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April 2009
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Slow Food
key words
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The Ark of Taste
The Ark of Taste is a project created by the Slow Food
Association in 1996. It is a metaphorical vessel traveling
around the world, helping small-scale products of high
gastronomic value threatened by industrial agriculture,
environmental degradation and standardization. The Ark
seeks out, catalogs and nominates flavors that are endangered
and need protection, but are still alive and have real
potential. With the help of monitoring carried out by
Slow Food Convivia around the world, the Scientific Ark
Commission evaluates cured meats, cheeses, cereals, vegetables
and local breeds using specific selection criteria: gastronomic
excellence, a connection with the local area, artisan
production, a sustainable approach by producers, and products
at risk of extinction.Today the Ark of Taste includes
more than 700 products in 50 countries.
In Austria the Ark project has taken off recently with
great enthusiasm. A commitment was made in 2007 to search
out potential products for Slow Food Foundation projects,
and following a year of research two new Presidia products
were presented at Terra Madre 2008. Having discovered
many interesting and unique products, the next goal was
to have some of these included on the Ark of Taste. Four
months later, seven products had been nominated and accepted
and were announced to press and authorities in February
this year. The Austrian Ark includes an old variety of
giant radish, two raw milk cheeses, Austrian grown saffron,
and a peach variety grown in vineyards. The next goal
is to present two new Presidia projects at Terra Madre
Austria in October this year where all Ark and Presidia
producers will participate.
Click here to discover the products on the Austrian Ark.
For more information:
www.slowfoodfoundation.com
< Return to Index >
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From
land to table... |
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Slow Fish
International
Campaign |
The fourth edition of Slow Fish, the international event
for sustainable seafood (Genoa April 17-20, 2009) will
feature 23 Water Workshops to help visitors better understand
the critical situation facing our seas today, how we have
reached this point and actions we can take to try to improve
the situation. Topics covered will include how we catch,
purchase, sell and eat seafood, and policies regarding
the sea. Slow Fish, an event organized by Slow Food and
the Liguria Regional Authority, will also include the
presentation of a small guide to choosing fish, marking
the launch of an Italian and international campaign for
the sustainable consumption of seafood.
We would like to invite all fish and seafood lovers to
join in this international campaign, which will start
with a Slow Fish Challenge. Convivia
and Slow Food members, food communities, Presidia, cooks,
academics and young people in the Terra Madre network
are all invited to organize small activities dedicated
to sustainable fish (tastings, dinners, workshops...)
and to send us your information and recipes afterwards,
which will be used to create an online cookbook of good,
clean and fair fish and seafood from around the world.
Here are the instructions:
1. Find the fish:
Avoid endangered fish such as bluefin tuna, Atlantic
or farmed salmon, tropical shrimps, swordfish etc.
Choose a local fish, i.e. caught in seas or rivers
near to you.
The fish must be of the minimum size necessary
to reproduce (there are fish such as Orange Roughy which
only reach the age of reproduction at 20 years!)
It has to be caught in the right season, i.e.
outside its period of reproduction.
2. Find a recipe:
A traditional recipe,
A recipe invented by you, which might become the tradition
of tomorrow.
3. Cook this fish at home, in your restaurant
or canteen, share it with friends, customers,
journalists etc.
Explain to your table companions why you have chosen this
fish and why you ignored other species. Your recipe will
be an opportunity to celebrate, marked by conviviality
and a small but significant gesture of responsibility.
A truly political act—to save our seas.
4. Send us the information you have collected
about this fish (its characteristics, how, where
and when it is caught...) and your recipe—and if
possible, a photo, or other material such as children’s
drawings, a drawing of the fish, fishermen’s tales
etc.
There are three months - May, June, July - and up to August
15 for you to send your recipes to communication@slowfood.com
We look forward to hearing from you!
For further information on the Slow Fish event www.slowfish.it
For more information on the Slow Fish Campaign
and Challenge click
here
< Return to
Index >
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After
School Cook Up
Slow Food Waitakere
and Terra Madre Chef work together to bring Taste
Education to children in Ranui |
NEW ZEALAND -
On returning home from Terra Madre 2008, I was particularly
motivated and inspired about food education and have since
launched a cooking class for children with my local Slow
Food Waitakere convivium. Based in Ranui, a ‘low
decile’ area in West Auckland, the after-school
classes are offered once a week for six to twelve year
olds and are funded in part by our local council, making
them accessible to all. We use fresh produce from the
community garden where our convivium has a plot. While
the classes are not designed around ‘sensorial education’,
this is an integral part of the process: smelling fresh
basil, hearing the sizzle of food as it hits the pan,
feeling the texture of vegetables as they cut them or
the slippery texture of soaked rice paper for Vietnamese
rolls. The children are wonderful—very excited about
food and learning, responsive and responsible. As New
Zealand is home to diverse groups of immigrants, we also
try to incorporate different food cultures as this is
one powerful way to learn about each other. And along
the same theme, we have just begun adult classes—taught
by talented home cooks from various cultural backgrounds,
who share their knowledge and stories of their culture
and food traditions.
