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Slow Food

Piemonte Thursday

We spent our last day touring Torino‘s ethnic markets with Vittorio Castellani, journalist, broadcaster and self-declared gastronomad, known locally as Chef Kumalé. An anthropologist by training, he has put his background to good use in communicating the issues, circumstances and foods of Torino’s ethnic communities. He’s a writer as well, and worked with our friends at Lavazzo to write Coffee Roots. He was kind enough to agree to an impromptu book signing at our meeting point, outside the Hamam, which originally served as the bath house to Torino’s immigrant workers. We toured the facility later: abandoned for 20 years, it’s been refurbished and offers meeting spaces, a cool and tempting basement restaurant and a turkish bath open on alternating days to men and women.

These are the tenements where the workers lived, above the market. Abandoned now, they held workers from the south of Italy and from many immigrant communities; they still host occasional squatters, many these days coming from China.

The food market is large and varied and sprawls across many streets and buildings: this is the farmer’s market section, an unusual feature in Italy where the food markets nowadays tend to be straight retail operations selling imported produce. One of Slow Food’s projects is to try to develop a network of farmer’s markets around the country.

The market changes to reflect the communities it serves. In the enclosed section of the food market, Italian traditional producers now also sell cheeses and salumi tailored to Romanian tastes. There are areas of the market for all the different regions of Italy as well: we passed a little slice of Puglia, way up here in the north.

From an Asian-run stand, you can buy a bit of pork tongue or veal nerves. Why not?

We checked out a local Moroccan bakery, serving that community’s needs for pastries and sweets. These are part of its culture; a social currency as well as a food tied to religious observance. When breaking Ramadan fast, sweets and pastries are some of the allowed items. Packed with dates, nuts and honey they are a quick, effective source of energy to bodies depleted by fasting.

In the courtyard at Torino’s mosque. It’s the simple grey door left of centre in the photo, situated in the courtyard of a tenement well hung with laundry and plastic sheeting. There were 24 of us there, which was comfortable; every Friday afternoon 20,000 moslems head in here for worship, aiming for one of the 200 spaces inside. The ensuing tension and conflict are widely reported, but nobody seems to know what to do about it.

After we parted from Vittorio, we leapt back into the bus and sped off to Eataly for lunch. Built in a former vermouth factory, it’s a large and impressive edifice, one of the new wave of groceries (not unlike Whole Foods?) promising products for all budgets and offering a whole consumer experience. We started our day there with very good bread and lovely pizza (mine had fresh tomatoes, ham, anchovies and burrata – a fresh mozzarella with cream).

We travelled round the facility with Sebastiano Sardo, Slow Food’s man in Eataly. He shows us a whole lot of beer. Unusual for Italy.

A whole lot of wine. Not so unusual.

A Spanish wood fired oven explained in part why the bread and pizza were so good…

Education is a big part of the picture: the seasonal wheel shows families, as they enter the store, what’s in season here.

The store has a library where you can browse food guides, surf the internet and even buy books and Slow Food paraphernalia.

The foods of Piemonte, a special display which gives a bit of history and background to the foods of the area.

Paying tribute to the building’s origins, there’s a vermouth museum on the top floor, with these cool copper sniffing devices which give you a sense of the relevant aromas.

Piemonte Wednesday

We had a morning at the Pollenzo campus with some of the Slow Food folk on Wednesday. Representatives of the Slow Food International, Slow Food Editore and the Foundation for Biodiversity gave us a talk on their mandates and activities. It was a helpful boost to our understanding, half a year since our last talk from them, and was particularly useful for classmates hoping to do internship postings with the organisation. We left for Bra, where the offices and our lunch were waiting.

Where it all began: the restaurant in Bra where the Slow Food movement became a reality.

Italian sushi, quipped Piero Rondolino, who joined us for lunch. We had lardo, salsiccia di Bra – a delicately spiced raw veal sausage, and carne cruda battuta al coltello (raw, hand-cut veal). All delicious.

Then some pasta, followed by the best panna cotta in the world? Maybe, surely in the running, lots more research needed. It was sweet, soft, delicate. Creamy but not too rich. And very pretty.

Back on the bus, after a shuffle round the hot, closed-for-lunch town, and away we sped towards our final Italian winery in San Martino Alfieri. Not sure what was ahead, we strolled up the path…

Heading in the right direction for Marchesi Alfieri winery…

A very old grapevine (for table grapes)

And hey presto there we were in a castle with beautiful grounds, meeting our winemaker Mario Olivero, who gave us another talk about my beloved Barbera, which is the main one of the several varieties of red wines they produce. A neglected grape, it was dismissed as fit only for table wine until about fifteen years ago, when a few and then many Piemonte winemakers began to take it seriously for its fruit and body and capacity for ageing. Now there are some 50 million bottles produced in the region, and it’s the area’s second most important variety. We sampled a couple of different years each of Marchesi Alfieri’s Alfiera and La Tota wines, and yes they were very good indeed.

After the cellar tour, Marco introduced Elena Rovera, from Cascina del Cornale, the organic cooperative that is an agriturismo, restaurant and seller of organic products, situated in Magliano Alfieri, between Alba and Asti. And what a spread she put on for us…




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.

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.

Auto-indoctrination at the feet of Petrini

Monday was our first face to face meeting with Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, and therefore our patron saint, since the University of Gastronomic Science fell out of the folds of the cloak of the Slow Food movement in 2003.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, he arrived late, his excuse being the exquisite tortelli he’d had to stop and sample at an excellent local restaurant. Well, he lives the dream all right. And he lived up to his reputation as a charismatic and passionate speaker.

