Terra Madre 2008

Terra Madre 2008: we came, we saw, we conquered.  What an event!  The opening ceremony in Turin (Torino, Italy) on Thursday night (23^rd of October) was awesome and inspirational, with music and theatre wrapped around lots of words – some wise and wonderful, some more easily measured by quantity rather than quality.

The next four days offered many experiences: from the Earth Workshops to the Taste Workshops to the talks at the two Sala; from hobnobbing it at the massive Parmigiano-Reggiano stand at Salone del Gusto to savouring slivers of Presidia cheese from South America; meeting people from around the globe, some with cultures similar to our own and similar stories to tell about their triumphs and their struggles, and some with life experiences that we can (thankfully) only try to imagine.

The first commitment, after the Opening Ceremony, was the Australian regional meeting at 10am on the 24^th of October.  It was rather a strange affair, with just a few pre-determined speakers and everyone else listening passively.  No issues, joint projects, desired outcomes, future agenda…  Many of the Australian delegates were staying at the same venue and therefore had time to connect on the hour-each-way bus trip to the conference venue, so perhaps some of this ground was covered at another time.  I wondered if we had made the right choice to stay closer to the conference venue (about a two kilometre walk each way, which was actually a great way to gear up beforehand and relax afterward).

After the regional meeting, I stepped out of my comfort zone and introduced myself to a couple of delegates, and what an interesting bunch they were.  After five weeks in non-English-speaking countries, it was great to talk Australian!  Over the next few days it was a relief to meet up occasionally with those familiar faces but I was still surprised at how easy it was for people to disappear into the masses.  I looked for the other Noosa convivium delegates to no avail.

The conference program was full and varied, with a selection of workshops under several themes presented at set times over the next three days, including:

The Future of the Climate and Food

Following the Manifesto on the Future of Food and Manifesto on the Future of Seeds, the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, created by the Tuscany Regional Authority by Vandana Shiva, now presents the Manifesto of Climate Change and the Future of Food Security. This essential document sums up the main problems and offers potential solutions to turn the tides.

MARKETS – Fewer intermediaries, more trust

Farmers’ markets and other forms of direct sale. In collaboration with CEFA, FAIRTRADE, EU.

MARKETS – Indications of origin

Geographic Indications (GIs) such as Darjeeling Tea, Pampas meat, Basmati rice, and Parmigiano cheese embody unique expressions of culture, tradition, and place. Yet, some GIs succeed spectacularly while others fail miserably. Explore what does and what does not work. In collaboration with Rimisp - Latin American Center for Rural Development.

EDUCATION – Learning communities

Educational experiences in creating an agroecological culture. Comparison and presentation of international educational projects.

NEW NETWORKS – Youth, food, agriculture

Presentation of the Terra Madre youth network.

PRODUCTS – Fish: transform and preserve

Small fishing communities are even more vulnerable than agricultural communities. In situations where fish resources are already heavily exploited or compromised, alternative strategies are needed. Transforming and preserving products is a way of adding value to a product which is not easy to manage in terms of income and can create new opportunities and skills in local areas.

The common thread was, of course, good food – or more specifically, high-quality food grown and prepared ethically, carefully, cleanly and fairly, and shared in the spirit of conviviality and nourishment.

The planning for Terra Madre involved a huge amount of logistical manoeuvring.  Participants from 1,652 food communities representing 153 countries converged on two principal venues – the Palasport Olimpico, where the opening and closing ceremonies were held, and the Lingotto Oval, where Terra Madre was held.  The Oval was linked via a crowded corridor to Salone del Gusto (the international food fair), which was held in the Lingotto Pavilions, otherwise known as the old Fiat factory.  Fiat still has their head office at Lingotto but, sadly, the manufacturing operations have been shipped overseas (presumably where labour is cheaper and production costs are lower, but it doesn’t seem right, does it?).