As a private caterer, I find my work constantly presents
opportunities to teach, whether it is sharing the source
of the wonderful local figs, recipes, or talking about
the simplicity of making bread. I recently finished a
live-in cooking job with a group of people over 60, some
of whom had never seen a potato patch and didn't know
where oysters came from. I watched as over the course
of 10 days they 'woke up' to the natural world around
them and relaxed.
Claire Inwood
Terra Madre cook delegate
2008
seeq@paradise.net.nz
< Return
to Index >
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Students
in Stuttgart
Youth Food Movement
participates at the third national Slow Food Fair |
GERMANY - Held over April 2-5 the third
edition of the Slow Food Fair in Stuttgart Markt Des Guten
Geschmacks branched out to include Dinner Dates and Slow
Tours around the region, as well as a workshop and seminar
program focused on the important themes of “regionality”
and “European designation of origin”. The
fair also celebrated the announcement of two new German
Presidia - Bamberger Hörnla Potato and Limpburg Ox.
In addition, this year the Youth Food Movement took the
opportunity to participate, bringing an inspiring stand
to the event where they hosted a parallel program of discussions,
workshops, film screenings and musical performances under
the motto ‘Choose Local’. Meanwhile, around
the region a mini Pangea - Ark of Knowledge Exchange Program
saw interested young people stay with local producers
for a few days to learn some of their skills and knowledge.
As a warm up to the event, an Eat-In was
held on March 31 in the city’s central plaza to
bring together students, farmers, food artisans and local
politicians to discuss ideas about increasing the power
of the local food market.
What is an Eat-In?
1. a group of people gathering in public to share a home-cooked
meal
2. a conscious effort to bring new people together, to
strengthen our communities and to broaden the food movement.
www.eat-ins.org
For further information on the event:
www.slowfood-messe.de
Youth Food Movement:
www.youthfoodmovement.org
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Pleasure
of Produce
Farmers’
market in Tel Aviv joins the Earth Market network
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ISRAEL - Tel Aviv’s
chefs are dropping by the city’s new port area earlier
and earlier on Friday mornings to pick up top quality
produce directly from producers at the weekly Earth Market—the
city’s only farmers’ market. Offering fresh,
seasonal fruits and vegetables, olive oil, cheeses, beer
and traditional foods such as tahini, around fifty artisan
food growers and makers from across the country are discovering
that not only are their offerings very popular with the
regular crowds of around 4000 shoppers, but that this
new experience is an enjoyable social event. With a wide
range of food traditions represented by producers coming
from several ethnic and religious groups and great diversity
among the customers, the marketplace is always a colorful
array of exchanges.
Just under a year old, the farmers’ market was
established by two enthusiastic young women—writers
and cooks Shir Halpern and Michal Ansky. “To be
honest, as young women working in the food industry,
we literally have had enough! Enough of pale supermarket
vegetables. Enough of compromising with mediocre products
while Israel exports top quality products to Europe.
Enough of coming back green with envy after visiting
the farmers’ markets in France, Italy and the
USA. After you realize how enormous the gap in taste
is, it is almost impossible to go back to your old consumption
ways.”
Michal, who recently graduated from the University of
Gastronomic Sciences Master’s course, and Shir
worked with the local Slow Food convivium to create
the market. In February this year it was officially
recognized as an Earth Market, joining an international
network of farmers’ markets that follow specific
Slow Food principles. As the first producer’s
market to be established in contemporary times in Israel,
the market sets an important precedent and a great example
for the future. Three additional Earth Markets are already
in the planning stages.
Click here to view a beautiful photo gallery of
the market.
