Skip to content

Italy

Food festivals and conferences

Who knew how many and varied they could be? Google any food type nowadays and you’ll find a selection of organised activities around it. It’s spooky really. Here we are in a time when food traditions are disappearing; our ability and will to feed the planet’s out-of-control population are slipping badly; and technology is messing with flavour, quality and our faith in what we eat. And yet, just think of a food and there’s a cult of celebration around it. Is it kind of like clapping very very hard to bring Tinkerbell back to life? I hope not.

Bulgarian National Pepper and Tomato Festival (August). I see no reason why these two excellent vegetables (yes, I know, I know, tomatoes…) should not be celebrated, and even celebrated together.

Finally a time and place to pay homage to my favourite tuber: the seventh World Potato Congress will be held in Tours, France, 2008 – plenty of time to plan for this one. Call for papers for a simultaneous potato conference is already out. And don’t forget that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato. How will you celebrate?

The Big Cheese, in Caerphilly (July) (a little suspicious of this one: do falconry and fire eating really go with cheese?) And if that’s not silly enough, check out the Cheese Rolling contest in Gloucester (May)

A couple of Slow Food events I hope and plan to be able to attend this year: Slow Fish in Genova May 4-7, 2007 and Cheese, held in Slow Food’s home town of Bra, September 21-24, 2007.

And one I wouldn’t mind taking in for sure: The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, September 8-9, 2007. This year the topic is Food & Morality, taking its spin from Slow Food’s articles of faith:

  • Food and quality – should food be good?
  • Food and safety and the environment – should food be clean?
  • Food and justice – should food be fair?
  • Food and human nature – is it right to take pleasure in food?

As luck would have it I’ll be on the other side of the planet in May, when the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society meets up with the Association for the Study of Food and Society in Victoria – of all places – to talk about Changing Ecologies of Food and Agriculture.

And then (is it just me or are these organisation names getting a little unwieldy?) the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association is going to host a workshop on the subject of The Morality of Food as a Social Movement at the Collective Behavior and Social Movements conference in August.

Pig Week

Piggish in many ways. Started it off by snuffling and snorting my way through yet another cold. Surprised myself by getting up at 6.05 am on Tuesday to listen to Barbara’s Ideas program on pigs. And (thanks Gloria) enjoyed learning this was British Bacon Education Week. And of course we’re into the first week of the Chinese Year of the Pig, which the class will celebrate tonight, noses firmly in the trough, with a big Asian feed (thanks in advance Amy, Andy et al). One day perhaps I’ll get to the Bongseong Charcoal-broiled Pork Festival, or perhaps the Ballyjamesduff International Pork Festival, or one of the many American pork festivals: the Spamarama in Austin, TX sounds worth avoiding though. And if you want to see what 200 calories of bacon (and lots of other things) actually looks like on the plate, check out these pictures.

The weekend in review

It was a busy old weekend. Our class pretty much split into two: half of us spent the weekend in Pollenzo, checking out the other campus of our uni and attending a meeting of the Slow Food offices, while the other half larked about at Carnivale in Venice. I couldn’t tell you who had more fun!?

The group I joined got a grand tour of our big brother campus. Our campus at Colorno is the small and newer half of the university which began in Piedmont, in the village of Pollenzo, about ten minutes from Bra where the headquarters for Slow Food has its offices. Amazing things have been done to transform Pollenzo’s campus – the Agenzia di Pollenzo, a neo–gothic estate built in 1833 as a model farm by King Carlo Alberto of Savoy – into a sparkly new facility that can hold up to 180 students enrolled in cohorts of 60 in a three-year program that takes them on field trips literally around the world: they’ve had stages in the UK, Japan, Australia, India and Africa. Pollenzo’s much smaller (pop. 800) than Colorno (8,000); and Bra (pop. 28,000) where most of the students live is much smaller than Parma (pop. 177,000) where most of us do.


