{DIARY 4} MY GASTRONOMY TEACHERS:
ORGANIZERS, PRODUCERS, WRITERS, AND GOURMETS

The gastronomes of my generation were inevitably self-taught. Not many wine-tasting courses existed, and there was certainly no University of Gastronomic Sciences, as there is now in Italy (see this page). Apart from our first gastronomic experiences, our first important bottles of wine, and our first noteworthy restaurants, therefore, the main formative influences in a gastronome’s life were the people who stimulated us to learn more about the subject. These people were in effect our teachers; the education they gave us was supplemented by our own private reading and by the early television cooking programs.

As far as my own experience is concerned, while I should stress that I live in a region where gastronomic subjects are part of everyday life, the people I regard as my teachers were acquaintances, writers, and television personalities, though the world they belong to has since changed considerably; in some respects, it is more aware, but in others, it is far more superficial.

I would start with Luigi Veronelli, who was probably the most important Italian food-and-wine connoisseur in the twentieth century. He was the first real pioneer of modern gastronomic literature and television in Italy. His work was particularly interesting because it had a solid scientific, historical, and philosophical basis. I have fond memories of him, because he invented a new way of talking about food and wine, because his words enriched and defined the Italian vocabulary on the subject, and because he was the first to champion the small farmers and producers, the true creators of the pleasures of the table. His guides and other books were the basis of the education of thousands of enthusiasts of my generation, and gave a crucial impulse to the growth of the Italian food-and-wine industry, making it what it is today.

On television, too, the program he copresented with Ave Ninchi was groundbreaking in the way it used the new medium to present the subject. My first great television influence, however, was Mario Soldati, a remarkable character—gastronome, poet, novelist, and film director. I remember how in 1957 my whole family was always glued to the screen when his program Viaggio nella valle del Po. All ricerca dei cibi più genuini (A Journey Through the Po Valley: In Search of Genuine Food) was on. In that historical production of Italian television, the far-sightedness of the poet and the great film director brought out extremely well the transition that postwar Italy was going through. It was a total transition, from an agricultural economy to an industrial one, and it led to the rise of agroindustry. Nowadays, that series is still indispensable for an understanding of the transformations that took place in Italy, as we saw in the previous chapter, and it has even more value now that a great part of that agricultural tradition has disappeared.

To turn now to those who had a direct influence on my attitudes and my mode of being, there are three key figures, all of whom were working in my region, so I was able to appreciate their human and gastronomic qualities firsthand: Bartolo Mascarello, a producer of Barolo; Battista Rinaldi, another Barolo producer and mayor of the small town that gives its name to the king of the Langhe wines; and Luciano De Giacomi, former president of the Association of the Knights of the Truffle.

Bartolo Mascarello, an unforgettable winegrower whose 2005 death was mourned not just by his family but by the many lovers of his products, personified in every way the identity of the people of the Langhe—indeed, the identity of the Langhe itself. His strong links with the area and its traditions are irreplaceable; they, together with his rigorous political and moral vision, will be his true monument. Until the last days of his life, I delighted in his company: talking to him was like talking with the land itself, sharing in its transformations and caring passionately about its conservation. His wine is that of a producer who—long before the importance of such things was recognized by others—always sought that principle of quality which I will discuss in more detail later. He gave me the first concrete example I ever saw of production according to criteria that corresponded to three fundamental principles which I will call “good, clean, and fair”: respect for sensory quality, for environmental sustainability, and for the workers, the people who actually produce.

Battista Rinaldi, mayor of the small town of Barolo, was also a producer of Barolo wine. In the late 1970s, I was entranced by his recherché but agreeable way of speaking, which was a little flowery but always in keeping with his role as a true amphitryon, or host of formal banquets. Having been for many years not only mayor of the town but also president of the Enoteca Barolo (Barolo Wine Association), he made a name for himself as an organizer of dinners, practicing the noble art which Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière had codified in his Manuel des amphitryons (1808). Each banquet or symposium organized by the Enoteca was preceded by one of his talks, during which he could hold his audience’s attention and engage their interest in the subjects of food and the pleasure of eating better than I had ever seen anyone do. I think the amphitryon still has an important role in directing a banquet and putting the guests at their ease, mediating between scientific terminology and the language of gastronomic pleasure. It is a vital skill if we wish to convey information or sensations and teach people about food.

On the same wavelength was another great character from my area, Luciano De Giacomi, with whom I came into contact many years later, after a long period during which we avoided each other because he was an altogether gruffer, more demanding, and in some ways more difficult person. He was the epitome of conservative Piedmont, expecting rigor in everyday life from others, but quite consistent in making the same demands on himself. After successfully organizing the first international convention on Piedmontese wines in 1990, I was made a Friend of the Associazione dei Cavalieri del Tartufo (Association of the Knights of the Truffle), of which he was then president, and I attended many symposiums of this excellent organization. I was struck by the sternness and authority with which De Giacomi organized these events: where Rinaldi was easygoing and affable, De Giacomi was prickly and stiff. But they were two sides of the same coin, and from both of them I learned a great deal about the significance of the figure of the gastronome and how important it is for him to be able to communicate with others.

From the more strictly “gourmetistic” (if I may be pardoned the neologism) point of view, another important influence on me was Dr. Giusto Piolatto, a true connoisseur of good food whose approach to gastronomic pleasure fascinated me. He was one of the first critics of the Guida ristoranti (Restaurant Guide) published by the weekly magazine Espresso. He taught me a lot about restaurant-going and how to judge food, because his approach to pleasure was always enriched by a genuine sympathy for, and profound knowledge of, the producers, raw materials, and techniques. I saw him enjoy food without gluttony, thanks to his knowledge and his ability to taste.

Lastly, I would like to pay tribute to Folco Portinari, poet and writer (he was one of the editors of La Gola, the pioneering Italian magazine which revolutionized gastronomic discourse), with whom in the 1980s I formed, in the context of the Arcigola association,¹³ a kind of intellectual partnership that still continues today. Though not without its disagreements, albeit always amicable and dictated by a sincere desire for an exchange of ideas, this relationship led, among other things, to the Slow Food Manifesto, which Portinari brilliantly wrote in 1986. His advice and criticism has always been most valuable, and he has taught me something more about the intellectual approach to gastronomy.

During the course of my life, since I began to travel widely, I have met other such figures all over the world. And while people from my own region were the first to influence me, among my later acquaintances of international standing I would like to mention another: Hugh Johnson, whom I consider to be the greatest connoisseur of wine and the greatest writer on the subject of the past century. The Story of Wine, his book on the history of wine, remains a classic work in its field. I was particularly impressed by his style, his methodological approach, and his ability to relate to farmers and wine producers all over the world. It was that style that made it possible for me to begin with wine and then continue the development which led to the ideas contained in this book.

This Diary, as the reader will have noticed, is primarily intended as a tribute to the people who have in some way or other changed my life, but I hope it will also help to emphasize how important personal education is for gastronomes and how alert one must be to discern in other people, by associating with them, those complex skills and different sensibilities that are the very essence of a gastronome, of the practice of this science that is so fascinating and yet (though hopefully not for much longer) so elusive.

1. GASTRONOMY

“Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are,” and “You are what you eat.” The apparent obviousness of these two celebrated sayings by Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Ludwig Feuerbach masks the infinite complexity which has to be taken into account if one is to demonstrate their truth; yet, at the same time, it asserts the absolute centrality of the role of food (a centrality which perhaps has been lost) if one wishes to interpret—and perhaps influence—the dynamics that underlie our society and our world.

Food is the primary defining factor of human identity, because what we eat is always a cultural product. If we accept the existence of a conceptual juxtaposition between nature and culture (between what is natural and what is artificial), food is the result of a series of processes (cultural ones, because they introduce artificial elements into the naturalness of things) that transform it from a completely natural base (the raw material) into the product of a culture (what we eat).

Man gathers, cultivates, domesticates, exploits, transforms, and reinterprets nature every time he eats. When he produces, he alters natural processes, influencing them in order to create his own food: the transition from a gathering economy to an agricultural one is the history of man as he settles, grows crops, raises livestock, and manipulates nature in response to his own needs. Then, when he goes on to prepare his meals, unlike other animals he uses more or less sophisticated technologies that transform the raw material: fire, fermentation, preserving, cooking. Lastly, when he consumes, he chooses more or less carefully how, what, where, and how much to eat.