He talked about the founding of the Slow Food movement, and the university’s role in delivering to its students a thorough education in all aspects of gastronomy. Throwing down some of the catastrophic examples of large scale farming and fishing enterprises driving small, local food producers out of business, he said each time: what is this but gastronomy?

He has a passion for the value of education, and sees, I think, the students of this university as the seeds of an educated future. Teach people what is wrong with the food of today and you initiate the action that will change it for the better. He spoke on the three principles of Slow Food (good, clean and fair = Buono, pulito e giusto, just like the name of his latest book..) and about the movement’s expanding scope, to raise public awareness about issues of biodiversity and the perils of a market-based food economy.

Produce food for profit alone, is the message we’ve been hearing from all three of the Slow Food speakers we’ve had so far, and you sever the social and economic links that allow you to produce food for reasons of hunger, tradition, love, and community — and you destroy the very means of reversing the damage. And so there is a shift in the organisation’s focus now towards community building. The remarkable achievements of the Terra Madre meetings were groundwork for this, but it will be interesting to see how the structure of the organisation changes to accommodate – or not – this wider vision.

Well, I think I was not alone in enjoying our first major indoctrination session. There is something cozy and deeply reassuring about being addressed intimately and respectfully by a leader in a field we all already believe in. This experience I’m in for the next year does feel so validated by the zeitgeist; it feels to me that we are on the crest of a wave of righteous knowledge about the evil being done to what literally feeds our most fundamental human need.

We were invited last night to join Petrini for informal drinks in a local wine bar. And so about a dozen of us descended into a private room in the cellar, picking our way around cases of wine, greeting the owner – hard at work on the meat slicer – to find a full table already of students from another program in our uni, as well as a few uni staff and unidentified (to me anyway) others. So, dodging flaking plaster, we perched on makeshift seats – boxes of wine – and nibbled on excellent salumi and bread and sipped excellent wine, and listened to the mostly Italian banter around the table. Those of my classmates present were mostly unilingual English speakers, so it was not as entirely convivial as it might have been, and as we were more or less at nose level with the table we had the distinct feeling of being literally at the feet of Petrini. But it was pleasant enough, and I made an early exit into the fogbound streets around midnight, leaving the others to enjoy it for a couple more hours.

Corn and turkeys

I was confused when I first moved to England about use of the term “corn” – which to North Americans means the yellow kernels that brighten every summer picnic. In England it’s used in its traditional and more wide-ranging sense, meaning any grain, and generally the kind that feeds livestock. According to Michael Pollan, it used to mean literally any grain at all – including grains of salt, hence the expression “corned beef”. And hence the qualifier “sweet” which is added to the kind of corn that people eat, as in sweetcorn.

While passing through London in November, on my way to Italy, I happened on a copy of his recently published and much-praised book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, right there in the Bloomsbury Oxfam Bookshop. Delighted I was, but long in the opening of this fascinating story. I have started reading it this week, after coming upon an interview with him recorded a few months before the book hit the shelves. The interview is more about Pollan and his research and writing methods than the content of the book, but he does preface the interview with a reading from it and answers some interesting questions about it at the end.

(Corn Maiden, in the sculpture garden of The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Santa Fe)

And so I’ve been reading the first section, which is a depressing story about the appropriation of corn – one of the traditional foods of American Indians – by agribusiness, and about the enslavement of American farmers to corn subsidies which in turn has created such a surplus of corn that its products form a shocking part of the fabric of American life, from sweeteners to manufacturing materials.

And if we thought it was cruel to feed cow by-products to cows, it turns out it’s actually not much better to feed them corn, which they aren’t designed to digest either (they are grass not grain-eaters). Luckily Pollan is a talented, humane and funny writer, so it’s possible to survive the facts he’s presenting to his fellow humans. I thought I’d take a break and look at some of his other writings today.

His 2003 article about Slow Food (from Mother Jones magazine) is interesting reading, particularly following turkey season. I hadn’t realised, when I wrote my poem, Lamenting the Turkey, that I was writing about Broad Breasted Whites, but seeing them described in Pollan’s article as “mindless eating and shitting machines” that are so deformed by breeding they cannot reproduce without artificial insemination, I’d say that’s exactly what they were; lumpy and awkward like the poem. Here it is, (from Cartography) – let’s dedicate this iteration to Pollan and to omnivores everywhere (oh, and by the way I do -really!- like eating turkey but will of course be more diligent about buying traditional breeds in future..).

Lamenting the Turkey

Stub-winged idiot, a food whose life
is a brief hymn to gluttony: crescendo of feathers
and flesh fills our tables, bloodlessly knifed
as the red leaves of Christmas bloom in the background,
remorselessly bright.

In a time we’re kneeling to stars and shepherds
this is our chosen meal: a feathered blunder
so dumb it drowns in rain, gaping at skies
as they seal its throat with liquid wonder.

We adopt all the symbols of peace
but consume the corpse of a baleful thing:
it riots at the scent of blood, will slay
wounded brothers with its bladed chin.

We fill the season with music, and stop
this wobbling voice with a plug of bread;
it ends its time as it always lived:
stuffed with food, yet never fed.

So this is our festive platter:
a death of stupidity and fatted fear,
naked and shining beneath the candles,
a meal we gobble in the gullet of the year.