One of the great joys of Salone del Gusto is the opportunity to have some real face time with some of the foods that in their vast numbers tend to overwhelm one in the exhibition halls. For an hour or so you can rest your feet, meet some producers, and learn about their wares.

Urban agriculture has been on my mind in recent years, so I was happy to see a series this year called Feeding the City, which offered panels from Berlin, Milan and Paris. I couldn’t make the Berlin one, but I had two very different experiences in the others.

Milan put on an excellent show. A panel representing Nutrire Milano (Nourishing Milan) explained the idea behind their project, which was to see if it was possible to feed the city with food from the local area, a maximum of 40 km from the city centre. They brought a variety of products that used such products as raw milk, fruits, vegetables, honey and cured meats.

Two young cheesemakers offered us some excellent ricotta and mozzarella, and some sublime aged (2 years) cheese made from Jersey milk.

Another youthful producer

who is learning sausage-making from his octogenarian grandparents introduced his salame (Filzetta – named for the casing),

Cotechino (normally served warm, but logistics dictated the circumstances)

and liver mortadella, which had been ground with mortar and pestle in a method used before mechanization.

He uses natural curing in his half-dozen varieties, which are made between September and April (not in the summer when it would be too warm).

The monks were cloistered, so couldn’t come to introduce the beers themselves. They are Benedictines, who learned the brewing methods from Trappists, and ferment the beers in the bottle (like champagne). We had an amber and a dark one

The maker of the goat cheese selection wasn’t there, but her handiwork was excellent.

We had two variations of Tronchetto, one coated in ash and the other a blue.

And one that had been aged in chestnut leaves.

Mauro the apiarist urged us to save some of the goat cheese for tasting with the honeys he’d brought, observing that the bitterest (chestnut) was excellent with aged and blue cheeses (he was quite right).

The honeys were (clockwise from the lower left): acacia, millefiore, tilia cordata (wild linden), castagno (chestnut), melata (honeydew). It was served with bread made from flour grown around Milan

and baked by Davide Longoni who pointed out the connection between the words pane (bread), padre (father) and fame (hunger). His bread is big and broad; the kind of food for which you need a table, company and good wine, he said. He said it was flawed but he was learning how to work with the flour – the know-how of working with local “extreme” flours (with little gluten) to make traditional breads has been lost – but he hopes one day to produce loaves he’s happy with.

The Paris tasting could not have been more different, in every possible way. A sell-out crowd gathered, each relieved of 40 euros for the privilege of being there to – as it turns out – drink some beer and cider

and (to be cruelly blunt) eat a bit of clear broth with half a charred onion floating in it.

It was good, but the experience left a definite bad taste in the mouth. Even the translation was crazy, after a commendably seamless week of simultaneous translation. Speakers said their bit in French; notes were taken and translated into Italian, which was then translated into English. Though we could pass the time looking at handsome slides from the handsome book that Michelin-starred chef Yannick Alléno

was flogging. Much was made by the panel host of the strikes in France and the difficulties of getting the panelists to their flights which had apparently been booked with odd timing that managed to cut the proceedings short. It is a shame the panelists hadn’t managed to pack a few more ingredients in their bags; I ended up feeling the same sense of rip-off that I have felt eating in Parisian restaurants. No, not all of them. But this was really no place to short-change your customers.

No “feed the city” sentiment at work here either. The young beerseller, SimonThillou (La Cave à Bulles) had knowledge and affection for the beers and ciders, Ok, admitting cliched expectation here but I was looking forward to a fleet of French wine, so the locally produced (from imported ingredients) beers and ciders – a bit sweet for my taste – from apples grown in the Isle de France, were disappointing.

And Samuel Nahon’s Terroirs d’Avenir caters mostly to high-level chefs like Alléno. So how commendible is it to source local (Isle de France) artisanal product for a niche and exclusive market? Not sure; not (as I grumble) that we saw much of it. He declined to expound on difficulties he’d encountered, and simply explained that he’s providing a guaranteed market for low yield or “ugly” but delicious fruits and vegetables, and giving Parisians a chance to taste foods known by their grandparents. He does sell to the public somewhat spontaneously in “marchés éphemères” (pop-up markets) as well.

I paid a fleeting visit to a session on GMOs, functional foods and nutraceuticals, both areas of concern for Slow Food, whose No-GMO campaign was visible during the week.

A few snippets:

Marcello Buiatti:

• more is spent on marketing than researching GMO products;
• GMO is a technology of failure, because only 4 plants have been successfully modified since 1987, and these use the same processing methods as the nineties, so no advancement in the ten years 1997 to 2000;
• plants evolve in ways that GMO do not; there is the same cross contamination between regulatory bodies and biotech firms in Europe as there is in the US, for example the marketing manager for Syngenta came from the European agency responsible for risk analysis and testing of GMOs.
• the “3 sisters” (why the feminization?) Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta with the other five (including Pioneer, Hasbro, Sogeti) control most of the seed companies in the world, and have made alliances with pharmaceutical companies who develop fungicides;
• and that Monsanto earns more from royalties than it does from plants and seeds.

Manuela Giovannetti from the University of Pisa spent some time explaining the “substantial equivalence” myth

which has been contested since the nineties, and yet is still in use to allow GMOs into our countries. There are many other sources of information which call into question the science upon which the policies pursued by governments are based. And with that I had to flee to a tasting, about which more another time.

Paid an even briefer visit to the Earth Workshop on organic and biodynamic farming, which was underway when I arrived.

I caught some discussion of a 21-year study (1977-1998) in Switzerland which compared organic, biodynamic and conventional farming methods using 7 year crop rotations. The study was funded by government rather than multinationals, a dangerously rare situation nowadays. According to the speaker, the soil fertility findings were of particular interest because biodynamics came out far ahead of any other method, showing an increase in soil fertility, which he attributed to biodynamic methods of composting. The trials showed organic methods caused a drop in soil fertility of 10% over the 21 years; conventional methods, using chemicals as well as manure, dropped soil fertility 8%, and conventional using only artificial inputs dropped 15% while biodynamics increased soil fertility 1% (after an initial drop of 4%).