Local food at the heart of Terra Madre Day

On December 10, 2010, in events & bookings, the nose, by jamie
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SLOW Food Perth’s Lake Jualbup shared picnic in Shenton Park tomorrow – 11 December 2010 – is one of 1119 Terra Madre Day events being held in every corner of the world, in 124 countries, as local celebrations of local food by Slow Food and its Terra Madre network.

From Australia and New Zealand to the Americas and Europe, Slow Food members, producers, food communities, cooks, academics, young people and musicians have united in a collective global celebration of local food that’s good, clean and fair. This year confirms the success of the first exciting edition in 2009, held on Slow Food’s twentieth birthday, when 1028 Terra Madre Day events were held in 118 countries.

The goal of this year’s Terra Madre Day is to collect funds to finance the creation of a thousand vegetable gardens in Africa: in schools, in villages, on the outskirts of cities. The Terra Madre gardens will be run by the communities, planted with local varieties and cultivated using sustainable techniques. The idea is not new, but comes from many agricultural and educational projects already ongoing in Kenya, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Morocco, Ethiopia, Senegal and Tanzania.

The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity will manage the donations and coordinate activities in Africa.

In New Zealand, the food community of Maori organic producers of Aotearoa will celebrate their gastronomic heritage by organising a week of meetings and debates to talk about Terra Madre and Slow Food, in collaboration with the Ngati Hine Health Trust. Today, in Kawakawa and Whangarei in the north of the North Island, two lunches will be held, called Ata Haere… Go Slowly, to promote a better way of living and eating. Participants will prepare their favorite dishes, using ingredients from local organic farmers, then share them with families, friends and the community. The group of Maori organic producers includes growers of peruperu (Maori potatoes), seven varieties of kumara (sweet potato), other edible roots and fruits like oranges, mandarins, kiwis and feijoas, as well as cattle farmers. Farming techniques are based on traditional Maori knowledge passed down from the tupuna (ancestors).

The Balkan countries will see the launch of a Manifesto on Food, Biodiversity and Rural Cultural Heritage, written by the Terra Madre Balkans’ network during its first regional meeting in July 2010. The manifesto draws the attention of civil society, institutions and the business world to the importance of protecting rural heritage. The document will be presented to leading authorities in every Balkan country.

In Bulgaria, the manifesto will be presented to journalists on December 11. On the same day, the first Christmas market organised by Slow Food Bulgaria will be held in the Sofia Museum of National History, with foods and other sustainable products. Students from the Georgi Benkovski School in Cherni Vit and the Petko Karavelov School in Sofia will perform a musical program dedicated to Terra Madre Day. They will also be preparing sweets and Christmas cards for visitors. The proceeds will be used for Slow Food’s next activities in the two schools.

The Sami community in the northern Arctic has been working with Slow Food since 2003, when the Reindeer Suovas presidium was established to protect traditionally dried and smoked reindeer fillet. The first inter-regional convivium, Slow Food Sápmi, was created out of this collaboration. It currently has around a hundred members in Sweden and Norway and in the future hopes to attract members in Finland and western Russia’s Kola Peninsula. In Jokkmokk (Sweden), Terra Madre Day will be celebrated with dinners based on Sami products, conferences and traditional Joik music.

To welcome the 1000 Gardens in Africa initiative, Slow Food Mukono in Uganda will organise an event called Living Locally, Eating Locally, an open day during which parents and elderly farmers will be invited to spend the morning helping children in the Buiga Sunrise Preschool garden, sharing their knowledge of traditional, local agricultural methods. This will be followed by a cooking workshop with traditional recipes, to remember forgotten typical foods. The workshop will be run by Terra Madre cooks from the Dembe Women’s Group.
The Slow Food Mukono Convivium launched a food education program in 2006 and now works with over 20 schools to improve young people’s attitudes to agriculture, developing innovative methods to maintain food sovereignty and above all focusing attention on the creation of school gardens where fruits and vegetables are grown using sustainable techniques.

In Costa Rica, over 50 people from Santa Barbara and surrounding villages will learn how to build a solar cooker, which uses the sun’s rays to cook food. The event is organised by women from the Sol de Vida association, a Terra Madre food community which promotes organic agriculture, local seed protection, traditional cultivation techniques and cooking with solar energy. The public will also take part in agroecology workshops and learn practical skills like how to make natural fertiliser. In keeping with the Terra Madre Day spirit, the event will conclude with a lunch cooked in the solar cooker. The Sol de Vida women will prepare soups, tortillas, cakes and sweets with ojoche nuts picked from forest trees, as well as other dishes based on corn, beans, manioc and turmeric. The cooking and the lunch will be accompanied by Afro-Central American music set to the beat of the marimba, a traditional musical instrument.

