Good, Clean and Fair Food for All: What Fair Food Means for Slow Food in Brazil and Germany

To oppose the corporate food regime, food movements mobilize concepts such as food justice, food democracy, food sovereignty, food citizenship, among others. Slow Food is one of the forerunners of the food movements that emerged in Europe in the late 1980s, seeking to transform the agro-industrial food system because it is unsustainable, socially unjust, and produces nutritionally unsafe food. As an international movement, it has used some of these concepts throughout its history and in its various locations. Since 2005, Slow Food's philosophy has been to fight for good, clean and fair food. But what does good, clean and fair mean in a global movement with diverse contexts and over time?

This paper builds on Slow Food's philosophy to explore how contextual differences shape the movement's development, focusing on case studies from Brazil and Germany. it seeks to understand how the concept of "fair food" can have different meanings and imply different modes of action within the same organization, according to the specificities of food politics in each case. Utilizing multi-sited ethnography conducted between 2019 and 2021, both in-person and virtually, the paper provides a comparative analysis of the movement’s agendas in both countries. It examines the specific meanings of "fair food" in each context, along with the associated struggles and discourse disputes, emphasizing the recent inclusion of "for all" in the movement's philosophy. Drawing on socio-anthropological literature on food movements, the chapter investigates how different understandings of "fair food" intersect with concepts like food justice, food democracy, food sovereignty, and fair trade, and how these discourses shape the movement's potential for social-ecological change.