties of this event was the easewith which it was possible to slip in and out of multipleconversations over a drink, during a meal, on a tour, andso on. Precisely because Barossa Slow was focused on thesupposedly apolitical subject matter of food and drink,17

the very nature of the event allowed a degree of comfortableinteraction unthinkable under most other circumstances.Accordingly, a good deal of conversation was geared tonding out whether material or nonmaterial concernshad brought ones conversational partner to Barossa Slow,whether there was common ground worth pursuing withrelative strangers, and whether to carry the currentexchange further or to seek out yet other Slow Foodies forthe remainder of the event.

Third, as this ethnographic account demonstrates, arguablythe most important property of Barossa Slow was its providing

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a substantive context for the expression and pursuit of cul-tural capital, which customarily informed the everyday livesof the attendees. This Slow Food event was constituted insuch a way as to resonate with the cultural concerns thatwere already critical to some sections of Australias increas-ingly afuent but also fragmented middle class.

As elsewhere in the late capitalist world, Australias middleclass has lost whatever cultural cohesion it might have hada quarter of a century ago; during the same period, it hasacquired a remarkable level of consumer afuence. For somemembers of this class, cultural matters such as the preserva-tion of heritage, the relevance of tradition, and the appeal of the rural, as well as questions about authenticity, originality,and value, are all broadly aesthetic issues that bring meaningto and create motivation for their middle-class lifestyles on aregular basis. From the practical preservation of heritagesites to the impractical questioning of modern values, theseissues are what this segment of Australias middle class isusually all about.

In symbolic terms, then, Barossa Slow provided a richcontext in which a specic regional cuisine could be savoredthrough a particular culture of class. Or, to put it the otherway round, a culture of class could be expressed throughthe regional cooking so artfully presented by the Slow Foodconvivium. The order is not of concern: most important ingiving value and satisfaction to the Slow Food membership

were the mutually constitutive cultural connectionsbetween cuisine and class.

None of this would have been possible, of course,without a good deal of idealization on all sides, and it will,I hope, be evident by this point that a good deal of myth-making underpinned much of the appeal of Barossa Slow.Indeed, the manufacture of myth was as integral as anyother element in the cultural accounts offered by both con-vivium organizers and attendees. I use the term mythhere to refer to the assemblage of social stereotypes, skewedrepresentations, and biased accounts that are characteristicof all consumer experiences under late capitalist conditions.As Roland Barthes expresses it: However paradoxical itmight seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort,not to make disappear.18

In this respect it can legitimately be argued that theauthorized account of Barossa community life and theregions community-mindedness was distinctly incomplete.As we have seen, Barossa Slow promulgated the imagethat here was a discrete physical region populated by anidentiable community committed to a whole food culture.In reality, however, those involved in mounting the occa-sion comprised but a small and self-selected network of residents, while the majority of the regions populationremained uninvolved and, one suspects, for the most partindifferent, precisely because this was a privileged even

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elite event, in no sense a mass, popular one. In total,the residential population of the Barossa stands at aboutfour thousand people, so only a small fraction was directlyinvolved. Although absolute gures are not of majorsignicance here, it must be noted that large segments of the population were excluded from any kind of participation

the substantial numbers of older retirees, unemployed andsemiemployed youth, and casual, transient workers (onwhom both tourist and wine industries extensively rely forlabor), to mention but a few. These groups had no role toplay in Barossa Slow. Nonetheless, they are all membersof the Barossa community and contribute signicantly toits economic and social functioning.

In other words, when the events organizers and sponsorsreferred to the participation of the community in BarossaSlow, they were speaking of themselves. They imposed onthe event as a whole their conceptions of community mem-

bership, their ideas about community participation, andtheir notions of where the boundaries of the communitywere to be drawn. Comparatively speaking, this behavior isneither exceptional nor untoward. Anthropological analysesof many other settings show that individual members con-ceptualize and talk about our community as if their viewswere shared by everyone else. That this is a wholly erro-neous assumption often entails their learning some painfullessons when their actions result in internal communityconict. The difference is that in the particular instanceof Barossa Slow, the skewed views of a select few becamethe distorted lens through which a substantial numberof captive outsiders were expected to interpret this richand variegated regional life.

In a similar vein, the ways in which the ordinaryattendees were described and the roles they were assignedto play in the course of the event entailed considerablemisrepresentation and distortion. One myth, for example,revolved around the way in which the experience of Barossa Slow might help people turn away from FastFood. Not surprisingly, Fast Food was repeatedly referredto in the most derogatory of terms; as indicated at theoutset, the Slow Food movement at large aims to banishthe degrading effects of Fast Food. This is doubtless anadmirable ambition, and it would be difcult to argueagainst it. But it is scarcely one that could nd much pur-chase in the class-skewed world of those who attendedBarossa Slow, for theirs is a world in which Fast Food isunlikely to play a signicant part anyway.

The broadly liberal and (in the loosest sense) environ-mental mentalit of this class fragment, with its recurrentconcern for heritage, authenticity, past technologies,

rural labor, and so on, is entirely at odds with a lifestylein which Fast Food as a problem looms large. In addition,not only is this a middle-class fragment with a particularethos and ideology, it is also a middle-aged one, so thatif its members are to be found at all in such demonicsettings as McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or

Hungry Jacks, then it will most likely be in the companyof children, even grandchildren, who are being momentar-ily indulged. Thus the participants in Barossa Slow didnot have to be converted from a universal Fast Food to aregional Slow Food, because the former was not part of their cultural constitution in the rst place. Attendance atBarossa Slow and, I tentatively suggest, at similar eventselsewhere was not so much about culinary conversionas about cultural consolidation.

Other examples of mythmaking in relation to bothconvivium organizers and ordinary members could be

added to these. The stereotypes, skews, biases, and distor-tions that abounded throughout the duration of BarossaSlow were to be anticipated in a contemporary event whereexpectations are high, aspirations overdeveloped, and prolif-erating rhetoric and hyperbole become the order of theday. Despite these caveats, the multifaceted and polyvalentcharacter of Barossa Slow was its most important contribu-tion. While it was assuredly an interest in regional cookingthat brought the events participants together, the way inwhich it was organized and represented made it possible toencounter and reect on, among other topics, the meaningof tradition, the nature of authenticity, the signicance of artisanship, and the quality of past technologies.

For some, Barossa Slow brought home the materialrealities of wine production and tourism, while for othersthe event could be enjoyed for its imaginative rhetoric andemotive symbols. Most important of all, the event could besavored in a myriad of ways according to the participantsclass and culture. Side by side with the consumption of regional cooking lay the prospect of variously reecting ondifferent ways of being in the postmodern world. Mightit be in this respect, then, that for all the difference and dis-tinction that the Slow Food movement attaches to regionalcooking, events such as Barossa Slow are emblematic of the interpretative and reexive prospects now held out morebroadly by cooking and cuisine?g

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Adrian Peace. Barossa Slow

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