All these processes, viewed in a historical perspective, indicate a titanic complexity, a human identity that is extremely unstable and constantly being redefined under the influence of exchanges, encounters, innovations, amalgamations, alliances, and conflicts. In order to convey the extent of that complexity, Massimo Montanari uses what seems to me a very apt metaphor for our identity, that of roots. The term “roots” is often used in a tendentious and mistaken way to evoke fixity, to underline and justify differences between peoples or, worse, between “races”:

The search for our roots never succeeds in identifying a point from which we started out, but only a twine of threads which grows thicker and more complicated the further back in time one goes. In this intricate system of additions and relations, it is not the roots but we ourselves who are the fixed point: identity does not exist at the beginning but at the end of the process. If we must talk of roots, let us develop the metaphor and describe the history of our food culture as a plant that spreads out more widely the deeper it goes into the soil … The product is on the surface, visible, clear, well-defined: that is us. The roots are below the surface, abundant, numerous, wide-spreading: that is the history that has constructed us.¹⁴

I, too, would like to use this metaphor, and perhaps add a further meaning to it, because it will be a good way of restoring due importance to the food we eat and seeing what that food represents in the right proportions. Under the frenetic impulse of technocratic and reductionist thought, we have fallen into the temptation of neglecting the totality of the processes and interrelations that enable us to eat every day, considering only the result, the food that we swallow. Yet these “roots” are crucial and must become a major subject of discussion again. To adapt Montanari, I would say that the product is on the surface, visible: that is what we have on our plate every day and what is most talked about. The roots are below—abundant, numerous, wide-spreading: they represent the way the food on our plate became food, the way it was created.

Food is the product of a region and of what has happened to it, of the people who live there, of its history, and of the relations it has established with other regions. One can talk about any place in the world simply by talking about the food that is produced and consumed there. In telling stories about food, one tells stories about agriculture, about restaurants, about trade, about local and global economies, about tastes, and even about famine. The peppers of Costigliole d’Asti are a symbol of globalization; amaranth and the wild herbs used in the Tehuacán soup tell of forgotten gastronomic knowledge and of ruined agricultural economies; the prawns of the Indian coasts are a manifestation of a mistaken concept of “development”; the vegetables in the farmers’ market in San Francisco evoke the contradictions that well-meaning impulses can generate when they are grafted onto a system which is in itself somewhat perverse; (see Diaries 1, 2, 9, and 10, respectively). When one comes into contact with these stories, one understands more and more clearly that food is the primary means of interpreting reality, the world around us. Food reflects the complexity of the present-day world and of past history, the intertwining of cultures, and the overlapping of different philosophies of production.

The study of this amorphous mass of input and output, which is bordering on the chaotic, requires today a science that will examine it organically and take into account the multidisciplinarity that it necessarily involves—a science that will give new dignity and new tools to those who wish to study these subjects, and that, if I may be a trifle provocative, will be comprehensible even to those who insist on translating into figures things that are not calculable. A little humility, a more open-minded intellectual approach, and the recovery of a kind of knowledge that seems to have lost any “scientific” status may be a beginning.

1.1 Gastronomic science

There is a science that studies food, or rather the culture of food in every sense: gastronomy.

The word “gastronomy” is of Greek origin and is documented only sporadically in the major European languages before it was used in the title of a French poem by Joseph de Berchoux, La Gastronomie, ou l’homme des champs à table, which was printed in Paris in 1801 and translated into English in 1810. Note that the French title mentions the “man of the fields at table,” thus in a sense connecting the farming world with the world of food consumption. But we will return to this subject later. For the moment, it is sufficient to observe that it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century that gastronomy began to achieve definition, and that the primary impulse came from French culture. After the French Revolution, a positive relationship was established between gastronomes and chefs, which helped to define and defend French cuisine over the next two centuries. During those years, modern catering was developing very fast in Paris: in 1804, there were five times as many restaurants as there had been in the prerevolutionary period; the number had risen to a thousand by 1825 and more than two thousand by 1834. Gastronomes made the fortunes and reputations of the chefs with their guides and their first critical writings. Gastronomic literature was born; among the most important authors were Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, the true founders of modern gastronomy. The chefs themselves consolidated their popularity through the writings of Antoine Beauvilliers, Charles Durand, and Antonin Carème.

Etymologically, gastronomy means “the law of the stomach,” or the set of rules that must be followed if one is to choose and consume food to the satisfaction of the stomach. Later definitions are only partial, because they define it as the “art of preparing and cooking food.” When the word made its first official entry into the dictionary of the Académie Française in 1835, gastronomes were still defined as “hosts who choose, arrange, and offer a lavishly laid table.”

In fact, the term can be extended beyond mere good eating and “living handsomely.” The choice of foods, which seems to be the common denominator of all the main definitions, implies a rather wide range of knowledge, which touches on many other disciplines, both technological and humanistic. As we have seen, man has always altered nature in order to obtain the food he needs by means of various cultural processes, and the history of those processes is of daunting complexity to anyone who attempts to analyze them. To reduce gastronomy to “eating well” is a twofold error: first, because this definition implicitly accepts the common belief that the history of nutrition—economy and subsistence—and the history of gastronomy—culture and pleasure—are distinct subjects;¹⁵ and secondly, because it only covers a small, and perhaps the least noble, part of the complex system of “roots” which underlie our food.

1.2 The elite and hunger

From the beginning, gastronomy had a markedly elitist connotation: after all, it was the dominant classes who wrote, for themselves, the recipe books and the first works of gastronomic criticism. It was therefore inevitable that gastronomy should be a science exclusively reserved for them. The “subordinate” culture of the poor and the rural population left no written records, and one can only guess from the recipe books of the aristocrats that the knowledge of the poor was expropriated by the ruling classes along with the right to pleasure. And yet the principal inventions in the history of gastronomy were made in the lower levels of society to respond to urgent needs: the absence of food, the perishability of produce, the need to transport or preserve it and therefore to minimize the impact of space and time on what we eat.

In 1801, when the word “gastronomy” appeared in the first writings on the subject, the main “law of the stomach” for most of the urban and rural population was still hunger, as it had been in earlier centuries. Only the abundance on the tables of the rich therefore had gastronomic dignity: it was thought—or at least said—that the methods of seasoning and cooking only concerned those who had no difficulty in obtaining adequate provisions. The poor and the hungry were from the outset denied all gastronomic dignity, though the gastronomic knowledge that they had built up and refined over centuries of adaptation to their land continued to be plundered and expropriated from them.

This fictitious separation between subsistence and pleasure may be said to have survived to this day. But in the meantime, starting in the years following World War II, the context has significantly changed. The great majority of the population of the Western world has solved the problem of obtaining provisions and its effect on the family budget. Although the figure of the gastronome is a product of the first post–French Revolutionary bourgeoisie, it has always reflected a tradition of noble, very rich cuisine, which has its roots in the recipe books of the royal courts. Gastronomy concerned the wealthy classes, who viewed the appetite and its satisfaction from countless different points of view, whetting it with taste, measuring it with pride.

The true bourgeois sense of gastronomy is far more modern, and it immediately begins to crumble when class differences lessen and food is no longer a means of asserting them. From 1950 onward, the term concerns larger sections of the population and the problem of how to choose food acquires other connotations; elitist gastronomy goes into crisis. It is no longer necessarily the well-to-do citizen who has the best diet, since he, too, buys poor-quality industrial products in soul-destroying supermarkets. In fact, unconscious and involuntary gastronomes spring up among those who live in contact with the land. Products that occur naturally or derive from the increasingly rare traditional forms of agriculture become delicacies for those who cannot easily obtain them.

Gastronomy is increasingly confined to the sphere of folklore and of play, not without coarse allusions to Pantagruelian abundance, which is in fact simply a way of exorcising our memory of hunger. The content of the current multitude of newspaper columns and color supplements, TV programs and game shows all devoted to the subject of food and gastronomy is the clearest proof of this development, which has taken on the dimensions of a social trend. There is no in-depth cultural analysis, no real knowledge of the subjects discussed: traditions add “color,” and often pure nonsense is talked for the sake of audience figures. Try an experiment yourself: ask ten people to tell you what gastronomy is. They will talk vaguely of “good food”; they will mention the elitist connotations; some will tell you about shops that sell ready-made dishes, others will refer to the world of restaurants, chefs, and cookbooks enclosed with the daily newspapers. Nobody will say it’s a science, and if you tell them it is, they’ll probably think you’re joking.

