By anyone's standards, Diana Smart is a pretty remarkable woman. At an age when most people are actively contemplating their retirement, Smart chose instead to fulfil a lifetime's ambition and learnt to make cheese. Now, some 15 years later, the indefatigable 75-year-old is widely regarded as one of the best cheesemakers in Britain. Her single and double Gloucester cheeses are stocked by such exclusive retailers as Neal's Yard, Fortnum & Mason and Paxton & Whitfield, and have been singled out for praise by Sarah Freedman, author of The Real Cheese Companion. And Smart is a member and staunch supporter of the Slow Food movement.

She believes firmly in using time-honoured techniques to create her cheeses, a reaction in part, she says, to the fact that her father was one of the first battery-chicken farmers in the UK. 'I was brought up with chickens, and I always felt sorry for the poor things,' she explains. So when she saw an ad in the local paper for a cheesemaking business, part of the attraction was that the purchaser would be taught the traditional methods for making Gloucester. 'I bought my business, recipes and a lot of my equipment from two maiden ladies, the last of their line, whose family had made cheese for generations.'

These days Smart makes her cheeses in Churcham, Gloucestershire, twice a week, and still uses the Victorian presses and mills she inherited from her predecessors. It's gruelling work: her day starts at 5.30am, when she gets up to heat the milk from her mixed herd of Friesans, Brown Swiss and Gloucester cows. The latter, explains Smart, are 'the traditional breed, the ones used in the old days', but although she would like to use their milk exclusively, it's not a commercial proposition. 'They don't give a lot of milk - and we've had an awful job getting them in calf,' she admits.

Once the blended milk is warmed to the correct temperature, she adds rennet, leaves the mixture to set, then drains off the whey - which, in the old-fashioned way, is fed to the pigs. Nothing is wasted. 'I don't finish until after five,' says Smart, 'and then I still have to go down and turn the presses a couple of times during the night.' But few British cheesemakers are as prepared to put as much time and devotion into their craft as Smart. Patricia Michelson of La Fromagerie, is an ardent advocate of traditional unpasteurised cheeses. Her shop in north London is a high temple of the dairy, and the shelves are stocked with a vast array of seasonal cheeses from all over Europe, the bulk of which are sourced from independent dairies in France and Italy.

Michelson has relatively few British cheeses on display. She finds it hard to source the top-quality produce she requires in this country, pointing the finger at a number of reasons for the shortfall, among them the disruption caused by two world wars to the dairy farming industry and the impact of modern bureaucracy and over-regulation on local, small-scale producers. Michelson also highlights a difference in the cultural attitudes between the British and the French and Italians when it comes to food. 'They are very sensual about it all, it's a way of life for them, but us Brits are much cooler about the way we perceive food. There's this whole guilt trip about giving yourself that sort of pleasure,' she says. Some people even believe that eating cheese causes bad dreams.

If that's true, then the scene a few weeks ago in the improbably named Piedmontese town of Bra was the stuff of nightmares. Most days the cobbled streets and piazzas of the town are chock-full of delivery vans, family Fiats and boy racers gunning their small-engined Vespas. Now the place was packed with canopied trestle tables displaying an almost impossible range of cheeses.

Lesser-known varieties - rubbery looking caciocavallo, pungent robiola di Roccaverano and gourd-shaped Casizolu - were heaped alongside giant wheels of parmesan, creamy pots of ricotta, blue-veined gorgonzolas and great white moons of mozzarella di buffala. Chic women in Gucci sunglasses and high heels used toothpicks to spear their next mouthful with precision, others just grabbed chunks off display plates with their fingers. The owner of one stall enthused about the rich tradition of cheesemaking he'd inherited, along with his flock of sheep, to a crocodile of rapt schoolchildren. A group of businessmen in suits slurped a sneaky midday sample of wine, while an older man in a tweed suit sweated in the hot sunshine as he agonised over which of the six cheeses on offer at one stall he should buy.

Slow Food's third biennial cheese fair, held in the town that is now its headquarters, was certainly pulling in the punters. By the close of the four-day festival, the organisers estimated that 130,000 people, locals and tourists alike, had visited the small town to sample some of the 650 cheeses on display. There was even a handful of Americans who'd endured the now almost interminable security searches and delays of transatlantic flight to present their products to an Italian audience. While their cheeses had passed muster with the authorities, the beers and ciders they'd brought along with them to accompany a tutored tasting hadn't been so lucky. They'd been impounded by Italian customs agents who'd decided that, due to the inflammable nature of the alcohol they contained, the drinks presented a security threat.

Along with stalls stacked with cheeses, there were samplings of local wines, white, red and sparkling; mountain honeys; salted anchovies; spicy mostardas and hazelnut paste, a regional speciality. Visitors to the fair could simply wander at will among the stalls, trying whatever took their fancy, but they could also attend a plethora of taste workshops, demonstrations and dinners, or take guided tours to visit some of the region's best food producers.

