Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Revolution at a Snail's Pace: How the Slow Food Movement Is Tackling Our 
Biggest Food Problems
The organization is working to shed its image as a pleasure-based club of a 
privileged few who have the time to linger for hours at the dining table.
November 10, 2010  |
http://www.alternet.org/story/148802/revolution_at_a_snails_pace_how_the_slow_food_movement_is_tackling_our_biggest_food_problems?page=entire

At the Slow Food organization's biennial convention in Turin, Italy last 
weekend, I joined food lovers from around the world as they perused a vast 
indoor market stocked with some of the tastiest morsels to be coaxed from the 
land anywhere. Samples were flowing in the great hall, dubbed the Salone del 
Gusto (Salon of Taste). Rows of stalls filled the 324,000-square-foot 
exhibition space, offering delicacies like prosciutto cured from the flesh of 
acorn-fed pigs, bread baked on maple leaves, blue-tinged Persian salt, brewed 
beans gathered from the wild coffee forests of Ethiopia, Sicilian spleen 
sandwiches, and countless other gastronomic treasures.

As wine glasses were swirled and sniffed and the souls of 10,000 cheeses were 
searched, a foodie encounter of a different sort was taking place in the 
building next door. There, 6,400 farmers, fishermen, cooks, food activists, 
teachers and students from 161 countries were engaged in three days of 
intense dialog. This was the other half of the Slow Food convention, called 
Terra Madre, Italian for Mother Earth.

The participants at Terra Madre came from dramatically different contexts, 
but the common ground they shared was solid. Each is working on his or her 
own piece of a larger puzzle: how to save the landscapes and cultures that 
produce the kind of delicacies so savored across the way at the Salone del 
Gusto.

In addition to talking shop on a variety of issues related to food 
production, Terra Madre participants gave presentations to their colleagues 
on many subjects. One, on the importance of the moringa tree in Kenya, might 
not seem relevant to, say, the Amazonian Guarani tribal members in 
attendance. But the Guarani's Juçara tree, which produces palm hearts and 
açaí, fills a similarly central role in their culture, and faces analogous 
threats from environmental destruction. Other presentations covered topics 
like sustainable seafood, seed patents and farming in arid climates.

Slow Food began in 1986 when Carlo Petrini, a journalist, staged a successful 
protest against plans to build a McDonald's on the Spanish Steps of Rome. 
Since then, the movement has turned into an organization that's been through 
many transformations, and is currently working to shed its image as a 
pleasure-based club of a privileged few who have the time and means to linger 
for hours at the dining table.

"I'm sick of masturbatory gourmets, people who smell a glass of Bordeaux for 
half an hour and speak divinely, as if they are priests, 'Oh, it has the 
wonderful smell of horse sweat,'" Petrini emphasized at a press conference 
during the 2008 Slow Food convention. He started Terra Madre in 2004 to help 
bring Slow Food in line with its mission of supporting food that's "good, 
clean, and fair."

Terra Madre can be chaotic, and at times difficult to grasp. One journalist I 
met complained that he wasn't learning anything he didn't already know. I 
wondered if he already knew how to prepare a wedding feast from moringa 
leaves, and suggested to him that Terra Madre isn't for food journalists; 
it's for people with calloused, dirty hands. It's a place for them to meet 
and share ideas for solutions to the obstacles they face in trying to produce 
good food on healthy land.

Unlike the Salone del Gusto, Terra Madre wasn't open to the public. The 
participants were selected via an application process, and those chosen as 
delegates had their expenses paid by Slow Food.

"Slow Food is building a movement of everyday people to make changes to the 
food system. These changes encompass everything from school gardens, 
supporting a generation of new farmers to running campaigns to impact 
national policy. Working from the grassroots, we hope to fundamentally change 
the story behind our food to one that we are proud of," Kate Walsh, Slow Food 
USA's director of communications, told me. And to this end, Terra Madre, by 
all accounts, is the most important program in Slow Food's portfolio of 
projects.

"Terra Madre is a moment when people can realize that they're not alone. It 
profoundly changes how people live their lives afterward," said Josh Viertel, 
president of Slow Food USA.

A new program of Terra Madre, "A Thousand Gardens in Africa," was unveiled at 
this year's event. The plan will begin with work in countries that have an 
existing relationship with Terra Madre, including Kenya, Uganda, Ivory Coast, 
Mali, Morocco, Ethiopia, Senegal and Tanzania. Once established, the gardens 
will spread to other countries, expanding the Terra Madre network. The 
gardens will be cultivated with sustainable methods, and situated in schools 
and on community land in both urban and rural settings. "The final objective 
of this project is food sovereignty and helping local farmers recreate their 
farming traditions," explained Serena Milano, Secretary General of the Slow 
Food Foundation for Biodiversity, in a press release. "We do not give local 
farmers kits with seeds and fertilizers ... instead we help them recover 
certain local crop varieties that are more resistant and have less need for 
external inputs."

A big priority of the Thousand Gardens project is to restore prestige to 
small farmers, an occupation now often shunned by young people in Africa as 
in many other parts of the world. The program will promote educational 
activities in conjunction with the gardens, helping children learn to 
appreciate good food, and drawing on planting and cooking techniques from 
elders. The gardens will include fruit trees, vegetables and medicinal herbs, 
with priority given to local varieties. Slow Food chapters worldwide are 
invited to adopt one of these gardens. The cost is 900 Euro, which will cover 
equipment, training, coordination, educational material in local languages, 
technical assistance, a contribution toward scholarships for young Africans 
and financial assistance for representatives of these projects to attend the 
international Terra Madre meeting.

One morning, Viertel led an energetic gathering of more than 700 Terra Madre 
delegates from the U.S., and in that packed room the stereotypical Slow Food 
image of leisurely indulgence was nowhere to be found. What was found 
instead, were people on a mission. Invoking the work pace of Slow Food's 
mascot the snail, Viertel reminded the group that "It's only taken 60 years 
to screw up our food system. If it takes another 60 years to fix it, that's 
OK."

Petrini spoke next, emphasizing transformation, whereby old ideas that still 
work can be maintained, as preferable to revolution, where the good is 
sometimes tossed out with the bad. Nonetheless, the revolutionary spirit in 
the room was palpable. There was chanting, clapping and stomping, and the 
energy recalled that of other social movements.

The civil rights, anti-war, labor or feminist movements would not have been 
what they were without the input and passion of younger generations, and the 
same is true with Slow Food. Of all the subgroups at Terra Madre, the one 
called Youth Food was the most energetic. A mentoring workshop was arranged, 
in which elders of the sustainable farming movement were paired with aspiring 
farmers. The discussions included topics like how to buy land on a farmer's 
income, how to develop relationships with chefs, how to run a good CSA, how 
to set up a proper bee hive, or protect basil from the wind. Already, farmers 
in their early 20s are doing things like creating a program in South Africa 
that's trained thousands of teenagers in organic farming, or establishing a 
honey industry in Southern Brazil to provide economic incentive to save the 
local catinga forest. Hearing about this kind of activity inspired the other 
youth, and the elders as well.

At Youth Food's final meeting Petrini told the group, "...food and food 
culture [has] become an expression of power...[has] become a rediscovery of 
people's relationship with the landscape ... We're not just talking about 
food and agriculture, we're talking about spirituality."

The excitement generated, the information exchanged, and the networking that 
transpired at Terra Madre all conspired to invigorate a community that's 
driven to create real change. The snail may be the Slow Food mascot, but I 
left Terra Madre believing that what happened there will expedite the pace of 
real change in the food systems of the world.