1.3 Pure folklore?

The histories of food, on the one hand, and of gastronomy on the other are separate and very different. The first represents economics and subsistence, serious subjects with a scientific basis; the second is associated with pleasure and the culture of food—mere divertissement and hedonism, play and gluttony, of no importance at all. This fictitious separation has for centuries relegated gastronomy to the realm of folklore, denying it any scientific dignity and associating it only with the sphere of leisure, with the village fête, and with the media rage for regional and traditional products, with disputes about the ranking of restaurants.

If this situation has been taken to its most foolish extremes by the “popularization” of gastronomy that has been going on since World War II, the seeds of its scientific depreciation could already be seen in the writings of its founding fathers. Not even the traditional, elitist, almost “aristocratic” sense of the word has contributed to its “ennoblement.” People who concern themselves with gastronomy, and therefore with pleasure, have always had to face the prejudice that pleasure is a sin (the religious influence on prevailing ideas), or at any rate not a serious matter. Just think of the well-known saying, “business before pleasure.”

Even Brillat-Savarin, who wrote the fundamental Physiologie du goût (Physiology of Taste) in 1825, a year before his death and at the height of the French fashion for gastronomy, deep down was almost ashamed of it, or pretended to be. He published the book at his own expense, and his name was not even mentioned in the first edition. His real, or feigned, sense of “shame” is well expressed in the introductory “Dialogue Between the Author and His Friend”:

AUTHOR: … nevertheless I will not publish my book.

FRIEND: Why not?

AUTHOR: Because having dedicated myself by profession to serious studies, I fear that those who knew my book only by its title would think that I occupied myself with trifles.¹⁶

The author, a magistrate of thirty years’ public service who had published weighty tomes in the fields of law and political economics (and also chemistry, in his youth), did not want to present an image of himself that was inconsistent with the status that he had achieved. Nevertheless, as he states in his preface, he was fairly sure of the importance of the arguments contained in his Physiologie:

Considering the pleasure of the table in all its aspects, I had noticed some time ago that on this subject one could produce something better than cookbooks and that there was much to say about functions which are so important and so constant, and which have such a direct influence on happiness and even on business.¹⁷

His solution was to adopt the rhetorical device described by Jean-François Revel in his introduction to the work: “It was the charm of the composite composition to conceal the banal beneath the severe or the serious beneath the comical, the systematic in the unsystematic—the art of the cryptogram, which used to be one of the forms of discretion in literature but which today is no longer understood.”¹⁸

I dwell at some length on Brillat-Savarin’s work because it is an important landmark in the birth of modern gastronomy. As I have already mentioned, he and Grimod de La Reynière, in the successive issues of the Almanach des Gourmands, laid the foundations of modern gastronomic literature and introduced elements of modern gastronomic criticism. I am aware of both the limitations and brilliance of Physiologie du goût, and I do not wish to compete with the historians of gastronomy; as a matter of fact, Brillat-Savarin did not invent anything, and a historical account would require deeper analysis than can be given in these few lines. But Physiologie, though its style is playful and only half-serious, defines clearly and skillfully all the basic elements that we ourselves need today to found a new gastronomic science (the book is also a significant achievement as a literary exercise, for, apart from the recipe books, this was a genre that had no particularly distinguished models at the time). If the subject has until now been confined to the realms of folklore, it is partly due to Brillat-Savarin, undoubtedly; but if we read his Physiologie with a slightly more scientific approach, we find a definition of gastronomy that I would like to take as the basis for the modest arguments presented in this book:

Gastronomy is the reasoned knowledge of everything concerning man insofar as he eats … It is gastronomy that moves the growers, the winemakers, the fishermen, and the numerous family of cooks, whatever the title or qualification under which they mask their concern with the preparation of food. Gastronomy belongs to natural history, because of the classification it makes of kinds of food; to physics, because of the various tests and analyses to which it subjects that food; to cooking, because of its concern with the art of preparing food and making it pleasant to the taste; to trade, because of its search for the means of buying at the best possible price that which it consumes and of selling at the highest possible profit that which it puts on sale; to political economics, because of the resources it provides for the financial authorities and the methods of exchange that it establishes between the nations.¹⁹

Here, in the third “Meditation” of the treatise, we already find all the complex elements of gastronomy as a multidisciplinary science, in a description that takes account of the agricultural, economic, scientific, technical, social, and cultural processes that are involved in nutrition. Much of the work’s originality lies in this definition, which claims due dignity for gastronomy, in a vision characterized by good sense and a surprisingly modern ability to grasp the complexity of things.

Embracing this multidisciplinarity, then, in toto and without reservation, though fully aware of my own limitations, I would like to begin from this point, from Brillat-Savarin’s definition, endorsing both its first sentence and its structure, opening the mind to chaos, but rejecting the “folkloristic” approach, though not spurning the element of playfulness, much less that of pleasure. This is, rather, a vision which regards play and pleasure as serious matters, which draws on disciplines old and new in the light of developments during the two centuries that have passed since the publication of Physiologie du goût, and which implies important reflections—to return to that other favorite aphorism of Brillat-Savarin—on who we are, that is, on what we eat.

{DIARY 5} ALICE

Many great friendships arise by chance among the tables of restaurants, during convivial encounters that happen to reveal elective affinities between gastronomes; these affinities are then cemented by time, leading to fruitful collaborations, fertile exchanges of ideas, and fascinating human adventures. So it was with Alice Waters. She was, at the time, the one person in the United States who embraced from the outset the embryonic ideas of Slow Food that I was then trying to propagate. I met her during my first visit to California, in February 1988, having made a particular point of visiting her restaurant Chez Panisse, which everyone seemed to agree was the best in the San Francisco area. Her fame had spread all over the United States because, apart from her wonderful cuisine, Waters had reawoken the native pride of the young Californian gastronomic culture (and by extension that of the whole United States), along with a profound feeling of respect for the environment and for the traditional knowledge of that land.

The cuisine that she purveyed at Chez Panisse was strongly influenced by her experiences in France and Italy, but equally closely linked to local farming and to the wealth of knowledge that the numerous immigrant families in this part of the States had brought with them and handed on. The exceptional quality of her dishes has defined a very personal style, which has always made the organoleptic characteristics of the raw materials its main ingredient—something very unusual in the homeland of industrialized agriculture and fast food.

Waters was educated in that fertile world of alternative culture that centered around Berkeley in the late 1960s, a movement which among other things asserted the reestablishment of a peaceful and harmonious relationship with nature. As a result, from the start her restaurant was a rallying point for the nascent environmentalist culture. Amost from its beginning Chez Panisse has used only raw materials deriving from organic agriculture and local farms. Waters may truly be described as the leading inspiration of the organic movement in the United States: she and a few friends began to promote the cause of cleaner agriculture in the 1970s, and their success can be seen today in the great care taken with sustainability and in the quantities of organic crops now produced in California.

I can vouch for the fact that eating at Waters’s restaurant is a remarkable gastronomic experience. It is astonishing for the delicacy and care with which her chefs cook, but even more so for the clarity of the flavors: they manage to bring out the taste of the vegetables in a way that I have rarely encountered anywhere else in the world. The mix between a refined culinary technique and a choice of produce that is positively manic in its respect for correctness in the production process and for the geographical proximity of suppliers guarantees wonderful results. Even the unassuming flavor of French beans as an accompaniment to one of the dishes seems almost like a miracle of nature, something absolutely amazing.

But Waters is not just a brilliant cook and a paladin of sustainable agriculture: over the years, I have seen another side of the original approach she has been determined to pursue in her gastronomic venture. In 2000—I always drop by whenever I’m in San Francisco—she took me to see a project she had recently initiated: “The Edible Schoolyard.” The Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley has almost a thousand students; many of them are Latino or African-American, and it cannot exactly be described as an elite school. But these children, at least as far as their school is concerned, are lucky. Waters has created at their school something I still consider to be the true masterpiece of her gastronomic career. It is what is usually called a school garden—a kitchen garden tended by the children, who thus assimilate the basics of agriculture, but above all learn to recognize the vegetables, their characteristics, and their qualities. The originality of the project lies in the fact that the children not only have the chance to grow their own food in an urban context, where eating habits have completely eradicated every kind of gastronomic education, but they also learn the rudiments of cooking, because they are taught how to process what they cultivate. Hence the name, the Edible Schoolyard.

It is an undeniable fact that the poorest children and teenagers in the big American cities no longer eat at home; their parents do not cook at all, and the family does not come together for meals. Food is bought either in the form of prepared meals from the supermarket or at the local fast-food restaurant. The obliteration of gastronomic knowledge in the United States has been total, and its effects on public health are rapidly making themselves felt. The Edible Schoolyard is a way of teaching these children to cook, to recognize the best kinds of food; it is a way of refining their sense of taste and their sensibility. It is a model that ought to be imitated all over the world; all schools should devote particular attention to gastronomic themes, and they should not wait to do so until the very last moment, when the situation is almost beyond repair, as it is in the suburbs of the American cities.

