After news broke last week about the passing of Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, people reached out asking me about my experiences at the Slow Food University, also founded by him.

In the years I taught there, I never interacted with him directly beyond a passing hello. But every day on campus I saw firsthand the way he indefatigably inspired those who worked and studied with him.

I’ll never forget what one of the students said to me.

“I want to make the world a better place to eat,” he told our class. It was as if the young man had distilled the entire Slow Food manifesto, published by Petrini in 1987.

Ultimately, I believe that Petrini’s greatest gift to us was language. He gave us the words we were searching for to describe a fast-changing world where we no longer knew our culinary place.

The phrase “slow food” alone! Some will be remembered for 1980s-era idioms that entered the cultural firmament (wax on, wax off; where’s the beef?). Petrini gifted us a single word that forever changed the way we eat and think about eating. Slow.

One of his campaigns over the last decade called on Piedmont grape growers to stop grubbing up less lucrative grapes like Dolcetto and Barbera as they made way for the all-powerful Nebbiolo.

In 2016, he published an opinion in the Italian daily La Repubblica where he noted that Nebbiolo monoculture was degrading the area’s biodiversity. As a result, the character of the wines was changing.

“When I hear of producers who rip out their Dolcetto and Barbera so they can grow Nebbiolo,” he wrote, “it breaks my heart. This negates the true value of viticulture in Langa. There is a diversity of soil types here. Over the centuries, they, like the growers, have adapted to the grapes in different ways as those varieties evolved. Together, they have given their very best.”

A few years later, I started to see winemakers across Italy replanting the “village grapes” as some called the local varieties. It was the umpteenth example of how he used the written word to make us reimagine the power of agriculture.

In today’s world of unending, head-spinning change, we could use some more Slow in our lives.