One of the interesting features of the Pollenzo campus is the Wine Bank, in the historic wine cellars of the Agenzia di Pollenzo, where producers can lodge their products in a centre for oenological teaching and present – for study or tasting (but not, alas, by us this time) – a selection of specially selected Italian wines of many vintages.

Back in the meeting room, I enjoyed the business discussions, and the mealtime schmoozing that went on with the 50-odd Slow Foodies from Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, the US, the UK, Australia, Ireland, Argentina, Canada and the Netherlands. We enjoyed good and interesting foods at lunchtimes: cured meats, varied cheeses, salads; there were of course some Presidia and local food products… including wonderful gelato.

Meanwhile, news from home today made me sad: I hear that Fanny Bay Oysters – locally owned for 22 years, described as the largest oyster farm on Vancouver Island, and one of the largest shellfish producers on the B.C. Coast, has just been sold to a U.S. (Washington state) company. Of course the public promise is that all will remain as it was as far as the running of the company goes, but there was also an uneasy paragraph in the news story I read that mentioned the U.S. firm’s interest had stemmed in part from its lack of a processing plant in B.C. Which suggests that change is inevitable, and that the change will involve some kind of increased processing activity. Anyway, it’s always a sad thing to see business ownership leave the neighbourhood, particularly one where there isn’t a lot of steady employment. However you cut it, it’s local cash leaving the local area, and in this case the country.

Painting with light and tasting with wine

One of this week’s visiting lecturers was Alberto Cocchi, a Parma photographer who works out of his studio in Bologna. His American accent threw us at first – he spent some years in the US studying and working – but he was all Italian when it came to style and attitude to food – his photos were inventive and gorgeous. He revealed that the very etymology of “photography” comes from Greek roots, and means painting with light, before walking us through the technical stuff, the f-stops and the ISO settings, the digital vs film debate.

Depth of field, he said, is where it all begins when you’re talking about food. Or talking, more specifically, about food porn (a term last year’s students had taught him and which, since we’re getting technical here, I feel obliged to reveal was originally gastroporn, discussed in print as long ago as 1984, in The Official Foodie’s Handbook). He showed us some examples of his work with depth of field: selectively using focus to group objects, and using light to create interest and even a bit of mystery. We had a quick preview of his recent shoot in Scotland where he photographed whiskey, oysters and Black Angus (on and off the hoof).

Yesterday we had a photo shoot in the classroom where he worked magic on a couple of dishes, showing us the difference between natural light, side lighting, fill-in techniques (using plastic mirrors or even cosmetic mirrors) and more complicated stuff with softboxes, umbrellas and flashes. We got to watch the photos evolve on the screen. We’re looking forward to seeing him on one of our field trips later this year, when he’ll take us out and let us test what he showed us.

And we had an informal wine tasting. Some Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino, Amarone, Nero D’Avola, Cabernet and Pinot Nero passed beneath our noses and across our palates in quick succession, and then we had to run for the last bus home and – those of us attending – get ready for our Valentine’s Day dinner. It was red and white food, which included radishes & salt, cream cheese with red pepper jelly, pasta, roasted baby red potatoes, rice pudding and strawberries (in chocolate!). Oh, and red and white wine I guess. The Valentine’s cocktail was prosecco with pomegranate seeds, very pretty.

Call of the coypu…

… or do I mean Revenge of the Nutria?

Visitors to Florence, I’m told, often remark on the web-footed, beaver-like creatures you can see frolicking in the Arno. Here too in Parma we’d noticed mammals in the river and wondered what they were: nutria, we were told (aka coypu / coipú / kóypu / ragondin / nuture rat / swamp beaver — but not to be confused with the river otter). And as their species name (Myocastor coypus) suggests, beaver-like they are, in many ways.. until you see their tails, and their colourful teeth!