In this respect Waters has opened my eyes: she has found a formula that works, a playful and entertaining way of teaching gastronomy to children and at the same time feeding them a healthy school lunch. It is no coincidence that she is now the international vice-president of Slow Food; her career as a chef is a living example of an approach that transcends the canonical forms of the cook’s profession, that goes beyond the mere practicalities of running a restaurant, and that crosses all the borders of gastronomic multidisciplinarity. She is a crucial figure, who has absorbed all the complexity of being a gastronome into her everyday life, becoming the creator of a new way of operating in the world of food, in the very nation responsible for some of the worst aberrations ever seen in nutritional history, with enormous repercussions on the whole planet.

{DIARY 6} THE FLORENCE GROUP

On February 4–5, 2003, I attended the first meeting of the Commission on the Future of Food, a working group set up on the initiative of the Regional Council of Tuscany.²⁰ My particular task was to draw up a Manifesto on the Future of Food, to be presented at subsequent meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This was the first time I had ever received an official invitation to make a contribution as an eco-gastronome and to exchange ideas with leading scholars, antiglobalization activists, and ecologists from all over the world. The organizers’ aim—which proved successful—was that this first meeting should be an opportunity for people to get to know one another and begin discussing the strategies that need to be adopted in order to bring about a worldwide revival of “food sovereignty”—that is to say, of people’s right to choose what kind of agriculture they practice, how they eat, and how much they eat, in accordance with their economic potential and the traditional knowledge they possess.

My first impressions of the meeting were very striking: gathered in a sumptuous room of the palace that houses the Regional Council of Tuscany, in Via Cavour, Florence, you felt isolated from the world. The magnificence of the room was slightly off-putting; at least, it created a sense of solemnity that was perhaps excessive, even given the seriousness of the meeting. The other members of the group seemed to know each other very well; they were, after all, part of the elite of world activism, and they had already met and worked together several times before. I knew only two of them well, because until then my movement had kept slightly apart from purely antiglobalization dynamics and from the “official” ecological groups. We had always preferred to work directly in the field, through selective and very concrete projects such as the Presidia—small-scale projects devoted to the preservation of a specific food product (see especially this page–this page)—while our “ecological consciences” as gastronomes were in fact very young: a degree of healthy respect and the belief that it was better to concentrate on real activities than on words had induced us to remain independent.

The fact that most of those present had never had any personal contact with me or my movement probably generated a certain amount of suspicion, accompanied by the usual stereotype of the Italian gastronome: an affable fellow, very fond of his food, somewhat hedonistic, and a great expert on the culinary marvels of his country. That a fantastic buffet had been prepared on the floor below, using products saved and protected by Slow Food, must have reinforced this prejudice.

The meeting opened to the apocalyptic tones of Edward Goldsmith, who took everyone aback with his forecast that life on Earth would come to an end within a few decades. The manner in which the founder of the magazine The Ecologist began his speech may have been a little rhetorical, but considering the situation in which our planet finds itself today, perhaps he was not too far from the truth. At any rate, this speech was followed by a series of typically ecologist criticisms and denunciations; the main focus of attack as far as the future of food was concerned was the damage caused by industrial systems of agriculture and the iniquities of international trade.

I listened with interest, but I was also impatient for them to start talking about food. Not that what they said was not relevant to the subject—I know it is important to analyze the systems of production that are used around the world, to question their quality, verify their sustainability, and ensure that all other cultures and societies of the world are respected, but if people do not take into account the “gastronomic” side of things, they make the same mistake, in reverse, as gastronomes make when they talk about food without knowing where it comes from, confining themselves to learned disquisitions on taste. In other words, I felt the lack of an all-embracing vision of reality, and it seemed to me that people were making more or less the same mistake as the reductionists and the over specialists. To put it plainly: a gastronome who has no environmental sensibility is a fool; but an ecologist who has no gastronomic sensibility is a sad figure, unable to understand the cultures in which he wants to work. What we need, then, is eco-gastronomy.

So my speech caught the meeting somewhat off guard. Logic would have demanded that I discuss Slow Food’s ecological vision, using the same language as the others and perhaps singing the praises of our concrete efforts to preserve biodiversity. I certainly did not neglect to inform the others about our projects, but my whole speech centered on the right to pleasure, and especially on gastronomy. My basic argument was as follows: pleasure is a human right because it is physiological; we cannot fail to feel pleasure when we eat. Anyone who eats the food that is available to him, devising the best ways of making it agreeable, feels pleasure.

The traditional cultures have created a vast heritage of recipes, ways of preparing and processing local or easily accessible food. This is true even of those areas in the world that are most seriously affected by the problems of malnutrition today; just think of the gastronomic culture of India. These forms of knowledge are intimately linked with biodiversity and show us both a way of using it and a way of defending it. Moreover, they give pleasure: organoleptic pleasure of course, but also intellectual pleasure, as one might call it, because they are the symbol of a particular culture.

To reject pleasure in the belief that it only accompanies abundance is a serious strategic mistake. Even the Food and Agriculture Organization, which has always regarded pleasure as a secondary consideration compared with the serious emergencies it has to solve, is currently reviewing its attitude. We should not give food aid without first considering the context of the countries that are in difficulty; we should not try to stimulate agricultural development by introducing elements that are external in origin or completely alien to the local ecosystem. Any such attempt at intervention is bound to fail, and may well cause even more serious damage.

When the group heard me mention pleasure, I saw the expressions on their faces—and my impression was confirmed by a colleague of mine who was present at the meeting: their preconceived notion of the hedonistic glutton had been satisfied. But this was only their first reaction, because fortunately they were highly intelligent and open-minded people. After the initial response, perhaps of slight amusement, there was a vigorous discussion on the subject, notable for a speech by Vandana Shiva, who spoke about the importance of gastronomy for the defense of traditional kinds of vegetables (it was on this occasion that I struck up a close friendship and collaboration with Shiva, who is the founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in India and an important activist for biodiversity). Her argument was that there was no point in persuading small farmers to preserve or reintroduce the seeds of their traditional plants if you did not also teach them how to use and cook them. Even Goldsmith, giving one of his infectious smiles and using the same flowery language with which he had foretold the apocalypse, agreed with me, admitting that he had never thought about the problem before. The result was that in the Manifesto on the Future of Food, which was drawn up after several other meetings of this kind and presented at a meeting held in July 2003 in San Rossore, Tuscany, the introduction ended with these words:

The entire conversion from local small-scale food production for local communities, to large-scale export-oriented monocultural production has also brought the melancholy decline of the traditions, cultures, and cooperative pleasures and convivialities associated for centuries with community-based production and markets, thereby diminishing the experience of direct food-growing, and the long celebrated joys of sharing food grown by local hands from local lands. [See Appendix, for full text.]

I considered it a minor victory that the text included a defense of the right to pleasure, and although it was not easy, after the others’ initial doubts about my position we all developed a sense of solidarity in the writing of a document which I think has yet to be given the attention it deserves by the powerful of our planet. The members of the group, in their several fields and each through their own activities, are carrying on the work, more convinced than ever that it is time to create alternatives if we are to change, and save, the future of food. And gastronomes like me are part of the project.

{DIARY 7} PLEASURE AND HEALTH

In the autumn of 2001, I developed liver problems which led to my spending several periods in the hospital. The treatment was long and tedious, though happily effective, and it gave me firsthand experience of what had long been a personal conviction of mine. This unpleasant illness became an experience that, seen through the eyes of a gastronome, revealed all the profundity and complexity of our relationship with culinary pleasure, which is usually considered unhealthy and conducive to disease. The fact that I have been compelled since my illness to follow a more spartan diet, and abstain from drinking alcohol, has taught me to refine my relationship with food. I have become more sensitive, and I learned that I can use all the knowledge I acquired in the gustatory-olfactory field from wine-tasting and apply it to other products. For example, I have discovered the variety and complexity of the smells and tastes of tea (a whole new world has opened up before me); I have concentrated on the differences between the various varieties of fruit and vegetables; and I have become more aware of the types of wheat and of the kind of treatment they have been subjected to before being turned into pasta or bread.

