Slow Food Festival In Turin

We’ve talked about the Slow Food Movement before and now the Independent picks up the story with a review of the recent Slow Food Festival in Turin. There’s some good background about the movement that we keep seeing being referenced. They say:

The Slow Food movement was started in Rome in 1986 by Carlo Petrini and a group of other like-minded souls – largely in protest at the arrival of the first branch of McDonald’s in the city. (Apparently the legendary Italian designer Valentino also joined in the protest; the rumour goes that he feared the smell of chip fat would infect the clothes in his nearby atelier.) So it was born out of a fear of the Americanisation of Italy’s precious food culture. It’s now even got it’s own university: the University of Gastronomic Sciences is based in the town of Bra in Piedmont, and is the world’s only university committed to gastronomy.

The city of Turin itself has really embraced Slow Food and there’s a great community spirit during the festival. The government sponsors it and the organisers help to pay for people to come over. There were Africans wandering around in bare feet and the Peruvian man, for example, had travelled 18 hours by bus just to get to the airport. He didn’t speak a word of English and was being put up by a little guy in the city, a bit like those exchange holidays we did as children.

This year, 1,600 food communities were represented. Everyone from Tibetan monks who produce yak’s cheese to reindeer breeders from Magadan in Russia, olive producers of Sinai and brewers from St Louis. It was a wonderful, powerful show of food communities from around the globe standing proudly and saying, what we do is important and is worth preserving.

Slow Food’s value in essence is to encourage the practice of agriculture that is “good, clean and fair”. The movement believes in, and has worked tirelessly for, freedom of information, the right of fair trade for farmers and producers, the right to water, GM-free farming and the conservation of native breeds, and the protection of sources of origin. They believe fiercely that in supporting small communities and their right to exist and live a fair and just life that they will also preserve language, dialect, music and traditions.

Independent Online Edition > Features