I'd had a bit of a preview the day before the fair started. Giandomenico Negro, the founder of Arbiora, an organisation that ages and distributes robiola, a goat's cheese from the Roccaverano area, had driven me along switchbacking hill roads to visit Teresa Chiarla, one of his producers. Along the way he'd explained that, until a few years ago, the cheese had been in danger of disappearing altogether - consumer demand had fallen to such a low that the few producers who still kept goats only made sufficient cheeses for their families. Arbiora had effectively rescued robiola from extinction by centralising the marketing and sales of the cheeses made by a now-growing number of producers.

'Four or five years ago, before we started,' said Negro, 'there were only a few farmers still making these cheeses. Now we have about 80 producers on our books and more and more people are eating robiola.' The income from these cheeses can make all the difference to the traditional, marginal subsistence of the Piedmontese farmer. It's a mixed economy: the families grow a few vines, plant a few acres of corn and a few more of wheat; their tomatoes, squashes, herbs, onions and nuts come from their gardens.

Chickens peck their way round outhouses, and there are usually a handful of sheep or goats grazing in the fields. 'Cheesemaking,' Negro explained, 'was traditionally a woman's job. The techniques were handed down from mother to daughter and men had nothing to do with the whole process, other than to sell whatever was left over.' Quite literally, especially in the case of goat's cheeses, men considered the tending and milking of the animals to be beneath them.

Teresa Chiarla's family have been farming in this way for generation upon generation. She greeted us dressed in slippers, thick wrinkled tights and a worn apron over her fading dress, the Nora Batty of northern Italy, and showed us to the pen where she feeds her herd. The goats were her children, she told us and, as she absent-mindedly stroked the one nearest her, she proudly pointed out individuals, naming them and fondly listing their character traits. Her husband was nowhere to be seen as she showed us into the goatily aromatic room beside the kitchen where she makes her cheeses.

'My grandmother taught me about robiola,' she said, 'and I still make it in exactly the way she told me. But my daughter saw my life, how hard it is, and decided to become a nurse instead. In a way, it's easier for outsiders to come here and make cheese.'

Not far away, in the small town of Cortemilia, Alessandro Francesetti echoes Chiarla's story. A short, round man with heavily muscled arms and a billiard-ball smooth head, Francesetti has been making sublime chocolate and hazelnut biscuits, sweets and cakes for the past 25 years. His daughter is studying tourism. 'It's too hard for her to do this,' he said. 'What keeps me going is my passion for the things I make, for the raw ingredients I use and for the recipes themselves. I love that people love to eat the things I make, but I also know that most youngsters don't want to work the hours I do. They want a life instead.'

Francesetti wants to sell up in five years time, but admits that he'll find it hard to take a back seat, insisting that he'll always be on hand to show the pasticceria's new owners the ropes.

When asked about his favourite product, he took out a plastic bowl and began to make a torta di nocciole, all the while providing a running commentary on the basic ingredients, the techniques he uses, his love for the cakes and biscuits he makes. 'It's practically impossible,' he said, 'to get top-quality products these days. For instance, the hazelnuts I use, they have to come from Piedmont. Turkish ones just won't do - the acid balance is all wrong. The trouble is, I have to fight to find the right products. My competitors use cheap imported nuts, and local producers are struggling. It also means that my cakes are more expensive, and consumers have to be educated to understand that they get what they pay for.'

It is this kind of consumer education, as well as the promotion of local, traditional foodstuffs, that provides the Slow Food movement with its raison d'&ecurc;tre. Renato Sardo, the director of Slow Food International, told me that the movement was founded shortly after the opening of the first McDonald's in Italy.

'There was a lot of public debate at the time about standardisation, the McDonaldisation, if you will, of the world. Up until then, any opposition was split in two. On the one hand there were the gastronomes, whose focus was fixed entirely on the pleasure of food. The other tradition was a Marxist one, which was about the methods of food production and their social and historical implications. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food's president, wanted to merge the two debates to provide a way forward.'

It was an immediate success: 10,000 people signed up as members within the first three years. Now there are more than 35,000 members in Italy alone, and around the rest of the world, 65,000 people based in 45 countries have also joined. Through events such as Bra's cheese fair; the Salone del Gusto, which is held in Turin every other year; Toscana Slow, a four-day exploration of the region's wine and food; local workshops, dinners and meetings; and a system of prizes - the Slow Food Awards will be held in Porto later this month - the Slow Food message is slowly spreading. In the past three years, a network of Slow Cities has been created. The mayors of 80 Italian towns, places like Orvieto, Greve and Positano, have committed their communities to the promotion of sustainable development, environmental conservation and the improvement of urban life, as well as to the preservation of traditional foods and wines.