In short, my senses have become even more acute and able to perceive nuances. I have left behind me that period of my life when I enjoyed food perhaps to an excessive extent, sometimes losing sight of the real meaning of tasting, and in effect proving right those people who regard pleasure as the antagonist of health. What I have come to understand is that this antagonism does not exist; it is all a question of training and moderation, of a sense of restraint. Some might ask why it was necessary for me to fall ill in order to understand this. My reply is that no experience is without its usefulness, and that even my contact with hospital food taught me a gastronomic lesson. I began to attempt critical assessments of these collective kitchens; I wrote rigorous reviews of them (and was by no means too hard on them), using the same criteria as I used for restaurants, and I found further confirmation of the fact that our relationship with food must be moderate, certainly, but should never be mortifying. It is not clear why all over the world in “enforced residences”—prisons, hospitals, and other such places—food should always be a secondary consideration, pure sustenance devoid of taste and gastronomic interest, unconnected with the locality, the season (and therefore lacking all freshness), or any kind of naturalness.

That experience convinced me that good food can in fact be a very useful therapeutic aid, a way of alleviating and making more bearable all kinds of suffering, whether physical or mental. I began to urge my doctors to explore this link between pleasure and health, which had never been scientifically studied even by nutritionists, let alone by medical professionals; I found among them some very intelligent people who responded to my provocations in a constructive manner.

Food has always had a medical connotation in all cultures, even the most primitive; but somehow all this has degenerated so that modern science is largely nutritionist in its approach, subdividing foods according to their nutritional characteristics—with no thought given to the taste of a dish or to its beneficial effects considered as an integral whole, including both the nutritional and the pleasurable aspects. A gastronome, then, must have medical concerns, but hopefully doctors, too, will begin to develop a gastronomic sensibility. I am sure that this would lead to new and interesting treatments and diets, achieving results that would seem almost miraculous even to a scientist.

2. THE NEW GASTRONOMY: A DEFINITION

Gastronomy is the reasoned knowledge of everything that concerns man as he eats; it facilitates choice, because it helps us to understand what quality is.

Gastronomy enables us to experience educated pleasure and to learn pleasurably. Man as he eats is culture; thus gastronomy is culture, both material and immaterial.

Choice is a human right; gastronomy is freedom of choice. Pleasure is also everybody’s right and as such must be as responsible as possible; gastronomy is a creative matter, not a destructive one. Knowledge is everybody’s right as well, but also a duty, and gastronomy is education.

Gastronomy is part of the following fields:

• botany, genetics, and the other natural sciences, in its classification of the various kinds of food, thus making possible their conservation;

• physics and chemistry, in its selection of the best products and its study of how they are processed;

• agriculture, zootechnics, and agronomy, in its concern with the production of good and varied raw materials;

• ecology, because man, in producing, distributing, and consuming food, interferes with nature and transforms it to his advantage;

• anthropology, because it contributes to the study of the history of man and his cultural identities;

• sociology, from which it takes its methods of analyzing human social behavior;

• geopolitics, because peoples form alliances and come into conflict partly, indeed chiefly, over the right to exploit the earth’s resources;

• political economics, because of the resources it provides, and because of the methods of exchange that it establishes between nations;

• trade, because of its search for the means of buying at the best possible price that which it consumes and of selling at the highest possible profit that which it puts on sale;

• technology, industry, and the know-how of people, in its search for new methods of processing and preserving food inexpensively;

• cooking, in its concern with the art of preparing food and making it pleasing to the taste;

• physiology, in its ability to develop the sensorial capacities that enable us to recognize what is good;

• medicine, in its study of the healthiest way of eating;

• epistemology, because, through a necessary reconsideration of the scientific method and of the criteria of knowledge that enable us to analyze the path food travels from the field to the table, and vice versa, it helps us to interpret the reality of our complex, globalized world; it helps us to choose.

Gastronomy enables us to live the best life possible using the resources available to us and stimulates us to improve our existence.

Gastronomy is a science that analyzes happiness. Through food, which is a universal and immediate language, a component of identity, and an object of exchange, it reveals itself as one of the most powerful forms of peace diplomacy.

2.1 On botany, the natural sciences, and genetics, or On biodiversity and its seeds

Anyone who has the good fortune to view Bartolomeo Bimbi’s huge canvases depicting Cosimo de’ Medici’s sumptuous Renaissance botanic gardens or some of the rare illustrations from one of the only 170 surviving copies of Giorgio Gallesio’s monumental work, Pomona Italiana, will see in those paintings and drawings traces of a biodiversity that is now lost and forgotten.

Gallesio was born in Finale Ligure in 1772 and died in Florence in 1839. He was a man of many hats: farmer, magistrate, deputy, public official, and diplomat. He is chiefly remembered, however, for his enlightened contribution to the science that studies the vegetable kingdom, and in particular for introducing to Italy that branch of botany, pomology (the science of fruit-growing), which was already widespread in other parts of Europe.

Pomona Italiana was an ambitious and unprecedented publishing project: for twenty-five years, Gallesio traveled the length of the Italian peninsula from north to south, recording, describing, and classifying the principal existing varieties of fruit. The results were published in forty-one fascicules containing more than 160 color plates of extraordinary beauty and meticulously accurate reproduction.²¹

Through its illustrations and text, Pomona Italiana gives us a picture of the heritage of Italian fruit in the early nineteenth century. The value of this work to scientific research is immense, especially for scholars working on the conservation and improvement of genetic resources in fruit-growing. It is an important contribution to our knowledge of Italian biodiversity, in that it describes the history of many varieties and can help us understand what has been lost and how easily such losses can occur.

In our own time, too, the problem of cataloguing the varieties of fruit and vegetables is a very topical, indeed rather urgent, one. The strong impulse toward high productivity in agriculture on a largely industrial basis has led to a rapid selection—not only by natural means, but also through hybridization and even through “creation” using genetically modified organisms (GMOs)—of new vegetable and animal varieties that suit the new production processes of our era. The square peppers of Asti and many varieties of Latin American corn, for example, have had to give way to hybrids, or at any rate to more productive varieties. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report gives an account of the massive reduction in biodiversity that has already taken place on our planet and which continues with increasing speed. Among the main causes indicated in the report are modern farming methods.

The Fatal Harvest²² collection of studies gives some data on the loss in biodiversity in the United States alone: 80.6 percent of the varieties of tomato became extinct between 1903 and 1983, as did 92.8 percent of the varieties of lettuce, 86.2 percent of the varieties of apple and, during the same period, 90.8 percent of the varieties of field corn and 96.1 percent of the varieties of sweet corn. Of the over five thousand existing varieties of potato, only four form the vast majority of those cultivated for commercial purposes in the United States; two types of pea account for 96 percent of American cultivations, and six types of corn for 71 percent of the total.

The seed multinationals seek to impose their seeds on the market by every means possible. Natural selection, which farmers traditionally carried out after each harvest by putting aside the seeds of the plants that had the best characteristics, is scarcely practiced any longer, except in areas where people still use what are regarded as “old-fashioned” agricultural methods. Seeds are now bought year by year from the firms that have developed the varieties that give a more abundant harvest: the objectives are quantity at all costs and resistance to the herbicides, which are often produced by the seed industries themselves. And now we have GMOs, the culmination of this “unnatural” evolution. Twelve thousand years of gradual selection made by the farmers have been wiped out in a mere fifty years in the pursuit of commercial targets.

This trade in seeds gives rise to absurd situations all over the world. In Saskatchewan, Canada, for example, the farmer Percy Schmeiser has been engaged for the past ten years in a long and exhausting legal battle against the multinational Monsanto, which accused him of illegally taking some of their genetically modified seeds. He was charged with violating the patent that the American multinational holds on a particular kind of transgenic rape, but he has always maintained that his field was contaminated by his neighbor’s crops.²³

This is only one of the many examples that could be mentioned. Another is occurring even now in the region of Karnataka in India, where more than six hundred farmers a year commit suicide (in India as a whole the number of cases runs into thousands) because they are unable to pay the debts they incur in order to buy seeds and the chemicals that are needed to make them grow. Or take the case of Mexico, where even in the remotest areas—the very cradle of biodiversity as far as corn is concerned—the luxuriant, almost wild countryside is broken up and dotted with posters for either Coca-Cola or the seed multinationals that advertise “miraculous” varieties of corn (the fact that corn is advertised is in itself rather weird, in certain areas of Mexico).

The seed trade is evidently the one on which the multinationals of agroindustry have chosen to focus their attention in order to control the market. There can be no doubt that GMOs, even leaving aside all ethical, health-related, or ecological considerations, are the most underhanded and powerful weapon in a commercial strategy aiming to dominate the entire productive process, starting with the first principle of life itself: the seed.

