Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair

{DIARY 1} PEPPERS AND TULIPS

In 1996, I happened to be traveling, as I often do, along the SS (strada statale, or state highway) 231, which links Cuneo with Asti, passing via Bra, the small provincial town where I live and where the international movement Slow Food is based. Even today, although a highway is being built to connect the two larger towns, this busy strip of asphalt running across southern Piedmont is virtually our only link with the rest of Italy. It runs in an easterly direction, and anyone who wishes to travel toward Milan or central and southern Italy is bound to use it.

Southern Piedmont has always been an agricultural region; its history has included many periods of hunger and deprivation, but more recently the area has been enriched by the introduction of small industries and by the emergence of a mutually beneficial interchange between the area’s traditional agricultural wares—including some of the finest of all Italian wines—and burgeoning international tourism. As the production and export of local gastronomic treasures has grown, tourists have been drawn not just by the beauty of southern Piedmont’s hilly landscape, but by its gastronomy, too.

The SS 231 runs across this countryside and, as well as being notorious for its inadequacies as a thoroughfare, it has become a striking symbol of the affluence that has transformed the land of my birth. It runs along a long string of factories, suburban shopping centers, and big-box stores that are among the worst architectural horrors that could possibly be imagined. Only here and there do you still find a few surviving greenhouses where things are grown. It is a depressing experience to drive through such squalid surroundings, especially as the slowness of the road always gives you plenty of time to meditate at length on “development” and its effects.

Along the road—if you make just the smallest of detours—the concentration of excellent restaurants and traditional osterie serving local cuisine is far higher than in any other part of Italy. It was here that I began to learn about gastronomy, and I owe a crucial part of my training as a gastronome to the chefs and farmers of this area.

But to return to that day in 1996: on my way home, I stopped at a restaurant owned by a friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen for several years and who was renowned for his peperonata (a common Italian dish whose Piedmont version is traditionally made with the “square” peppers of Asti). I wanted to have a helping of his specialty to refresh myself after the tiring journey that was now nearing its end; to my great disappointment, the peperonata I was served was awful—completely tasteless. The chef’s skills were not in doubt, so I asked for an explanation for this great deterioration in flavor. My friend told me that he no longer used the same raw materials as those of the peperonata that echoed in my gustatory-olfactory memory. The square peppers of Asti, a fleshy, scented, tasty variety, had almost ceased to be grown locally, so instead he used peppers imported from Holland—imported because they were cheaper, grown with intensive farming methods, using hybrid varieties that were visually striking with their garish colors, and perfect for export (“each box contains thirty-two peppers, not one more, not one less, and every one beautiful, every one identical,” he told me). But they were utterly tasteless.

Resigned to the fact that the wonderful peperonata had gone forever, I drove on down the road toward Bra. Passing along one of the stretches of road where there are still some greenhouses, I stopped the car at a place called Costigliole d’Asti: surely this was where they used to grow those square Asti peppers? What could be under those nylon sheets now? I met a farmer, who confirmed that it was indeed here that those magnificent vegetables had been grown. But not anymore; as he explained to me: “It’s not worth it: the Dutch ones are cheaper and nobody buys ours any longer. It’s hard work producing them and it’s all wasted effort.” “What do you grow now, then?” I asked. He smiled: “Tulip bulbs! And after we’ve grown the bulbs, we send them to Holland where they bring them into bloom.”

I was dumbfounded. I had come up against one of the paradoxes of agroindustry and its interaction with globalization: peppers crossing frontiers and traveling over mountains in exchange for tulips; products that were the symbols of two different regions being grown more than a thousand kilometers away from their respective homes, completely overturning the two agricultural traditions that had once firmly embedded them in their original ecosystems; a wonderful variety of pepper now on the verge of extinction; a traditional recipe distorted out of all recognition; and goodness knows how much pollution from fertilizers and pesticides and from exhaust fumes discharged into the air by container trucks and other vehicles going back and forth across Europe.

That day for me was the official starting date of eco-gastronomy; the raw material must be grown and produced in a sustainable way; biodiversity and local traditions of cuisine and production must be preserved even if it costs more.

{DIARY 2} TEHUACÁN

During the summer of 2001, I went on a trip, first to San Francisco, to attend the First National Congress of Slow Food USA, then on to Mexico, a country and a culture of which I am very fond and which I had not visited for some time. I stayed for awhile in the Federal District of the immense Mexico City, where I saw with my own eyes the extreme poverty endured by millions of people who had left the countryside, selling off what little land they possessed, and who were now clogging up the suburbs of the capital in the hope of making a living. The small-scale, family-based subsistence farming they practiced was no longer profitable: the neighboring United States had created illusions with the glitter of its products and stimulated new needs, but its primary effect had been to impose the methods of industrial farming. The latter had reduced the workforce, made it difficult to avoid being drawn into the vicious circle imposed by the multinationals (the commercialization of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides—all interlinked products), and stripped a farming culture of its traditional knowledge, formed over thousands of years.