Apparently these little blighters – Argentinian rodents with rat-like tails – were imported into Europe from South America in the 1920s. They arrived in Italy in 1928, brought here by commercial furriers hoping to turn a quick lire. When this didn’t happen, it seemed easiest to just.. set them free. And some of the rest escaped fair and square, and have made a real success of it: since their first sighting in the wild in 1960, they have spread from Italy to Sicily and Sardinia .

Alas for Italy, coypu really like it here and find many nice things to eat in the river systems, to the extent that they have laid waste to a great deal of native vegetation, as well as rice farms, and their burrowing habits weaken irrigation systems and riverbanks, causing tens of millions of euros in damage per year.

They were introduced to Britain as well, where they caused a lot of agricultural damage, but Britain embarked on an eradication campaign, employing 24 trappers who managed to eradicate the species there in just under a decade, by 1989 (… or did they?).

They are still raised in France for fur, and other products including soap, pate and even jewellery (those lovely teeth, just the colour of Mimolette, alors). Here are a couple of recipes in case you want to make your own pate or ragout. (Lucky for the nutria, animal rights activists at Bite Back are hard at work liberating these giant rodents into the French countryside.)

The French are not the only connaiseurs: apparently the meat is lean and low in cholesterol (well, they are herbivoires) and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries is aiming to get locals to help eradicate them through fine dining, and has helpfully posted some other recipes. If you need some visual prompts, here’s a YouTube video – sponsored by LDWF – to show you how it’s done.

Ironically, just as they are really making a nuisance of themselves by busting loose wherever they were imported, their numbers in the rivers and streams of Argentina appear to have been dwindling.

Chocolate finale

How do you make 24 foodie students happy? So easy. Make their last class on Friday afternoon a chocolate tasting session. We were reunited with our affable guide through cured meats, Mirco Marconi, who confessed his passion for artisanal chocolate, and treated us to a sampling of 23 different varieties.

We learned a bit about the history of cacao – its discovery by the Olmecs and its appreciation by the Mayans who consumed it as a liquid, relishing the foam. He showed us a picture of the Mexican chocolate whisk, the molinillo, which was actually a contribution by the Spaniards.

The New Taste of Chocolate by Spanish writer Maricel Presilla is, he says, the best book he’s read on chocolate. There seemed to be interest among my long-suffering classmates in doing more of the onerous research required to master this subject: there are chocolate festivals enough to keep us happy: CioccolaTO in Turin next month; the recently elapsed but highly recommended purists’ festival, Cioccolasita; and one to look forward to, Le Salon du Chocolat in Paris, from October 19-22, 2007.


We heard about the chocolate making process, from harvest through fermentation and drying, to refining, conching and tempering. We tasted chocolate beans, unsweetened chocolate, liquid chocolate, and ‘grand cru’ chocolates from Venezuela; we tried chuao and porcelana; criollo, forestero and trinitano. Bewildering varieties and many epiphanies of taste and texture.

My favourites were Guido Gobino’s Cialdine lemon and ginger – a chocolate covered nugget of exquisite candied fruit; Ravera‘s Baci di Cherasco – a crunchy fusion of fine chocolate and top quality hazelnuts (nocciola from Langhe); and Château Domori Porcelana – a silky bite of Venezuelan (70%) criollo — from a company evidently run by a chocophilic poet!? Marconi even brought us a special treat from his personal collection – a Bodrato cherry chocolate, the kind of treat he’d adored as a child and which is now produced with high quality cherries (la ciliegia d.o.p. di Vignola) which, bathed whole in grappa, are encased in a fabulous dark chocolate.

As we were picking and chewing I couldn’t help but think if we’d been served any one of the sampling – unsweetened versions aside – we’d probably have been overjoyed. Taken together, of course, you really notice the differences.

There were three artisan producers named from the US, Scharffen Berger (which has been bought out by a multinational since he’d first encountered them), Ghirardelli and E. Guittard. I’m eager to get back to Hot Chocolates in Courtenay and do a little taste-testing to see how they measure up now…