Raisin farmers meet yak herders? Must be the Slow Food fête.

Holistic education is also the goal of Slow Food's most ambitious project: the University of Gastronomic Sciences.

Housed in the neo-Gothic splendor of a former royal palace outside Bra, the University opened two weeks ago to 72 students who will learn about food and drink from every possible angle, subjecting them to intellectual rigor normally associated with traditional academic subjects.

"Food is one of the few things we cannot do without, and it is truly incredible that such an important feature of our lives ... has never acquired academic recognition," says Petrini.

"Using the raw materials, and visiting the places they come from, the university will teach all the stages things go through before they reach the table," explains Vittorio Manganelli, the Chancellor.

The curriculum, approved by the Italian ministry of education, is varied. Students will study subjects ranging from food sanitation to gastronomic tourism; from sensory evaluation to the sociology of consumption; from the semiotics of food iconography to chemistry.

They will also conduct fieldwork, visiting food and wine producers all over the world. Their first trip, for example, which is part of the "cured meats" module, will be to the Italian city of Parma, where students will examine the production of the region's famed ham.

Courses will be taught largely by visiting professors. Among the staff will be Alice Waters, founder of the legendary restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Eric Schlosser, author of the best selling "Fast Food Nation."

Mr. Manganelli expects that graduating students will be in wide demand in the food industry as critics, and in government departments setting food policy.

The students, half from Italy and half from the rest of the world, have a broad range of reasons for wanting to spend $23,000 a year to become the world's first professional gastronomes.

Sam Santomauro, from Brooklyn, has a very simple motive: for generations his family has owned a store selling fine Italian produce in Manhattan's Little Italy. He says he intends "to absorb as much information as possible to take my family business to the next level.

"We definitely share the Slow Food way of thinking, and to apply this knowledge to our business is more than I could have hoped for," he adds.

Sarah Clark, who has just finished her first degree in Italian, has a broader goal in mind. "The food situation in America is a little grim right now," she says. "Lots of people have lost contact with food and where it comes from. I want to change the way people look at food, and play an active part in bringing it down to a human scale."

Former philosophy student Michael Opalenski says he is impressed by the philosophical approach to food that his coursework takes (as well as by the four-course lunches the students enjoy each day). "We are all becoming this new profession, the gastronomer," he says. "Quite what that is, we will discover, because we are the first to embark on it."

Whatever a "professional gastronomer" turns out to be, the Petrini model is bound raise students' gazes well beyond the cheese board. "You cannot stand up to the arrogance of multinational power without a broad vision," the Slow Food founder insists. "I'm for concrete utopias: he who harvests utopia reaps reality. But slowly."

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