In Mexico, where the pre-Columbian civilizations were responsible for developing corn and many other food products that are now part of the basic diet of millions of people around the world, biodiversity is still at record levels. As far as corn is concerned, of the more than a thousand indigenous varieties that evolved over the centuries in perfect harmony with the various Mexican ecosystems, I was told that over the years almost 80 percent have been patented by American multinationals searching for new hybrids.

These local varieties have then been gradually replaced by those very same American hybrids, which need much more water (and many parts of Mexico suffer from a serious water shortage), as well as having a far lower nutritional value and poorer taste. Tortillas made with corn soaked in water with a little lime (the presence of so much calcium in such a widespread dish meant that dental problems were almost unknown in Mexico until fifty years ago) were—and to some extent still are—a homemade product, skillfully cooked by the women and rich in flavors which vary according to the type of corn used. This gastronomic richness should not be underestimated: together with the infinite variety of traditional Indian cuisines, which were always based on local products, it has made Mexican gastronomy one of the most complex in the world. (Much of the country’s rich gastronomic heritage has been documented by José N. Iturriaga de la Fuente, a winner of the 2003 Slow Food award for the defense of biodiversity.)¹

The spread of the intensive cultivation of corn has threatened other vegetable species, too, such as amaranth. This food, together with beans and corn, was the basis of the Aztec diet, but was banned by the first colonizers because it was felt to be in some way associated with the ritual human sacrifices that these civilizations practiced. As a result, it has become extremely rare, gradually forgotten by the local farming cultures, and this is a pity, for not only does the plant need very little water to complete its productive cycle, but it also constitutes an ideal supplement to the country dwellers’ poor diet.²

So that summer I went to Tehuacán, in the state of Puebla, to learn more about an excellent project—winner of the 2002 Slow Food Award for the Defense of Biodiversity—to reintroduce amaranth to one of the poorest areas in Mexico, where the desert is inexorably advancing. The Quali project, founded and directed by Raúl Hernández Garciadiego, is combined with an ingenious plan to regenerate the water supply using some clever methods devised by the ancient inhabitants of this area.

I visited a tiny family-run farm to see a small amaranth allotment with my own eyes and to hear from the farmers themselves what they thought of the project. With me went the directors of Quali, some of my own colleagues, and Alicia De Angeli, a well-known Mexico City chef and an expert on native Mexican cuisines, which she skillfully recreates in her own restaurant.

The poverty of the family we met was unmistakable, but they were very dignified and expressed satisfaction at having found a plant, the amaranth, that was easier to grow and more profitable than corn. Their house was modest; the children played on a small threshing floor strewn with disused tools, fragments of Coca-Cola bottles, and empty Pan Bimbo wrappers. (Pan Bimbo, the best-known brand of bread produced by the Mexican food industry, is gradually supplanting corn tortillas in the everyday diet of the poorer sectors of society, creating many nutritional problems in a country where white bread made from wheat had never formed part of the traditional diet.)

The little amaranth field was close to the farm buildings, and as we walked back to the farmhouse after viewing those colorful plants, I overheard an interesting conversation between De Angeli and the wife of the farmer who was our host. The two women stopped by the side of the short path down which we were walking. There were weeds all along the path; in fact, the house was completely surrounded by weeds. The attention of the two women (both of them cooks, but very different from one another, and it was a striking visual contrast to see them together—the one white and of European origin, a member of the affluent elite of the Federal District; the other a poor native Mexican, her spine curved by constant physical labor) was attracted to one of these leafy weeds. “This is a wonderful herb! But I’m sure you know it, don’t you?” De Angeli asked. “No, why?” said the lady of the house. “It’s excellent for making caldos [broths and soups]; they’re very nutritious, and tasty, too. The recipes I discovered during my research originate from this very area; they’re traditional to your people.” The perplexity of this farmer’s wife, a woman of about forty, was shyly expressed on her face as she asked the white chef for an explanation of how to make soup with that plant. De Angeli meticulously explained the recipes.

We visited the kitchen. The limited range of utensils and of food in the pantry spoke volumes about how difficult it was for these people to find enough food to put on their plates day by day. The house was surrounded by freely growing herbs that over the centuries their ancestors had learned to use for nutritional and medicinal purposes, but they themselves had no idea how to cook them; in fact, they weren’t even aware that they were edible.

