The Slow Food Vision of a Healthy, Abundant Future

By Atina Diffley

Martin and I were thrilled to be two of 6,300 delegates who attended the third international Terra Madre meeting hosted by Slow Food in Turin, Italy last October. Terra Madre is a network of food communities, each committed to producing quality food in a responsible, sustainable way.

The diversity of people, foods and food processing systems gathered together in one place was staggering: 4,000 small-scale farmers, breeders, fishers and artisan producers, 800 cooks, 300 academics, 1000 young people and 200 musicians representing 1,652 food communities and 150 countries as well as hundreds of volunteers and observers.

Close your eyes and imagine an international farmer's market with diversity beyond anything you've ever imagined. Tall, elegant women from Mali, hair braided and twirled, dressed in brightly colored robes. Spread out on hand-dyed cloths in front of them they display dried gourds filled with kama (dried sorrel leaves, pourkama (leaves ground from a local tree), and oroupounna (the powder of dried okra).

Next to them are men from Kirghizstan, Bosnia and Serbia with an interpreter in the middle, discussing the characteristics of varieties of wheat. Just behind them are nettle and tamarind producers from Kenya, Mauritanians with camel's milk cheese, Moroccans with argon oil, sorghum beer and banana wine producers from Uganda, mustard oil producers from Rajasthan, cashmere goat breeders of Iran and Kazakhstan men proudly displaying bumpy squash and mammoth turnips.

A Senegalese woman in flowing red and orange batik robes gestures with hennaed hands to a Bolivian shepherd dressed in a hand-woven, llama wool poncho and black fedora. In every direction are bright colors and motion, laughter and language. Food is passed from hand to hand to mouth. Eyes meet. Expressions of pleasures are the common language. Everyone understands the sound mhh and ahh.

We spent four short, intense days together sharing ideas and experiences, tasting each other's foods and hearing each other's stories. Many of us do not share a common language but we all have the same passion: the love of land, of food and community. These people nurture and preserve their food plants. In food communities based on sustainable, biologically diverse systems, to eat means to protect.

And the collection tables! Seemingly endless varieties of almonds, dates and grains, each uniquely evolved to thrive in different climate conditions and ecosystems. I visit the honey bar over and over: Hundreds of jars of different colored honey and bee pollen to taste, each with unique flavors and properties, each marked as to its country and flowers of origin. This diversity is the result of a multitude of bio-regions and thousands of years of close relationships between plants and the people who planted, cared for, ate them and preserved them.

Garlic seems to be the most universal of foods; everyone, from every country, seems to LOVE garlic. There are braids hanging and piled in every corner of the vast hall. Cheese is also everywhere. Hundreds of shapes, textures, ages, flavors and colors of cheeses made from the milk of goats, sheep, camel, buffalo, cows and horses.

All this truly gorgeous and delicious diversity brought home for me the staggering reality of what Slow Food is working to accomplish: a world in which all people can eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the planet. In essence, food that is good, clean and fair. Understanding food, how it tastes and where it comes from, creates the library of knowledge for an agricultural system that can truly be sustainable for future generations.

It is absolutely crucial for food security that every food community develop their own bio-diverse, sustainable, nutritionally diverse local food systems. Biological diversity is not an abstract concept; it is life itself. It is composed of human beings, wild and cultivated plants, wild and domestic animals, natural climates and environments, languages and cultures. Shepherds, farmers and fishermen are the guardians of much of this diversity, but they are at risk of being destroyed by the rules of the global market, by industry and standardized large-scale agriculture. The hyper-productive system dictated by industrial agriculture and globalization has failed: it has not fed the planet, it has polluted it, destroyed the cultural identities of entire peoples and drastically reduced diversity.

Slow Food also promotes the concept of being a co-producer, going beyond the passive role of a consumer and taking interest in food producers and the problems they face. By actively supporting food producers, we join the production process.

We are entering the third industrial revolution: clean renewable energy. Farmers and eaters are vital partners in this exciting transition. The fastest way to create a sustainable food system based on clean, renewable energy is to provide a reliable and secure market for local organic producers. By eating local and organic food we create local and organic food systems. By eating with consciousness, we move from being consumers to being preservationists and guardians of biological diversity and the environmental health of our Terra Madre.

Words of guidance were provided in a closing address given by Carlo Petrini, founder and president of Slow Food International.

"The economic crisis is dark. In darkness there is fear. In darkness the basic instinct is to move to light. You are the candles. Light the new bridge between the market that has fallen and the new market economy based on trust.

Go out in your community. Express yourself amongst your people. Be an active movement. Listen to those who don't agree and then tell them what you think."