This article outlines the origins of the Slow Food movement before examining the ways in which Slow Food rhetoric seeks to redefine gastronomy and combat the more deleterious effects of globalization. In articulating a new gastronomy, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini attempts to reconstruct the gastronomy of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, at once endorsing the principles of taste and pleasure while simultaneously defining food as a thoroughly cultural product linked to issues of quality, sustainability, biodiversity, and social justice. Meanwhile, Slow Food's rejection of the fast life connects the organization's concerns about culinary issues to other broad efforts to slow life down and step back from the encroachments of globalization and capitalism. These rhetorical strategies situate Slow Food in the context of new social movements, which increasingly focus on cultural and symbolic strategies as means of achieving increased autonomy or democratization of social and cultural arenas. (Contains 2 notes.)