Industrial agriculture and modernization wiped the slate clean: all it took was the introduction of a few cultivable varieties of the most common products—varieties which do not thrive in this increasingly arid environment—and within two generations the local population had lost all the traditional knowledge that had once enabled it to subsist on the freely available fruits of nature. A simple form of gastronomic knowledge, an ancient wisdom, a recipe, had disappeared from local culture and made life even more difficult in this region where the temptation to sell your field and move to Mexico City, or to take a job in the nearby maquiladoras making jeans for American firms, is stronger than anywhere else in the country.

Evening was falling in Tehuacán. Just as we reached the threshing floor, the truck that makes door-to-door deliveries of Pan Bimbo stopped at the end of the street, under a huge billboard advertising Coca-Cola, the American company which, ironically, owns the largest spring of bottled mineral water in Mexico, itself called Tehuacán. Even today, Tehuacán is synonymous for bottled water all over Mexico; in many parts of the country, it is the standard term that people use when ordering mineral water in bars. The factory that bottles it stood out on the skyline a few kilometers from our friends’ house, in this stretch of land which is among the thirstiest and driest in Central America.

{DIARY 3} LAGUIOLE

In the late spring of 2001, a business trip took me to France: to Lyon and Laguiole. I was due to have a couple of meetings with the local directors of Slow Food France in the regional capital and make a stopover in Aubrac, an area south of the Massif Central, bordering on the more famous Auvergne. There, in the principal village of the area, Laguiole, I was to meet André Valadier, the president of the Jeune Montagne cooperative, which produces Laguiole cheese, one of the many French cheeses classified as Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC). I should explain that Laguiole not only denotes a village and a cheese, but is probably even more famous as the name of a traditional knife, a minor art form which is considered the knife par excellence by all French gourmets.

Valadier is a very charismatic figure, the head of the association of AOC cheese producers, and I wanted to meet him to discuss the possibility of their attending Cheese, the international conference which Slow Food holds every two years in Bra, in September.

The visit also gave me an excuse to dine and stay at one of the most charming and relaxing relais in France, that of Michel Bras, a three-star chef based in Laguiole. He is a close friend of Valadier and a great champion of regional cuisine and local biodiversity: in his recipes he uses more than three hundred kinds of vegetables, from the most common to the very rarest, and from cultivated varieties to others that grow wild in the vast pastures and woods of the beautiful Aubrac plateau.

Between a quick meeting in the afternoon, in the offices of Jeune Montagne, and a wonderful dinner chez Bras, Valadier recounted to me the history of Laguiole (the cheese) and of this region, which for geomorphological reasons is somewhat isolated from the rest of France.

“Until World War II,” Valadier told me, “we produced cheese mainly for our own sustenance. Later, we strove to produce as much as possible, and today we’ve reached the point where we have to produce in order to have a surplus.”

In the 1960s, the Aubrac, like almost all the mountain areas of Europe, entered a period of profound social and productive crisis. First came emigration: the young rejected the harsh conditions demanded by agricultural life and left for the cities, abandoning the care of pastures, the raising of the local breed of cattle—the Fleur d’Aubrac (or Rouge d’Aubrac)—and the production of cheese. The few who remained, of whom Valadier was one, were persuaded by zootechnical experts to switch from local breeds of cattle to Holsteins, the famous dappled black-and-white creatures that invaded the world milk market in the late 1970s. They are the most productive of all cows: they stand quietly in their stables, pumped with feed specially formulated to squeeze every last drop out of them. When they reach the end of their “careers,” they are fattened up as quickly as possible—in America through hormones, in Europe until recently with the animal flour that caused mad cow disease—and then sent to the abattoir. Since, owing to the life they have led, their meat is not particularly good, they are mainly used for hamburgers or other industrial products.³ But they do have one advantage, at first sight: they produce almost twice as much milk per day as “normal” cows.

The Aubrac farmers could hardly believe it when they were shown those production figures. Within a few years, Holsteins had replaced the Aubrac cows almost to the point of rendering them extinct. Problems, however, soon began to arise: the Holsteins, because of their physical characteristics, are not suited to grazing on high ground, and in the Aubrac, with all those pastures, cattle sheds are almost pointless, except to shelter the animals from the winter cold. Moreover, their milk, which contains much less fat and also less protein than that produced by the indigenous cows (as well as being less tasty), is virtually useless for making Laguiole cheese, whose traditional production method requires milk with very different characteristics. So, along with the indigenous cows, the traditional cheese was also disappearing.

And as if this were not enough, emigration had led to the expertise in knife production moving to Thiers, where there are some big firms specializing in that sector.

The three symbols of Laguiole—grazing cattle, cheese, and knives—were on the point of being erased from history in the space of twenty years.