Many of the delegates were from Western Europe.  Of the delegates from the other developed countries, most (like us) did not need permission to enter Italy for up to three months.  However, the real challenge lay in getting the delegates from undeveloped countries – especially complicated places like Iran and Afghanistan – out of their country and into Italy on temporary visas.  Some delegates were only granted visas in the last week before the convergence happened.  I suspect a few might have missed out.

All in all, at Terra Madre there were 7,000 delegates (including ‘youth’ and cooks/chefs), observers, media, organisers and people presenting the food of the Presidia, which is a bank of ‘endangered’ foods from around the world.  Many of these foods are in danger of being lost because the ingredients are becoming scarce (specific breeds of animals or plant species are no longer found easily), or the production techniques are not being transferred.

According to Slow Food:

·      75% of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900

·      93% of American food product diversity has been lost in the same time period

·      33% of livestock varieties have disappeared or are near disappearing

·      30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct in the last century, and one more is lost every six hours

“The Presidia sustain quality production at risk of extinction, protect unique regions and ecosystems, recover traditional processing methods, safeguard native breeds and local plant varieties.  The Presidia directly involve producers, offer technical assistance to improve production quality, organize exchanges among different countries, provide new market outlets (both locally and internationally).”

Not all the Presidia food was to my taste – some of the cheeses were so aged or mouldy that I didn’t enjoy the smell, let alone the flavour – and some of the cured meats seemed too rare to be safe.  Fancy me being concerned about food safety!  One cheese, called ‘cheese in a sack’ (because it is) from Bosnia, looked really interesting: a mass of crumbly curds inside a dried sheep’s stomach.  The sack was about the size of a large European pillow and greying yellow in colour.  I suspect there would be a minimum level of local gut flora required to adequately digest these foods.

I got hooked on a smoked cheese that was made in spindle-like shapes with a pattern of grooves around them, but I’m ashamed to say I didn’t get the name or origin.  Smaller, flatter versions of this cheese, about the size of an oval business card, were being heated over a cast iron hotplate and emitting the most mouth-watering aroma. Customers were eagerly buying up all the ones I left behind and the stall was having trouble keeping up supply, probably due in part to the fact that they were one of the few hot items available at the Presidia.  The cooked cheeses were being served on tiny moulded cardboard plates with a toothpick through the middle – all the packaging used at Terra Madre and Salone del Gusto was 100% recyclable.

Another hard-to-walk-past Presidia food was liquid chocolate made from South American cacao mixed with some secret ingredients (I remember that one of them was chilli), which was being slowly agitated in a huge steel container and cycled through a fountain.  The stallholder would take the money and then interrupt the chocolate flow with a small paper cup.  Although liquid, the chocolate was too thick and rich to be drunk and so it was served with a small spoon: one tiny cup satisfied the three of us.  Later I raved about this nectar to a chef, who admitted that he had taken his cup to a stall serving semolina pancakes and another serving something akin to ricotta and had combined the three in a taste sensation verging on orgasmic.

By the way, during one of our brave explorations of the chaos of Salone del Gusto, we stumbled on a stall selling porchetta, carved straight off the huge hot roast.  On our first visit we bought it served in panini but a couple of days later, when I managed to find the stall again, I bought enough for dinner (about €10 worth).  Then, as the journey back to the Oval, I pulled lumps of seasoned meat and crackling straight from the packet, the juices sensuously dribbling down my fingers and hand.  Nigella Lawson, eat your heart out.

One of the feats of Terra Madre was the successful and inclusive system of communication.  How do you run a gathering of several thousand people from around the world, in six or eight different languages, with simultaneous workshops and meetings under the same cavernous roof?  When we arrived at the Australian regional meeting on the first day, I tried to convince the volunteer on the door that we didn’t need translation as it was all going to be in English.  But she insisted we go to the desk where the headphones and receivers were being handed out.  The reason became obvious when we returned to the meeting: the speaker was inaudibly talking into a microphone and all participants were receiving the audio via their headsets.  And so, later when I was wandering around the venue in between commitments, I could look in on six concurrent workshops, each with hundreds of people intently watching the speaker(s) in near total silence and periodically bursting into laughter or applause.  It was quite surreal.

