More than 5,000 representatives from the worldwide Terra Madre network met in Turin, Italy for the fourth time this October 21 to 25 - coinciding once again with the international Slow Food fair Salone del Gusto.
Delegates at the 2010 Terra Madre Conference in Turin Italy
The beautiful city of Turin was the host to the Terra Madre 2010 Conference
The five-day meeting brought together food communities, cooks, academics, youth and musicians from all over the world, who are united in a desire to promote sustainable local food production in harmony with the environment while respecting knowledge handed down over the generations.
What a gathering of people!! I thought it would be a few cooks, producers, students, slow food members and media.
I was meeting economists, agriculture ministers and all sorts of academics.
And we all had one thought in common. “How can we change the world by what we put on our plate?”
The Aussies were housed at the Olympic Village where the athletes stayed for the 2006 Turin winter Olympics!!!
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Salone del Gusto, where the exhibitors presented their specialties in the marketplace, where we could sample the cured meats, cheeses, preserves, chocolates, spirits, pasta, fish and much more,
and discover the flavours of the five continents. |
What a culture shock for us we were high in the alps close to the French border surrounded by snow capped mountains.
It was totally unexpected to be staying amongst such beauty and it was a quite refuge away from the 5,000 people at the conference.
The only down side was that it was a 1.5 to 2 hour bus trip each way, but I wouldn’t have swapped it.
In the opening ceremony Carlo Petrini- the founder of Slow Food was adamant about the four groups of people we need to listen to and learn from 
to pave the way for a sustainable future.
It is the humble and modest people of the world, and these groups are, 1 the natives, 2 The Farmers, 3 Women, and 4 The Elderly.
These groups are the least listened to by the media and politicians. He couldn’t emphasise enough that we need to respect the indigenous traditions and preserve their cultures. Proudly for us Aussies Auntie Beryl was asked to speak about realising her lifelong dream of opening a Hotel School in Redfern to educate indigenous youths about their traditions and cooking with “Bush Tucker”.
The Enoteca in Pavilion 1 was a space dedicated to quality wine
One of the most interesting people I listened to was an “Activist Chef” a German who cooked on the Rainbow Warrior for Green Peace. He said it would go against all their principals to buy cheap processed supermarket food, so he sourced it all straight from biological farms around Europe.
Sometimes catering for up to 10,000 people at a time for something like a peace march. His main point was that sustainable food can be used for large scale gatherings.
In the passageway between two pavilions there was an abundance of booths selling typical street foods from Italy and elsewhere
At the Terra Madre canteen 7,000 people were fed this way each day with delicious food. A chef from England was frustrated that this couldn’t be done for the upcoming 2012 London Olympics as the 2 main sponsors are Coca Cola and McDonalds.
In the future I am sure that this will change, it is up to chefs and cooks to buy their food sustainably.
We had a regional meeting with other slow food representatives from Oceanania. We heard native speakers from Vanuatu, Papua, New Caledonia and Maori cultures.
They all had one thing in common, that their cultures and health were being destroyed by imported food and the use of chemicals and artificial fertilisers poisoning the soil. Slow Food and awareness are able to help with the reversal of these unsustainable western farming practices and restore the land for the natives.
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The first McDonald's in Rome in 1986 at the Spanish Steps
that prompted the start of the Slow Food movement |
As well as learning from indigenous communities, producers and fellow chefs, I was fascinated by Chilean economist and environmentalist Manfred Max-Neef who spoke at the closing ceremony and said that humankind had reached the point ‘where we know a lot but understand very little’.
The 1983 winner of the Right Livelihood Award – often known as ‘The alternative Nobel’ – told the 10,000 delegates and volunteers in the Olympic stadium that, for example, you could study everything there was to know about love, anthropologically, socially, biochemically, ‘but until you fall in love you’ll never understand it’.
It's all about taste, freshness and experience
He called for the world to move away from a fragmented accumulation of knowledge and towards a greater capacity for understanding.
Since the age of seven, Dr Max-Neef said, he had always wondered what made humans different from animals. Was it a soul, intelligence or humour? He dismissed all of these, and said that eventually his father gave him the answer: ‘stupidity’.
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| Chilean economist and environmentalist Manfred Max-Neef who spoke at the closing ceremony and said that humankind had reached the point ‘where we know a lot but understand very little’ |
‘There are no stupid elephants, no stupid dogs,’ he said, ‘and while no human being is free from stupidity, the more power they have the more stupid they become. They have all the knowledge of what should not be done, and they do it.’
Dr Max-Neef lauded the power of Terra Madre to fight this stupidity – the power of hundreds of thousands of groups each working in their own small way.
‘We see and feel disease but we don’t see the immune system,’ he said. ‘All the people here (at Terra Madre) are the immune system of the planet. We are one united system and the only possibility for saving the planet.’
I really think we can change the world by what we put on our plate. Before purchasing food at a shop or in a restaurant, I ask where does it come from? Is it local, organic, unprocessed, in its natural state, is it from sustainable sources. The Green Shed, the farmers markets and your local butcher, baker and greengrocer are able to answer these questions.