Every fall, members of the Bellingham community along the Washington State coast in the United States come together to share the season’s catch and preserve it for the following months. Given the importance of small-scale fishing here, for the second consecutive year Slow Food Fourth Corner is organising the event for Terra Madre Day, inviting many convivia from around the area. The whole weekend will be dedicated to the festive event, with everyone helping to cut, prepare and can the fish according to an old Breton recipe. The fish is albacore tuna, caught with a hook and line along the United States coast, certified by the Marine Stewardship Council and recommended by Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.

> For Australian events and Terra Madre organisers’ contacts, visit the Terra Madre Day website

> See Slow Food president Carlo Petrini’s message for Terra Madre Day

> To support 1000 Gardens in Africa, please email the project

> Find out more about Slow Food and Terra Madre

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Terra Madre Day picnic: 11 Dec 2010

On December 4, 2010, in events & bookings, the nose, by jamie
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SLOW Food Perth invites you to join us at Lake Jualbup, Shenton Park, to celebrate Terra Madre Day on Saturday 11 December 2010 at 1:00pm. We’re celebrating eating locally, and enjoying that food together. And we’ll be part of more than one thousand events being held throughout the world to foster local community awareness of local food. Perhaps go to your local farmers’ market that morning and buy some delicious, local, fresh produce, meat or cheese. Or make a salad from your kitchen garden. Chill some Western Australian wine, and bring all of it to share at our Terra Madre Day picnic. You’ll also need to bring all that you’ll need: a chair, table, umbrella, plate, knife, fork. We’ll have trestles for the food, and ice and glasses. Just look for the Terra Madre Day flags and you’ll find us!

> Directions
Lake Jualbup is bordered by Herbert and Excelsior streets, and Evans Street and Lake Avenue, Shenton Park, off Nicholson or Onslow roads.

> RSVP
Not essential, but if you email or telephone Pauline Tresise on 08 9381 4519 to let us know that you’re participating, then we’ll then make sure we have enough glasses so that we all can raise one to the Terra Madre network of farmers, chefs and cooks!

> Picnic flyer

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A myriad of stories

On November 20, 2010, in the nose, by pauline
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PASCALE Brevet writing in The Atlantic Nov 5th 2010 highlights the myriad of stories from the development of Terra Madre to Adi Kharisma who travels the breadth of Bali developing sustainable agriculture. The one-stalk supermarket is one of the projects Adi has launched in Bali, a name which refers to the amazing richness of the wing bean. The bean leaves, pods and flowers to the roots and dried seed of the wing bean have always been used in traditional cooking.

He teaches school children to grow and harvest the beans and extract their milk The newly created Ubud Slow Food Convivium hopes to encourage this in more schools in their region.

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Building small-food culture in a big-food nation

On November 10, 2010, in the nose, by jamie
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RURAL Press journalist Matthew Cawood argues in his ‘Out here‘ column in this week’s Victorian Stock & Land that Slow Food’s Terra Madre world food commmunities’ meeting and Salone del Gusto artisan food fair in Italy last month demonstrate the economic and social value of ‘small food’. He questions if Australia can incorporate ‘alternative’ agriculture into national farm policy to encourage the development of other-than-commodity farm products. ‘The possibilities of small-scale, high-quality food and fibre production are large: greater diversification of land use, more return per hectare, more people on the land, more jobs, a broader base for agricultural produce,’ Matthew writes. It would be a mistake, he says, for agricultural policy to continue to be geared only to commodity-orientated food production.

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Jet-lagged discovery encapsulates Terra Madre

On November 3, 2010, in the nose, by jamie
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THE clock-hands read 2:15am. Jet-lag and odd waking hours may be to blame, but night-become-day for the past week has yielded a quest for new books. One has been in the bookcase for six months, untouched: Oxford research fellow Roger Scruton’s latest I drink therefore I am. In a way it has helped – and one paragraph in particular has helped – to sharpen the experience of Terra Madre 2010:

‘Poetry, history, the calendar of saints, the suffering of martyrs – such things are less important to the newly flush generation of winos than they were to us lower middle-class (wine-drinking) pioneers. Today’s pagan drinkers are in search of the uniform, the reliable and the easily remembered. As for where the wine comes from, what does it matter, so long as it tastes OK? Hence the tendency to classify wines in terms of the brand and the grape varietal, either ignoring the soil entirely, or including it under some geological category like chalk, clay, marl or gravel. In short, the new experience of wine is that of drinking the fermented juice of a grape. But that was not my experience on that fatal day in Fontainebleau: with my nose rubbing the nose of (Chateau) Trotanoy I was coming face to face with a vineyard. There in the glass was the soil of the place, and in that soil was a soul.’