At subsequent workshops, the ingenuity of this system shone through – it didn’t matter if the line-up of speakers included four or six different languages because as long as we had our headsets tuned into channel 2 (English) we would hear English either as spoken by the speaker or as relayed by one of the translators, who sat in booths at the back of each meeting room.  Thus the translators worked doubly hard: if, as at the last session, there were an English as well as an Italian speaker, the English/Italian translator would translate the English speaker into Italian for channel 1 and later translate the Italian speaker into English for channel 2.  I don’t know if there were any translators with more than two languages under their belt, but they would have been worth their weight in gold.

One-to-one communication was a little more challenging and fraught with misunderstandings.  When ordering food, the best method was pointing, holding up the requisite number of fingers and nodding (with a smile).  Thankfully, most stallholders understood a little Italian (certainly numbers from one to ten).  When trying to talk to other delegates, it was a little trickier.  Many of them spoke at least two languages, and I felt really inadequate.  We had a great time talking to a couple of delegates from Benin (a happy African country between Togo and Namibia, apparently with a stable democratic government).  Being an ex-French colony, their first language is a French hybrid but they learn English for trade and international communication, and I think they also have at least one African dialect under their belt.  Oliver was a great conversation-starter.

I felt sorry for some of the delegates – the ones we saw being ‘mothered’ by a volunteer obviously assigned to stay with them.  These were mainly peasants who had never been out of their country before, and possibly never out of their region or village.  They looked like frightened rabbits and I wonder if they would have welcomed an approach from us clumsy antipodeans.

Going to Terra Madre was a good lesson for me in managing my expectations.  I didn’t get to meet as many people as I thought I would and the myriad offers to visit delegate’s farms didn’t materialise.  And then I ended up bumping into some people several times – like a wonderful woman, Anza Muenchow, from Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington State, who I first stood next to in the queue for the toilet and then banged into five subsequent times (no, not always at the toilet).  Celestine Prophecies would say that we were destined to teach each other something, and maybe we did, or are yet to.  Anza gave us a DVD on food production in the north pacific coast region, which made me wonder if we should be exploring that area next…

In between commitments at Terra Madre, I made a few excursions next door to the food fair.  I knew Salone del Gusto was going to be big but the scale was still shocking.  Imagine aisle after aisle of stalls – several hundred in all – and each beautifully decorated and throbbing with custom: 180,000 visitors over the five days!  A journey through Salone del Gusto was a journey to the roots of food and through the flavors of countries in all five continents: Italy, Great Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, USA, Philippines, Norway, The Netherlands, Brazil, Guatemala, Slovakia, Poland, Colombia, the West Indies, Australia and many others besides.  The Italian market had themed lanes:

• ·      Fruit, Vegetable and Spice Lane
(fruit and vegetables, spices, herbs, vinegar, tea, infusions)
• ·      Cheese Lane
(cheese and dairy products)
• ·      Cured Meat Lane
• ·      Oil and Condiments Lane
(oil, condiments and pickles)
• ·      Grain Lane
(cereals, pasta, bread)
• ·      Meat Lane
• ·      Fish Lane
• ·      Sweet and Spirits Lane
(desserts, chocolate, honey, jams and preserves, spirits and liqueurs)

Plus, of course a special space for beer.

I took the opportunity to find some more material (in English!) about Parmigiana-Reggiano at the massive (separate) stand.  By a stroke of good luck, the President of the Consortium was there, and he kindly gave me almost half an hour of his time.  He endorsed the information I had that Parmigiana-Reggiano was threatened by diminishing production of approved milk.  We talked a lot about his role, on behalf of the Consortium, in defending Parmigiana-Reggiano from imitations and from the WTO’s efforts to allow those imitations to be given equal marketing opportunities in Europe.