Here in Britain, the first chapters were launched four years ago. Now there are 1,000 members in the country, and the fourteenth convivium was launched last month. 'We're trying to promote a greater appreciation of Britain's food culture through local branches,' said Wendy Fogarty, director of Slow Food in the UK. 'To this end, we hold as many local events as possible, and next year we're going to be starting taste workshops at food festivals around the country.' But although plans are afoot to launch the Ark of Taste in the UK in the New Year, according to Fogarty, we have a lot of work to do before we can reclaim our gastronomic heritage.

'The key is going to be the protection of artisan production, whether it's that of cheeses or traditional ales, and the breeding of endangered species of animals, fruits and vegetables. As things stand at the moment, we've lost a lot of skills.'

As someone with close links to past traditions, Diana Smart swings between optimism and despair when contemplating the future of craft cheesemaking in this country. 'I want to feel optimistic, but I go through periods when I feel rather depressed. There are some bright patches, though,' she adds, 'and I believe Slow Food is one of them. I do think there's been a bit of a backlash against supermarket culture, and the growth of farmers' markets and Slow are evidence of that. The more I have to do with the organisation, the more impressed I become. Their ideals are so in tune with mine.'

Fogarty, on the other hand, is far more sanguine. She believes firmly that there's a growing awareness in Britain of the importance of our culinary traditions. 'As a result of the recent series of food scares, we have become much more passionate about supporting small-scale producers, and there's renewed support for our traditions. It all comes down to getting local communities involved - that's really what Slow is all about.'

As my train pulled out of Bra, I sparked up a conversation with an American engineer who'd been based in Turin for the past year. 'You know, before I moved out here,' he told me, 'all I'd ever eaten was good old US food: hamburgers, chips, deep-pan pizza, that kind of stuff. After I'd been in Italy a couple of months, a colleague invited me to one of the Slow Food events, the Salone del Gusto. It just blew my mind. I'd never seen anything like it, and I'm sure the folks back home never will. But although I'm due to return to the US at the end of the year, I don't think I'll ever go back to eating the kinds of things I used to. The stuff I've tried here just tastes so much better.'

If only half the people who went to Bra's cheese fair took that message home with them, then Slow Food is going places far more quickly than ever imagined.

Alessandro Francesetti's Torta di Nocciole

This is Francesetti's interpretation of a regional favourite.

250g hazelnuts
230g sugar
20g yeast
1 tbsp milk
1 tsp cocoa powder
250g unsalted butter
2 eggs
220g flour

Preheat the oven to 220C. Prepare the hazelnuts by roasting in the oven until brown. Watch carefully as they cook quite quickly. Remove the skins, if they still have them, by rubbing the nuts (once they've cooled a bit) against the mesh of a sieve. Chop the nuts finely in a blender, reserving a handful, then add the sugar. Add the yeast, milk, butter and cocoa, then mix to a smooth, creamy consistency. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture, then tip in the flour. Mix until thoroughly blended. If you're doing this by hand, it will take up to 10-15 minutes to achieve the right consistency. (Francesetti's mixture, although larger in quantity, took almost 10 minutes in an industrial blender, then he spread it out on a steel table and mixed it by hand for another few minutes.)

Grease and flour a 22cm cake tin. Pour the cake mixture in and spread out until smooth (rap the tin on the tabletop a couple of times to get rid of any air bubbles). Sprinkle with the remaining nuts.

Bake in the hot oven for 10 mins, then turn the oven off and leave the cake inside for another hour, or until a skewer comes out clean. As the cake cools, it may shrink - don't worry if it does, this is perfectly normal. When cool, turn out onto a dish and serve.

Slow food facts

Slow Food's base is in Bra, northwest Italy. Since its birth in 1986, it has grown to become a worldwide movement, with 100,000 members in 45 countries, organised into more than 550 local convivia.

One of Slow Food's key concerns is the promotion of Ark of Taste products, regional specialities that are in danger of extinction. Ark projects are targeted at local areas, and can range from raising awareness of a particular foodstuff to the practical, such as the repair of a vineyard's dry stone walls or the building of a local abattoir. Funding and support for these projects comes from local convivia and producers as well as the regional authorities - the ideal of community lies at the heart of the Slow movement.

Slow Food's events, which are open to all members, are organised on both a local and international basis. Toscana Slow, which takes place in Tuscany 29 November-2 December, is possibly this year's highlight. The four-day event includes a tasting of some of Tuscany's best wines in Florence's Pitti Palace; a Tuscan sweet train that runs between Pisa and Florence, stopping in Lucca, Pistoia and Prato so that passengers can sample the local chocolates, sweets and cigars; meals featuring regional specialities in a number of restaurants and a 'futures' auction of Chianina and Maremmana beef. Members receive regular issues of Slow and Slowine, the organisation's magazines.

For more information on membership and events, visit www.slowfood.com, call 0800 917 1232 or email wfogarty@compuserve.com

· Research by Kirsty Buttfield