The reduction in biodiversity thus has a strategic importance in the commercial plans of the multinationals, and it is not just biodiversity, or the raw materials, that are lost; along with them are lost the related knowledge, techniques, and economies. The loss goes much further than simple biology.

So the natural sciences and genetics are of great importance from a gastronomic point of view as well: the contributions they can make, through the creation of germplasm banks and the study and cataloguing of existing varieties, thus pointing research in a different direction from that of high productivity, are without doubt where the future of our food lies. Working in these fields in order to safeguard and improve the traditional varieties or the old agricultural genetic technologies (putting the best seeds aside and sowing them again each year) is a prime necessity. Since the private sector is unlikely to take on such a task, those who finance research from public funds will have to take the first step, by promoting joint research projects in collaboration with the farmers, trying out a new approach that encourages “official” science to work with the world of traditional knowledge. Projects of this kind have already been launched in France, with interesting results. It would be useful to study them carefully and, if possible, replicate them elsewhere, especially in areas where traditional knowledge is still deeply rooted and in serious danger of rapid extinction, as in the developing countries.

2.2 On physics and chemistry, or On techniques for creating flavor

The use of fire to cook food is an operation that distinguishes man from animals. Man, unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, cooks instead of merely taking what exists in nature. Fire (and by extension all the other ways of preparing food) is the first cultural step in the process that makes food itself a cultural factor.

But the effect of fire on raw materials is first and foremost a question of physics and chemistry. Material is processed in order to make it edible, preservable, transportable, and as pleasant as possible. Fire cooks, produces the smoke you need if you wish to smoke food, and makes sterilization possible by generating very high temperatures. The laws that govern these processes, after being unknown for centuries, were finally demonstrated simply through culinary empiricism, but progress in the scientific disciplines also led to new inventions.

With the onset of industrialization, the nutritional needs of those who worked in factories and therefore had little time for cooking changed (the working day was much longer then—and to think that today we complain about not having time to cook our meals!). At the same time, industrialization brought new developments in the food industry, which relies on chemistry for its ability to mass-produce food that is packaged and in most cases virtually ready for use. The combination of new needs and of new discoveries in the field of food technology made possible a great expansion of the food industry, but it later turned out that the use of chemistry had been too indiscriminate, resulting in food scandals, new diseases, and the impoverishment of our diet in nutritional value and taste.

The golden age of the application of chemistry to the food sector was the second half of the nineteenth century and the innovators included: Julius Maggi with his powdered soups and stock cubes; Justus von Liebig (the same man who invented chemical fertilizers) with his meat extract; Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès with margarine; Carl Knorr and more powdered soups; Rudolph Oeteker with his yeast; Wilhelm Haarmann, who invented vanillin; and Francesco Cirio in Italy, who began producing his preserves in a small workshop in Piazza della Repubblica, Turin (the spot is now marked by a poorly preserved plaque). The same period saw the invention of Coca-Cola, chewing gum, and canned pineapple. Whether or not these pioneers realized how revolutionary their inventions were, it was they who initiated the industrial production of food on a mass scale, which foreshadowed the later industrialization of agricultural techniques.

The present-day food industry needs no introduction—we all know it only too well. It churns out all kinds of comestibles; it even reproduces traditional dishes and carries individual food cultures around the world, at least in their more obvious manifestations. At the supermarket, you can buy frozen pizza, Mexican sauces, and the ingredients for burritos, precooked curry or paella to heat up in a saucepan, and soups and broths from all over the world. There are also invented products such as chocolate snacks, potato chips, and processed cheese slices. These creations have become the epitome of the industry itself; the trademarks on the brightly colored packets are more important than their contents, and the products inside bear little resemblance in aspect, smell, or taste to anything that occurs in nature.

What happened, although it originated as a response to a real social need of the families who worked in the factories (but soon proved an excellent way of making money, too), in fact completely subverted the rules of food processing. The treatments were so unnatural and so violent—dehydration, freeze-drying, deep-freezing, et cetera—that additional elements had to be invented just so that the raw materials could regain some semblance of naturalness and some distant echo of their original taste. Nothing in nature resembles the chicken nuggets that are served in fast-food restaurants. It is impossible to associate them with the fowl they come from; their shape is completely artificial, and the raw material does not taste remotely like chicken, partly because of the selection of meat (production offcuts and innards) from factory-farmed birds, and partly because of the processing it has undergone—a production line which minces, sterilizes, adds thickeners, emulsifiers, and stabilizers, and finally freezes it. This is where chemistry comes in, for it can “reconstruct” out of nothing—create a taste, a smell, a texture. The industry of “artificial and natural” flavorings and of the various additives that we find listed among the ingredients is flourishing but also elusive. One of the rare descriptions of it was given by Eric Schlosser in his Fast Food Nation:

The IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances) plant in Dayton is a huge pale blue building with a modern office complex attached to the front … Wonderful smells drifted through the hallways … and hundreds of little glass bottles sat on laboratory tables and shelves … The long chemical names on the little white labels were as mystifying to me as medieval Latin. They were the odd-sounding names of things that would be mixed and poured and turned into new substances, like magic potions … IFF’s snack and savory lab is responsible for the flavor of potato chips, corn chips, breads, crackers, breakfast cereals, and pet food. The confectionery lab devises the flavor for ice cream, cookies, candies, toothpastes, mouthwashes, and antacids … In addition to being the world’s largest flavor company, IFF manufactures the smell of six of the ten best-selling fine perfumes in the United States, including Estée Lauder’s Beautiful, Clinique’s Happy, Lancôme’s Trésor, and Calvin Klein’s Eternity … All of these aromas are made through the same basic process: the manipulation of volatile chemicals to create a particular smell.²⁴

Man has succeeded in separating the flavor from the product, thus making it possible to recombine each at will. The industrial process of food production has no respect for the raw material and its original characteristics, for it is able to reproduce its consistency, appearance, and flavor in a laboratory. As a result, food labels become incomprehensible. The following are the ingredients that create an apricot flavor in ice cream, for example: heptyl acetate, santalyl acetate, phenylpropylic alcohol, amyl phenylacetate, phenylethyl dimethylcarbinol, benzyl formiate, geranyl isobutyrate, methyl isobutyrate, butyl propinate, and heptyl propinate.

These compounds are often concealed under the term “natural or artificial flavorings.” The fact that some of these flavorings are described as “natural” does not mean that they really are. It only means that they are obtained from a natural substance. How they are extracted, by more or less sophisticated chemical processes that are not always beneficial to human health, does not matter: from a legal point of view they are “natural.” As Schlosser notes: “Even though an almond flavor (benzaldehyde) is obtained from natural sources, such as peach and apricot kernels, it contains traces of hydrocyanic acid, a deadly poison.”²⁵

Today, research into the effects of flavorings and other chemical products has begun to light up what seemed a dark and impenetrable sky. Ingesting these products, even in microscopic quantities but continuously throughout our lives, exposes us to another form of pollution whose effects have yet to be fully investigated. There is talk of an increase in the number of allergies, and of poisonings, small or large though rarely fatal, by carcinogenic substances (such as that denominated Sudan 1, a chemical coloring agent sometimes used in food), which have been discovered after people have been unwittingly consuming them in large quantities for years. Certainly, there is a risk of these compounds dulling our sense of taste. They raise our threshold of perception to the point where we think natural products organoleptically poor, and they homogenize all flavors, depriving us of the joy of experiencing the natural diversity of taste, which is so rich, varied, and gratifying to the palate. At a cultural level, moreover, food additives have turned flavor into a marketing tool. Now there is actually such a thing as “food design,” which constructs the flavor of a product and even the product itself, in accordance with the results of market research; it adapts an industrial process to meet the supposed demand and then selects the cheapest suitable raw material. In effect, it turns on its head the process whereby man, in order to feed himself, starts with what he finds in nature and tries to improve its flavor. Food design starts with the flavor it wants to obtain; all other considerations come later.

Chemistry and physics are part of modern gastronomic science because they can help us restore due prominence to taste, which is intimately linked to what is indisputably the central element, the raw material. They can help us organize industrial food production in a sustainable way and prevent the production of substances that are harmful to our health, unmasking those who abuse the concept of food design. They can explain what happens in the process that leads from the chicken to the nugget, for example: they can tell us what our food really contains, so that we can avoid the continuation of what, for more than a century, has been a deception practiced on consumers.