I did a little more digging and found a 2005 WTO paper that outlined the debate about GIs (geographic indication: limiting use of a food’s name to products from within a specified location), expressly in relation to cheese.  The paper summarised concerns of the International Dairy Foods Association, which says that enforcement of the GI system (i.e. relabelling of non-compliant products) would mean:

• a loss of access to established product names;
• consumers would have to be convinced that the ‘new’ product is the same quality as the cheese that they have been buying for decades;
• millions of dollars in packaging costs and marketing to preserve and regain sales.

I wondered why an international association should be so concerned about wanting to market cheeses made in one country with the same name as a cheese made in another country.  And then I read that the IDFA is “the US dairy processors collective voice in Washington, D.C., throughout the country and in the international arena”.  IDFA members are responsible for more than 85% of the total volume of milk, cultured products, cheese, and ice cream and frozen desserts produced in the United States.  One of them (and I suspect the largest) is Kraft, which has been producing and marketing Parmesan cheese for more than six decades, and Feta cheese for twenty years.

We’re not talking small fry here: according to the paper, in 2002 the US cheese industry was valued at US$13.7 billion (at wholesale).  In 2003, the US produced:

·      2.806 billion lbs of Mozzarella

·      676 million lbs of Cream Cheese/Neufchatel

·      283 million lbs of Provolone

·      264 million lbs of Swiss (Emmental)

·      127 million lbs of Parmesan

 This is not necessarily good cheese, but lots of cheese nevertheless (the hoary chestnut of quantity vs quality again).  And that’s not counting all the cheeses whose names are not in question.  Which brings us to one of the IDFA’s arguments: that the GI system restricts access to names that are considered generic (by whom?).  I must admit that before I went to Parma I didn’t understand that Parmesan referred to a specific cheese made in a specific region.  Imagine the consequences of the GI system being extended to cover ‘cheddar’!

The IDFA also argues that the EU’s own internal GI system (separate to the WTO system) is faulty.  At the time of writing the paper, the EU protected:

·      2,100 types of wines and spirits

·      600 foods, including 149 cheeses

·      63 meat-based products

·      16 types of table olives

 This inhibits US feta and Parmesan manufacturers wishing to export their cheese to the EU.  However, the EU has problems enforcing this protection within its own member countries.  For example, Germany is Europe's leading producer of Parmesan after Italy, and the largest producer of Feta is not a Greek company: the Danes manufacture most of the Feta in the EU.

Essentially, like all patents and other trademarks, it appears the rules are only adhered to when the money is spent on defending them.  According to a 2003 Time article, the issue gets even more complicated in the dark and murky world of litigation:

“To this day, the Parma ham from Parma can't call itself that in Canada, because a food company called Maple Leaf Meats registered the Parma name as its own back in 1971. When the Parma consortium began exporting directly to Canada in the mid-1990s, Maple Leaf Meats sued and won. The Italian consortium now sells its ham in Canada under the name "the original ham."”

As a consumer, I want to feel confident that the food inside the package I am picking up at the market is what the label says it is.  While the name is important for initial recognition, if the qualities of that food meet my expectations, I don’t care what it is called.  But I think it is fair that a food made in a time-honoured way, and within the designated region of production, should have first rights on the traditional name for that food.  I certainly don’t believe Kraft should be allowed to call the stuff they sell in green cans, ‘Parmesan’ (perhaps they could try, as my father calls it, “the-scrapings-from-between-your-toes”).

Back at Salone del Gusto, at the large Ireland stand, I caught up with Giana Ferguson from Gubbeen Farmhouse and spoke at length to Darina Allen of Ballymaloe House and Cookery School.  You gotta love the Irish passion and sharp wit.  All that Guinness, perhaps?  Giana and Davina’s enthusiasm for local, slow food almost seeps from their pores.  Davina and I talked about Codex Alimentarius – almost in hushed tones – and the implications for food in the future.

“The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO and WHO to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organizations.”

