SLOW IS A bad word – conveniently of four letters – in these United States. It means, with respect to people, stupid; if you're slow, you're on your way to what were called, in my high school, "special ed" classes. It means inefficiency, wasted time, people driving 50 miles an hour in the left lane, oblivious to the enraged speeders behind them, honking their horns and flashing their high beams. Fast, on the other hand, is good, whether we are speaking of cars or connection speeds or company.

So, to the American ear, Slow Food, the movement begun in Italy in 1986 as a counter to the imperialistic spread of fast-food culture, sounds a dubious note right off. Slow food suggests, to us, flawed food, defective food, food we'd have to wait for or quite possibly wouldn't even bother to wait for, since it's easier just to get back in the car and drive to McDonald's or Jack's and order without unbuckling our seat belts, assuming we buckled them in the first place.

Cultural gulf here, captured in a single word – a single syllable – not to mention in the title of a new book, Slow Food: The Case for Taste, by Carlo Petrini (Columbia University Press, $24.95). It is easy to see why the resistance to fast food – the entire edifice of fast food, not merely the plastic outlets we do see but the factory farms and manufactured foods we don't – sprang from European soil. Europe, with its wealth and its deep cultural ties to the United States, was bound to be at the top of the to-do list for fast-food colonialists ("We are McDonald's, the most famous brand in the world, and we intend to conquer Italy," the head of McDonald's Italian "development" division said in 1998); at the same time, Europe's food cultures are ancient, and they are central to Europeans' rich and variegated identities. Europeans have never valued speed the way we deracinated Americans do, and so it would not occur to them that the word slow might have an unfavorable connotation on the far shores of the Atlantic.

Yet, despite the conspicuousness of the Euro-American struggle over food, from battles over McDonald's to legal wrangles about genetically modified crops and the honest labeling thereof, it is misleading to suppose that it's just us versus them. Really it's us versus just about everybody else: America contra mundum. No matter where you go in the world, you are likely to notice that food is handled with care as a cultural patrimony, and that people don't just gobble it down but savor it. They know, as we seemingly do not, that good food is a rush.