Source
I drink therefore I am: a philosopher’s guide to wine
Roger Scruton
Continuum Books ISBN 978-1-84706-508-7

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Food a ‘secondary commodity’

On November 3, 2010, in the nose, by jamie
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RURAL press journalist Matthew Cawood reports a Terra Madre workshop in Turin at which Italian economist Claudio Malagoli explored why the price of food was rising while farmers – at the same time – received less for their production at the farm gate.

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The land: celebrated

On November 2, 2010, in the nose, by jamie
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Tuesday 26 October 2010. 6:00pm – WE are driving into the darkling night towards Bra. Domenico says we must see the Langhe wine district and the alps from the hilltop town of La Morra: just a small diversion. We trammel over cobbles and stop in the square at the top of the town and emerge into the fast-chilling air. The last of the day’s light is settling. We walk to a rail at the far end, past an over-life-size, Rodinesque bronze of a vineyard worker atop a great, white, square block of marble. Beyond us, despite the shrinking day, an endless valley appears below, a draughtsboard of intensive cultivation. Here, it seems to me, are the very roots of culture. It has farming at its very soul. Not here is the land and those who work it taken for granted, or relegated. Both are celebrated. Farming is set on a high, white plinth because food, here, is yet the core of life.

A frost settles. Fog appears. On the horizon, to the north-west, the fangs of the alps catch the last wash of the sun. Village lights come on in the valley below. It is time for an aperitivo: prosecco with proscuitto, cheese and bread, a few steps away.

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Dogliani truffles: a surprise encounter

On November 2, 2010, in the nose, by jamie
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Tuesday 26 October 2010. 4:30pm – DRIVING with Elena and Domenico to Dogliani, in the heart of the wine-grape district known as the Langhe, just south-west of Bra, to visit the high vineyard of Alessandro Barosi and Amalia Battaglia. As the car climbs beyond the village on an avenue bordered by oak, hazel and birch, we pass a farmer and his dog walking through the trees. He smiles and waves and we wave back. Farther on, a large, high, rendered wall appears on our left and we sweep on to a wet gravelled apron. It has rained during the morning and there are puddles in the hard clay. The front of the house, arched and gently buttressed, with exposed brick supporting ivy showing in part of the old wall, seems of this earth, this place, inanimate of course, yet breathing of the countryside. Alessandro – tall, smiling, with graying curls – greets us warmly. About his neck hang ochre-red spectacles split at the bridge. Welcome to Cascina Corte. I am very pleased you have come. We turn to look out at the vineyard that falls away below the house and its modern red-brick winery. You catch your breath. The beauty of it in the fading, melting, afternoon light is sumptuous, like a rich brocade drawn with such gentle care over the sleeping landscape. Rows of russet-coloured, emerald green and yellow-orange vines rank away like embroidered stitches in the fabric, set against a field of deeper green. It is cold. A light frost seems to be settling in the field beyond: a hint of silver lies as a sheen on the short grass.

Cascina Corte covers 14 hectares with a little more than five hectares under vine. The vine courses deeply in Alessandro’s family. His grandmother and mother both owned vineyards. He recalls that when he was very young, perhaps five years old, he was wanting always to ride and play on his bike. But he was encouraged, even at that early age, to learn what his mother called ‘grape work’. Alessandro tells us that he bought the property seven or eight years ago for its 300 or 350-year-old derelict house – no-one is quite sure of its exact age – and an old iron bread oven that appears alone in the decaying brick and stone wall of a roofless, detached room at the back. He and Amalia have renovated the house as an agriturismo – a farm-stay bed and breakfast. The house, he says, is their most significant investment. The next is the vineyard – land under vine in Dolgiani is worth about 25,000 euros, or $35,000, for each hectare. Across the hills, in the region’s famed Barolo district, vineyards can be worth 20 times as much.