For more information on the Tel Aviv Earth Market please
visit: www.farmersmarket.co
For more information on Earth Markets:
Gigi Frassanito
pierluigi.frassanito@tiscali.it
www.mercatidellaterra.it
(only in Italian)
www.slowfoodfoundation.org
< Return to
Index >
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Abruzzo Earthquake Relief Fund |
ITALY - The massive earthquake which
struck the central Italian region of Abruzzo in the early
hours of Monday April 6, has left the region in a state
of disaster, with 287 deaths, at least 1,500 people seriously
injured and some 28,000 left homeless. President of Slow
Food Abruzzo–Molise Raffaele Cavallo confirmed that
while suffering serious shock, our friends in Abruzzo
are all well. ‘The Slow Food network is working
across the region to help provide food and shelter to
the victims worst hit by the fury of the earthquake and
we are evaluating what sort of longer term project to
develop to continue assisting the victims,’ said
Cavallo.
Slow Food Italy has launched a fundraising campaign
for the victims, and is working closely with Slow Food
Abruzzo to identify the best way for our movement to
provide assistance using the funds raised.
If you would like to make a donation, you can do so on
the donate
page of our Terra Madre site, choosing ‘Abruzzo
Earthquake’ in the project field.
For further information, please contact Simona
Piasentin: s.piasantin@slowfood.it
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Index >
Voices
from
Terra Madre
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Time
to Stop Falling Short |
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I
moved to Boston in 2003 to work as a chef
for an international contract food service
provider. Mostly I ran small cafés,
or catered events – from huge to
intimate in scale. I saw a lot of food,
a lot of facilities, and fed a lot of
people, and I realized that we don’t
think about how big the business of feeding
people really is... |
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Riva
Stevens
chef2riva@yahoo.com
Click
here
to read the rest of Riva’s story on
the Terra Madre website.
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< Return to
Index >
Food
Traditions
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Dum
Maalu
Discovering
smoked fish in Gal Oyat
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SRI LANKA - On
a trip to Gal Oya last year I was driving the roads
that circle the two large inland reservoirs in this
eastern region when I noticed a small sign outside a
villager’s home “Dum Maalu” (smoked
fish). The discovery was unexpected. Whilst salt fish
is common and very much a part of the Sri Lankan diet
as a punchy “rice puller” (a spicy condiment
to accompany curries, also known as a sambol, which
whet the appetite) the fact that locally produced smoked
fish was still very much part of village diets today
was new to me.
Smoking food was once an integral part of traditional
Sri Lankan cuisine and a stove, built on a platform
with a latticed shelf constructed above it, was commonly
found in homes. Many foods that were in season and in
abundance were smoked: unshelled cashew nuts, meat,
fish or jak seeds. With changing lifestyles and cooking
methods, the traditional wood stove is now associated
with poverty and rural living and we have lost a “table
of flavors and dishes” that were an everyday part
of the national cuisine just a few decades ago. The
smoked fish in Gal Oya came from the freshwater reservoirs
in the region and was smoked in the garden: the quality
and flavor of the end product could proudly sit next
to northern European counterparts. The most memorable
moment arrived when the generous producer invited us
to share the red curry she had prepared with smoked
fish for her family.
Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe
Terra Madre 2008 delegate
chamali31@yahoo.com
< Return to Index >
In
print, On screen
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Food
Inc
What lies in
store at Slow Food on Film 2009
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The next edition of Slow Food on
Film, being held over May 6 - 10, will include a screening
of the film Food Inc in the Documentaries section.
Do you remember The Corporation, the great
documentary which exposed the shocking behavior of multinational
companies in the new millennium? Now we have Food
Inc., by Robert Kenner, the producer of Al Gore’s
The Inconvenient Truth. It is a sort of The
Corporation focusing on the large food companies. Produced
over six years with the assistance of Michael Pollan
(Onnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast
Food Nation), this powerful and upsetting film reveals
the twisted logic and malpractice behind the mass-production
of food in the United States, tracing the production
chain back to its origins. It brings to the attention
of viewers, what the industry doesn’t want made
public - the origin of the food we eat.
Slow Food on Film is an international festival of film
and food promoted by the Slow Food movement and the
Bologna Cineteca.
For information about the festival program,
please visit the website www.slowfoodonfilm.it
< Return to
Index >
Small
is Beautiful…
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Linking
Wisdom
Extract from
an interview with Satish Kumar by Simone Bobbio
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INDIA - For more
than 20 years Satish Kumar has focused his intellectual
efforts on education. In the 1980s when the British
government closed small local schools and centralized
them in large impersonal establishments with students
commuting from rural areas, he founded the Small School,
a small secondary school in the village of Hartland.
He was then instrumental in setting up Schumacher College,
an educational center for the study of subjects relating
to environmental and social sustainability. It was named
after German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher,
who after the Second World War challenged classical
economic thinking by advocating an approach which focused
on small-scale local activity and self-reliance.
Satish Kumar was able to develop and disseminate his
ideas through these two ventures.