Just as these two sciences enabled man to perform the miracle of dissecting food and reassembling it at will, so they can help us restore its naturalness, its original flavor, to study the traditional techniques of preservation and processing, to accord them their rightful dignity and perhaps even improve them, bringing out all their potential. All this can be done without distorting the traditional methods for the sake of mass-producing large quantities, without stealing them from the original productive communities to patent them or trying to replicate them artificially, with all the risks that this involves.

If chemistry can place itself at the service of gastronomy—as it was in the past when food processing was performed in a scientifically more unconscious way and when empiricism indissolubly linked the preparation of food to its naturalness—it will benefit our health, our knowledge, and our enjoyment of flavor.

2.3 On agriculture and ecology, or On the techniques for producing sustainable food

During the last fifty years, agriculture has become increasingly industrialized. The introduction of elements external to the natural system in which agriculture is practiced, such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers, has rapidly compromised the salubriousness of food and of the environment. The survey, at the beginning of this book, of the damage that man has done to the earth showed that it is mainly attributable to modern systems of food production. The reduction of biodiversity has reached unprecedented levels and continues unabated.

Brillat-Savarin included agriculture among the subjects that are part of gastronomy, but later, with the spread of industrial methods, the two disciplines were completely separated, widening the gaps between the different phases of harvesting, processing, and consumption. Having lost its connection to gastronomy, agriculture has maintained ties only with the industry of food production. So we have reached the absurd situation where there are children today who eat chicken nuggets but have never seen a live chicken and don’t even know what one looks like. We have completely severed the link which until after World War II tied people to the earth with respect to food. Those who lived in the country, but also those who had moved to the cities not more than two generations earlier, had always been able to see where their food came from. Gastronomic knowledge was passed down almost automatically from generation to generation. Nowadays, that umbilical cord of ancient knowledge no longer exists, and more than ever before production and consumption seem like two completely distinct phases, which are both greatly the poorer for their total lack of mutual knowledge. It is this lack of knowledge that leads many of us to eat, unthinkingly, in fast-food restaurants.

And yet common sense would suggest that a gastronome, or even someone who would not describe himself as such, should demand to know everything about what he eats: its provenance, the processes it has undergone, and the people who have been involved. An interest in agriculture, its evolution, and its changes should be a priority for everyone who eats: “Eating is an agricultural act,” in the magisterial definition of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, poet, and essayist.²⁶ But for many people that is not the case, and as well as harming ourselves and paying for it in loss of flavor and poverty of diet, we automatically become accomplices of the devastation that is wrought on the earth by the spread of unsustainable agricultural methods.

The gastronome should know about agriculture, because he wants to know about his food and because he wants to support those agricultural methods that preserve biodiversity and the associated tastes and knowledge. It goes without saying, too, that given the state to which we have reduced the earth, the gastronome ought to have an environmental conscience and be well informed about ecology. I repeat: a gastronome who does not have an environmental conscience is a fool, because without it he will be deceived in every way possible and will allow the earth, from which he draws the essence of his work, to die. In the same way, it may be said that an ecologist who is not also something of a gastronome is a sad character, who besides not being able to enjoy nature and missing out on the pleasure of eating, is indirectly prepared to do serious damage to the ecosystem by the simple act of eating incorrectly.

I am putting agriculture and ecology together in a single discipline, because I think they are inseparable: anyone who tills the land and raises livestock works with nature and must not exploit and kill it. At the same time, environmentalists must understand that gastronomy is the art of producing food in harmony with the surrounding environment and that organic monocultures, for example, are not sustainable: even if you do not use chemical products, you can destroy the environment by eliminating biodiversity (such as woodland, other plants) in favor of a single variety that is produced in large quantities. The same happens if you introduce varieties that are foreign to the existing ecosystem; they may be organic, but they are alien to the environment and may cause serious damage to it. Above all, those who cultivate the land must not forget taste. If a product is not good, there is no point in it being organic; if it is not good and is alien to the local culture, it may be useful in responding to an emergency, but it will not permanently solve the problem of hunger or of certain kinds of pollution.

Agriculture and ecology must be a single entity, then, and both combine in gastronomy, the only sustainable way to produce food. Together they form a discipline so wide-ranging as to be capable of controlling and harmonizing the complexity that characterizes the food system. In fact, we are talking of a science which already exists—which has been described as, and I think really is, the true way toward a sustainable future: agroecology.

Agroecology is a young science that already boasts several different schools, all of which are, broadly speaking, based on the assumption that ecosystems, just as they are, possess all the means they need to regulate themselves. In order to grow crops and raise livestock, we must manipulate the environment gently, with due respect to local biodiversity, traditional culture, and the rhythms of nature. Miguel Altieri, professor of agroecology at the University of Berkeley in California, gives a good definition of the subject in the course of an interview:

For my school, agroecology is a science which is highly influenced by traditional agricultural science. We recognize this traditional knowledge as a science which has the same dignity as all the other sciences. Agroecology seeks a common matrix of dialogue between different realms, between this traditional knowledge and Western science, putting them on the same level. It is not a question of proving the validity of traditional knowledge by scientific methods, but of connecting the different notions for use in particular cases.

For example, in many parts of the world traditional farmers classify the soil by putting it in their mouths and tasting it. Science measures the pH of the soil to achieve the same end. But this operation must not be regarded as necessary to confirm the farmers’ conclusions; both realms must be accepted for what they are and a synthesis sought between the two.

From this synthesis emerges the guiding principles of agroecology, which does not seek to formulate solutions that will be valid for everyone but encourages people to choose the technologies best suited to the requirements of each particular situation, without imposing them. One of these principles, for example, is diversity; but diversity may assume various forms, such as an agroforestry system, polyculture, or crop rotation. What matters, I repeat, is not the technique but the principle: in this case the principle is that the selected kind of diversity will generate ecological processes in the system which will enable it to self-regulate and carry out autonomously operations such as nutrient recycling or pest and disease control.²⁷

Agriculture and ecology are part of gastronomy because they help us understand where our food comes from and produce it in the best possible way—by simultaneously observing the principles of taste, respect for the environment, and biodiversity. The two disciplines are an extremely efficient compendium of forms of knowledge, both traditional and modern, which must be interrelated if we are to achieve maximum production in the most sustainable way possible. A gastronomy which is well-informed about agriculture and ecology and intercommunicates with them is a science that knows its own limitations, and will be able to find the natural resources to guarantee development in the most threatened areas of the planet without harming the environment. At the same time, it will be able to find a means of correcting the current implosion of the agroindustrial system.

2.4 On anthropology and sociology, or On identity and exchange

Food, being a primary cultural element, lends itself very well to the study of cultures and identities.

Anthropology is the science of culture, and as such it finds food a very fertile field of research, as the best representation of societies and the best means of interpreting their characteristics. There are some famous examples of such studies, from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked to Marvin Harris’s Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. In the same way, the study of gastronomy without an anthropological perspective omits the profound significance that food has for man and makes the mistake of not considering diet as an evolving continuum, but as a set of fixed rules that summarily identify the various cultures.

Sociology, for its part, studies the social life of people, groups, and societies (and therefore the identities of, and exchanges between, different societies and cultures, or how identities are formed and, in a gastronomic perspective, what dietary manifestation they have). As such, it provides an extensive body of data and analytical tools that are useful to gastronomy, and it can use gastronomy as a basis for its own research.

Anthropology and sociology help us understand the complexity of the choices that people make, and at the same time, in a historical perspective, they help us understand our present situation through the exchanges, references, and social conflicts that have defined gastronomic identities and food systems; they also help us seek possible ways of redressing the balance of the global system by anticipating its future trends.

They enable us to find out about the methods that man has used to survive, adapt to, and harmonize with his environment, and thus, in light of what is happening in the world today, reevaluate traditional knowledge and skills. In such a way, Lévi-Strauss, running counter to the methods of his predecessors, documented the vast amount of empirical knowledge that characterized nonliterate thought, in order to show that this thought was not just a matter of chance, so to speak, nor lacking in rationality. In order to achieve this, he may be said to have made considerable use of gastronomy.

The cosmology of nonliterate cultures shows, moreover, that ancient populations, though they lacked a scientific basis for their knowledge, understood the laws of the universe through constant empirical observation. For example, as far back as two thousand years ago, the Sami (see Diary 14) believed that the Earth went round the sun, long before Copernicus and Galileo developed their own theories about heliocentrism. Simple expedients devised to avoid starvation, or at least to make food shortages as pleasant as possible, also form part of this picture. Anthropology, together with ethnology, is concerned with the study of traditional knowledge, and often, because of its need to document that knowledge, is the only source we have on skills that have been lost.