Cascina Corte is an azienda agricola biologica – an organic farm – and its wine, yet young when compared with the much older vineyards that surround it – commands a premium. Already Alessandro’s and Amalia’s dolcetto, barbero and nebbiolo – ‘the grape that grows in the fog’ – have taken their place on the most select winelists of local osterie. Their winemaking, says Alessandro, makes up the smallest investment in their way of life. The eight or nine serried stainless steel tanks in the winery, for example, each cost about 5000 euros. The dolcetto and barbero have a drinking life of three to 10 years, and nebbiolo, the grape that yields the wine for which the district is renowned, will drink for 20 to 30 years. It is some of this that Domenico wants to buy.

Peter and I return outside to capture the view again. A middle-sized, mushroom-coloured, curly-coated dog runs to us from the corner of the house, followed by a man wearing a blue tractor cap and an old shooting jacket. It is the man and the dog to whom we waved on the road when we drove to the winery. He walks up to us, calling off the dog which is nuzzling the shins of our jeans. We introduce ourselves in broken Italian. He shakes our hands. His name is Piero. The dog’s name is Blas. In the crook of his right arm Piero carries a short-handled tool like an ice-pick. He opens his left hand: in it are three tartufo bianca d’alba – the famed white alba truffles. Blas has just sniffed them out of the earth in the oak and hazel copse by the edge of Alessandro’s drive. It is seemingly immaterial that Piero holds what is worth about 125 euros. This is food with which to garnish pasta, or eggs. At this season, you can buy alba truffles in local osterie at a price of 2.50 euros per gram. Certainly, there are those who hunt truffles to sell, while others hunt truffles to eat. And it is here, first, that the pleasure of eating – and that of wine – seems to us to be at the very heart of Dogliani life.

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Manfred Max-Neef: what have we learned?

On November 2, 2010, in the nose, by jamie
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24 Oct 2010 – CHILEAN economist and environmentalist Manfred Max-Neef told Slow Food’s Terra Madre 2010 closing ceremony in the Italian city of Turin 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 Palaisisozaki 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’.

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’.

‘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.’

Source
Terra Madre

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Grocer asks the hard questions

On November 2, 2010, in the nose, by jamie
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Sydney organic grocer Peter Kenyon wonders if Australia has learned anything from indigenous food culture in the 240 years since navigator James Cook claimed the east coast of the continent for the United Kingdom. Peter, a delegate at Terra Madre 2010, aired his challenging thoughts to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Slow Food Pilgrims’ project…

SO how do you see the challenge for immigrant nations like Australia? Wow. We’re talking about Slow Food – it’s about food cultures and food heritage and food traditions that have developed over many hundreds, thousands of years. And in Australia, as an immigrant nation, we’ve brought (food) ideas to Australia from many other countries. The indigenous culture has its own food traditions, but can we buy that? Can we borrow it? Can we learn it? Is that possible? Does Slow Food have any relevance in Australia in an immigrant nation? How about the United States? In the United States, the people have got some of their own food traditions, corn and beans and things from the south, from Mexico; Canada has many of its own food traditions, with caribou and so on, but in Australia we’re the immigrant nation that has learned the least from its indigenous people, food and culture because of the great, disparate distance between our food cultures, hunter-gather cultures and our own immigrant nation. I just wonder where Slow Food fits into that. These questions….the wonderful thing here at Slow Food and Terra Madre is that they don’t proscribe anything, so these ideas can be explored and talked about. I don’t know if this is the time and place to talk about it, or in one of the forums, but I’m very excited in exploring these ideas.

Do you think the descendants of colonial Australia are at risk of being seen to appropriate indigenous culture, indigenous food culture? I think that’s happened in other countries but I don’t think it’s happened in Australia, because I think we’ve learned virtually nothing from indigenous culture. I don’t think we’ve learned how to live in Australia. When I was a child, mum, when she baked – and it wasn’t that she baked very often – had this tupperware thing that you rolled out to keep the bench clean. It was a plastic thing and it had all the dimensions on it, you did your work on it and then you wiped it down and you put in it a drawer and the bench stayed clean. And I think we almost live in Australia like we’ve sort of imported this culture and we’ve just rolled it out over the land with no connection, no roots down into the earth, and we just live on it. And I feel that in some way that we can almost wipe it down and just roll it up and walk away and we’ve learned nothing. We haven’t integrated, we haven’t learned anything, we’ve connected with nothing in the space, in the environment, in which we live.

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