For example, one of the first Codex standards, established in 1978 (and revised in 1999 and 2006) is the Standard for Cheese.  While this standard is not specifically referred to in the Australian Food Safety Standards (FSANZ), it forms the basis for international cheese production, at least for those countries that are members of the World Health Organisation.  Below is an excerpt:

CODEX STAN A-6
7.1 NAME OF THE FOOD
The name of the food shall be cheese.  However, the word “cheese” may be omitted in the designation of an individual cheese variety reserved by a Codex standard for individual cheeses, and, in the absence thereof, a variety name specified in the national legislation of the country in which the product is sold, provided that the omission does not create an erroneous impression regarding the character of the food.

Sounds kind of Monty Python-esque to me: “The name of the food shall be cheese, and cheese shall be the name…”.  The problem with the Codex is that it makes it easier for those with an interest in food as a commodity to argue for homogenisation of production, and therefore more scope for global trade.  It is the Codex that appears to be the cause of the gradual extinction of local and traditional food, and by inference, good quality food.

Davina introduced me to Donal Lehane, managing Director of Food-NPD, a research and innovation centre at the Waterford Institution of Technology:

“Food-NPD develops, manufactures and commercialises new lifestyle foods that satisfy emerging gaps in the market. Food-NPD helps to address the new health and nutrition concerns resulting from busy lifestyles, changing work patterns, different demographics and new leisure pursuits. Examples of innovation include development of dashboard dining, children’s lunch boxes, snacks for the elderly, healthy alternatives to today's fast foods.”

Dashboard dining?  Anyway, I asked him for his thoughts on regulatory impediments for small-scale food producers in Ireland.  Donal asserted that the biggest compliance problem facing producers of animal products was dealing with the veterinarians – peak regulators who didn’t understand food and food production, and who have little sympathy for the challenges facing small business owners.  His view was that BSE (mad cows disease), avian influenza and other bio-security threats have handed unprecedented power to the vets, and it was causing terrible problems all through the EU.

The final session of Terra Madre was held on Monday (27^th of October), when many of the delegates had departed.  A shame really because for me it was the best session of the lot and addressed issues about food that are so dear to me, being about the spirituality of food production and consumption.

Carlo Petrini joined Enzo Bianchi, the prior of an Italian monastic community, and Satish Kumar, disciple of Gandhi, founding director of Schumacher College in the UK and editor of Resurgence magazine.

They had a wonderful discussion on the concept of ‘sacred’ (defined by Bianchi as ‘something to be respected’).  It was agreed that our loss of respect for where food has come from (mother earth = Terra Madre), and for those who have grown, processed and prepared it, has meant that eating for many is now merely an act of ingesting fuel.

“Why do monks pray before meals?” Bianchi asked. “Not so much to give thanks, but to emphasize the sacredness of the moment and create a distance between themselves and food. We are accustomed to eating in silence but our meals are a masterpiece of communication.”

Kumar spoke about the connection between food and Indian philosophy.  He went on to describe Gandhi’s relationship with food and how he taught that loving food is ‘an expression of gratitude’.  He blamed economists for creating a ‘fear of scarcity, which doesn’t exist in nature’.

I particularly resonated (excuse the pun) with Bianchi’s explanation of why we ‘clink’ our glasses of wine before drinking.  The origin of this act was not, he declared, to join in wishing the other good health or good digestion or whatever.  It was, rather, to complete the stimulation of the senses to ensure a fully present and respectful experience.

He explained that when we bring a glass of wine to our mouths, we first look at it and admire the colour, viscosity and clarity.  We then bring it closer and the fumes fill our nasal passages, exciting our memories of fruits, spices and the rest.  As the first sip touches our tongue, we relish the sensation of the cool glass against our lips, the temperature of the wine and the feeling of it passing over our tongue, washing against our gums and bathing our palate.  We then taste the wine and savour the initial flavour, explore the different experiences at various points of our tongue and throat, marvel as the flavour changes over time, and finally swallow.

The only sense thus not stimulated is hearing (especially for monks eating in silence).  And so a ‘clink’ of glasses wakes our ears and signals, if you like, that a sacred act is about to be committed and to encourage us to be fully present, grateful, respectful and convivial.

The session concluded with a call for us to rediscover the sacredness of being at the table and sharing food together.  Hear, hear!