“These two projects were created to satisfy two
strong intellectual drives of mine. In the case of the
Small School, the idea came as a result of our children
being forced to travel by bus to get to a large school
with over 1600 students. I wanted to maintain the family
atmosphere of the village school by creating a relationship
of friendship and not fear between students and teachers,
one based on collaboration even when doing daily practical
tasks such as preparing food and cleaning. Schumacher
College is based on a holistic philosophy which adopts
a global approach to every issue. Following Descartes’
statement “I think therefore I am”, European
philosophical thought became anthropocentric and egocentric.
However I believe in the idea “you are therefore
I am”, a statement which stresses the dependence
of humans on each other and nature. This suggests that
academic study needs to understand the interdependence
linking knowledge rather than investigating things in
depth and ignoring cross-disciplinary connections. Only
the younger generations will be able to create a new
system of values, we adults must help them to express
this enormous potential”.
Small is Beautiful - a study of economics
as if people mattered, by E.F. Schumacher,
first published 1973 by Blond & Briggs Ltd.
< Return to
Index >
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The huge global problems facing us provoke
great concern and anxiety, but most of the time
this does not carry through to significant behavior
change. The enormity of the environmental problems
being discussed, make individual actions seem inadequate:
“How can using too much water at home affect
an increase in drought? How can buying local vegetables
change the global market? If I drink water from
the tap instead of from a plastic bottle, how does
this influence the world oil market?”
Among the many environmental problems afflicting
us, the degradation of the marine habitat and collapse
in fish stocks is one of the most serious and threatening.
Faced with this obviously critical situation, we
might feel a twinge of remorse and guilt, but then
continue eating bluefin tuna from the Mediterranean,
swordfish, immature fish (whitebait) and other endangered
species. The feeling that fish will continue to
fill the market stalls and fish shops overrides
the alarm signals voiced by experts and scientific
organizations.
Governments and institutions, subject to enormous
social and economic pressures, hesitate to take
effective action. Laws are inadequate and, when
they do exist, are not applied. So all we can do
is rely on public opinion, the spread of good practices
and the new awareness of consumers: and Slow Food
must play a leading part in this.
Slow Fish will be a powerful voice whose message
will continue over time thanks to a campaign involving
our whole association.
Members and friends of Slow Food, by giving up a
small amount of pleasure today, we can ensure future
generations can enjoy these pleasures tomorrow.
Piero Sardo
President of Slow Food Foundation
for Biodiversity
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| Join
a great international |
community
that defends sustainable agriculture, fishing
and breeding.
Celebrate the pleasure that the finest foods in
the world offer us in all their variety.
servicecentre
@slowfood.com
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CALENDAR
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Slow
Fish
April 17-20, 2009
Genoa, Italy
Grandmothers’
Day
April 25
Ireland
SlowBier
April 24-26, 2009
Münchberg / Helmbrechts, Germany
Horeca
April 27-30, 2009
Beirut, Lebanon
Slow
Food on Film
May 06-10, 2009
Bologna, Italy
Terra Madre Tanzania
May 29-30, 2009
Dar Es Salam, Tanzania
Journées Gastronomiques
Nord Sud
June 18-20, 2009
Libreville, Gabon
Cheese
September 18-21, 2009
Bra, Italy
Slow Food Nippon
October 23-25
Yokohama Japan
Terra Madre Austria
October 28-29, 2009
Vienna, Austria
EURO
GUSTO & Terra Madre for Young Europeans
November 27-30, 2009
Tours, France
ALGUSTO
– Saber y Sabor
December 11-14, 2009
Bilbao, Spain
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Slow Food and
Terra Madre
in figures
Members: 100.000
Convivia: 1.000
Countries: 150
Presidia: 300
Ark of Taste products: 810
Earth Markets: 9
School gardens: 243
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Slow Food Almanac
The Slow Food Almanac 2008 has been published
recently in English, Italian, Spanish, German, French.
you can view an electronic version of the Almanac
here.
communication
@slowfood.com
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What Slow Food and Terra Madre
mean to me...
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I
am a pensioner and I love seeking out and contacting
groups who, like you, create value in this society
"centrifuged" by globalization. By now
we all realize we have to change course! Personally,
I feel the time is ripe to begin changing things
at a personal level. The time has come when we should
put into practice our knowledge about the effects
of our individual decisions and actions, without
waiting for solutions to arrive from elsewhere.
Daniela Mapelli
daniela.mapelli@email.it. |
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Daniela
Mapelli
daniela.mapelli@email.it
Italy
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