Catherine Gazzoli

This is Catherine Gazzoli who has taken charge of Slow Food, grabbed it by the lapels, turned it round and given it a good kick up the backside with her 4 inch Jimmy Choos to propel it into the 21st century. Catherine is making friends with all the right people in all the right places so that now Prince Charles and Jamie Oliver are ambassadors for Slow Food and Pru Leith is on the board. At the recent Slow Food Burns Night dinner at the Damson Dene, Sue Jackson, our Chairman’s wife, kept us enthralled with her description of Catherine’s visit to the farm at Highgrove, when she was dressed to the nines when everyone else was in wellies, in the expectation of meeting Stella McCartney as well as HRH.

Her chutzpah must have paid off because Prince Charles has agreed to host a Terra Madre event at Highrove this year. Slow Food was recently given a full page in Country Life, who said that Catherine approached the job of revitalising Slow Food “with all the delicacy of a Force-10 gale”. Equally importantly, Catherine was profiled in The Caterer, our trade magazine. This is significant because chefs read the Caterer and up until now Slow Food has rather passed by the infantry of the catering world. Catherine intends to change all that. I’m sure she will.