“I decided that it was time to start a campaign,” said Valadier. “I set up a cooperative with some other young people who had not left the area, and we pinned our hopes on the few remaining Fleur d’Aubrac cows. Since then, there have been a lot of changes: now you can again see in the pastures our reddish-brown cows with those black circles round their eyes and those long, downward-turned horns that are used for making knife handles. Now you are sitting here in front of me in one of the finest restaurants in France, inviting me to bring Laguiole to Bra for Cheese, and you have asked me for the address of a place where you can buy a set of knives for your sister. I’d say that we have achieved results here, wouldn’t you?”

The next day, while I was paying a considerable price—but a fair one, I must admit, all things considered—for the knives I wanted to take home with me, I pondered those words. During my homeward journey, through those pastures that form such a breathtaking landscape, I thought of the many other mountainous regions of Europe, of the pastures that had run wild, of the ghost villages, of the cheeses that needed protection because they were on the verge of extinction, of the landslides, of the increasingly frequent floods, and of the woods that had turned into thickets. I thought of the productivism of the “milk machine,” and of the Holsteins.

The supremacy of technology thus creates a new ideology, which denies and conceals the complexity of the world and of the relations and interdependencies that characterize it, and also their value, tempting us to make the mistake of trying to analyze it in a linear manner, when this is not in fact possible.

Moreover, “linear” values, such as progress, the control of nature, and a rationality that tends to quantify everything, obliterate what were once described as differences in class, while widening the gap between civilizations: between a West that has “developed” on the basis of those values and the rest of the world, which seems to be crushed by the West’s dominant principles and given a simple, inevitable, and agonizing choice between outright refusal or acceptance and “alignment.” But the choice is important only in a relative sense, for it has always led to more or less obvious manifestations of what has been termed a new form of colonization.

Today, we are still paying for this and other major transformations at a price that is unsustainable for the planet. Economic theories have tried to introduce the concept of negative externalities,⁶ in order to quantify the collateral damage that the “four engines” have done to society: pollution, soil death, the scarring of landscapes, the reduction of energy sources, and the loss of diversity, both biological (biodiversity) and cultural. But it is still difficult to reduce such complex problems to a linear calculation, to quantify all the possible environmental, social, and cultural costs (the fact they are termed externalities is an indication of how little consideration they have been given, except as a phenomenon external to industrial processes). In the meantime, all we can do is count the casualties, or simply accept that “spaceship Earth” is heading for disaster. It is no longer a secret or a claim of the more radical environmentalists: we consume more than it is possible for the planet to provide without upsetting its own equilibrium.

That is, indeed, a very serious picture, and it led the director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf, to speak of “mortgaging the future” and of “thresholds of mass extinction”:

The loss is being incurred by what is commonly called biodiversity, or, according to the definition given at the Earth Summit held at Rio de Janeiro in 1992:

According to the Millennium Assessment, the situation is mainly due to a massive conversion of land to agricultural use: since 1945, there have been more land occupations than in the two previous centuries, and today cultivated land occupies a quarter of the surface of the planet. Water consumption has doubled since 1960, and 70 percent of it is used in agriculture. Over the same period, the emission of nitrates into the ecosystems has doubled and that of phosphates has tripled. Over half the amount of chemical fertilizers that have ever been produced—since their invention at the turn of the twentieth century—have been used in the years since 1985. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 32 percent since 1750, mainly because of the use of fossil fuels and changes in land use (such as deforestation). About 60 percent of this increase has occurred since 1959.

Such a level of interference in the balance of nature has significantly reduced biological diversity around the world: during the last hundred years, the coefficient of species extinction has increased a thousandfold compared with the average over the whole history of our planet. Genetic diversity has undergone a global decline, especially as far as cultivated species are concerned.

As stated in the synthesis of the Millennium Assessment, these changes in the ecosystem

The absurd idea (it is a contradiction in terms!) of industrial agriculture—agriculture carried out according to the principles of industry—is thus dominant. Under industrial agriculture, the fruits of nature are considered raw materials to be consumed and processed on a mass scale. The subversion of the natural order has affected the entire food production system. The agroindustry of food production has become the model of development in a world in which technology reigns. And if it has done enormous damage in the Western world which invented it, the imposition of a single method of development based on technocratic thought has created even worse problems elsewhere. It has done untold harm to the environments and people of the countries that are poorest in material wealth (though certainly not in biodiversity), and to traditions and cultures that have existed for centuries in perfect harmony with their ecosystems.

The so-called Green Revolution, which began under the aegis of the World Bank after World War II, shed a ray of hope on many parts of the world that were then suffering from starvation. Fertilizers and new hybrid varieties that increased production significantly, generating more than one harvest per year, made it possible to solve the problems of nutrition in some areas of the planet; but those areas were too few, because in the final analysis the Green Revolution was an ecological and economic disaster.