Anthropology and sociology can also tell us why some foods are preferred to others, and they remind us of some fundamental laws which humanity seems to have forgotten:

Even for an omnivore it makes sense not to eat everything that one can digest. Some foods are hardly worth the effort needed to produce and prepare them, some have cheaper and more nutritional substitutes, and some can only be eaten at the expense of giving up more advantageous items. Nutritional costs and benefits form a fundamental part of the balance—preferred foods generally pack more energy, proteins, vitamins, or minerals per serving than avoided foods. But there are other costs and benefits that may override the nutritive value of foods and make them good or bad to eat. Some foods are highly nutritious, but people spurn them because too much time and effort are needed to produce them, or because of the adverse effects they have on soils, animal and plant life, and other aspects of the environment.²⁸

The simple expediency of not “having negative effects” on the environment should alert us to the fact that we are doing something wrong on this planet, that the costs are beginning to outweigh the benefits.

Anthropology and sociology are part of gastronomy because they are interdependent and interfunctional sciences, because they study human culture and can use gastronomy to prove their theories. Meanwhile, gastronomy, for its part, turns to these two disciplines to improve its understanding of food systems, of the history of nutrition, and of the knowledge of food production and processing that has been handed down within specific cultures.

2.5 On geopolitics, political economics, and trade, or On globalization

It has never been so clear as it is today that geopolitics, political economics, and trade must be an integral part of gastronomy. In what has been called the age of globalization, exchanges are multiplying in every direction, complexity is increasing, and our diet is strongly influenced by this. Moreover, trade seems to have become the new god: the expediency of consuming one type of food rather than another, which used to be linked to geoclimatic and economic factors, has gradually been replaced by the rules of the market. The models of traditional cooking, which once had to contend or harmonize with the physical limitations of territories and with the relationships that formed between different societies, are now on the verge of disappearing because of the emergence of a model where what prevails, after intense industrialization and the globalization of trade, is consumerism and detachment from the agricultural world.

The history of man can be reconstructed through a geohistory of taste, where general models of cuisine become dominant and come to characterize the various areas of the planet. These models are the result of the use of local resources, of the blending and collision of cultures, of the dominance of some over others following wars and various forms of colonization. Almost all wars have been waged because of a more or less openly avowed desire to appropriate fertile land as a potential source of nourishment or wealth. Some, for example, argue that even the conflict between Israel and Palestine is due not so much to religious factors as to a struggle, dating back to 1967, over the control of water sources in this extremely arid part of the world.

Nowadays, many of these wars are fought on the commercial level, with the agribusiness and food multinationals in the role that used to belong to the nation-states. It is no coincidence that the antiglobalization movement has developed strongly in connection with themes relating to agriculture and nutrition, first coming to public attention through the protests in Seattle during the WTO meeting of 1999. Half of the total world population is involved in agriculture, and the laws of global trade are putting terrible pressure on the economies of the poorer countries, which still have a significant agricultural component. The interference in those cultures by the seed multinationals grows ever stronger and more devastating, and it is supported by very aggressive commercial strategies and by a system of tolls and subsidies for production that create a serious imbalance in the world. The rich West produces too much, sold at excessively high prices; to defend itself against the competition of the poorer countries, the West creates insurmountable commercial barriers that impose artificial prices. The Western policy of subsidies for the quantity produced has brought the poorer economies to their knees and in effect financed the destruction of the planet. These subsidies (still very influential in the United States, though in Europe a recent review of agricultural policy is beginning to make the distortions of this system less pronounced) enable the farmers of the rich West, who practice an industrial kind of agriculture, to beat off the competition of the poorer countries, which can produce at a lower cost.

For many years, the effect has been to finance poor-quality production whose main aim was to keep costs as low as possible, regardless of how good the product was. The industrial agricultural model has been vigorously defended despite the fact that it has long been known to be unsustainable; the poorer countries have been pushed into an unrealistic pursuit of the same model of development, causing immense damage to biodiversity and the traditional cultures. These countries become the victims of dumping—that is to say, of invasion by the rich countries’ surplus produce, which is subsidized at home and sold off at token prices, indeed often given away in the form of humanitarian aid. This process undermines local agricultural production, and it is because of such policies that in many areas of Africa, where the population is starving, the possibility of beginning to produce food or promoting local agriculture has gradually disappeared from the options of “development.” What is promoted is a mendacious dependence on the rich world, which gives vast quantities of aid. The fact that the United States sends GMOs that have remained unsold because of the moratorium imposed by Europe on these products, or wheat, corn, and other grains with split seeds which are useless for sowing, says a lot about the donors’ philanthropic intentions. And the fact that some African countries have begun to refuse this kind of aid confirms its relative uselessness and the detrimental effect that it has on local agricultural development.

Commercial priorities have come to dominate everything else, and the multitude of global injustices is almost infinite. A gastronome who has an ecological sensibility and who tries to promote forms of social justice through his choices cannot remain indifferent to a system of this kind, which is simply a global economic-financial pendant of the agribusiness model. As I have mentioned, this system has caused immense damage in the past and continues to do so: we must reject it out of hand.

In addition to providing the tools for an interesting historical account of how taste and food cultures are formed, geopolitics and economics thus make it possible to interpret the complex dynamics that underlie the present world system and to bring out all its injustices, contradictions, and paradoxes. Trade, for example, which according to Brillat-Savarin is the “search for the means of buying at the best possible price that which it [gastronomy] consumes and of selling at the highest possible profit that which it puts on sale,” and which historically has been a prime cause of the meeting of cultures, has today become a tool of domination, or rather a weapon of conflict, in the context of a globalized world. The study of these dynamics, with regard to the world of food, is gastronomy, and the understanding of these dynamics provides a basis for defining the social sustainability of productive and commercial models, and the conditions in which such sustainability can be achieved.

2.6 On technology, industry, and know-how, or On methods of production

Traditional cultures have invented the most disparate methods of food processing and preservation, making the best possible use of the resources available to them. It is obvious, therefore, that the method of food production is a gastronomic subject, but the fact is worth repeating nonetheless, in view of what has happened over the last fifty years: a revolutionary process that has given rise to a dualism between traditional cooking and industrial methods of production.

Culinary techniques have gradually disappeared from homes, from the stock of widely shared knowledge. In many cases professional cooks are the only people who still possess this knowledge, this know-how that was formed over centuries of practice. Through industrialization, this ancient knowledge has been transferred to increasingly centralized places of production, and the production of our food has been delegated to those who are able to do it on a mass scale, using new and highly sophisticated techniques. (These techniques efface the traditional ones and cannot be replicated at home; a good example is the artificial flavoring industry.) This transfer of knowledge has deprived us of the know-how and skills we need to process our own food. There has been a growing predominance of industrial food technology over more traditional methods. Such methods, often dismissed because they were part of everyone’s normal stock of cultural knowledge and were deemed unworthy of scientific attention, have faded almost completely away because others produce our food for us. For many today, cooking has become chiefly a matter of heating up something precooked and frozen.

The predominance of technology can be understood if we consider the current academic status of gastronomy compared to that which is accorded to the food technologies. It is the latter that are studied at the universities; students choose them so as to acquire specialist knowledge that will enable them to become valued employees of the food industry. In the university world, gastronomy has never been represented except in its more folkloristic forms, or at most as the subject of anthropological and ethnographical research, whereas the food technology used by industry boasts high-powered specialists who teach at universities all over the world.

In reality, the fund of traditional knowledge on the subject of food processing—the set of simple acts of everyday preparation—is an extremely rich and valuable heritage. These acts are evident in every society that is prevalently agricultural, and they were equally important in the city, too, before the standardized models of the food industry became completely dominant. The tools and manual skills necessary to perform these acts are disappearing after centuries of practice, yet in many cases they prove irreplaceable. The great chefs themselves acknowledge this by risking the charge of overfussiness from those who are superficial about such matters, or by declaring their inability to perform certain apparently simple tasks in the kitchen.

A great master of the culinary art, Fulvio Pierangelini, who runs the Gambero Rosso restaurant in San Vincenzo, Versilia, confessed to me that he pays the closest attention to the manual skills of those who work with his raw materials. For it is the direct relationship established between the person who performs a simple operation and the material itself that shows the person’s respect for that material and his ability to elicit the best organoleptic characteristics from it. Pierangelini told me, for example, of the time when he had once fired a young assistant after a few days’ trial, even though he had previously worked in some excellent kitchens. When cutting fish, the boy simply would not move his hands in the way that Pierangelini had taught him. Either for convenience or out of sheer incompetence, he persisted in holding the knife at a completely different angle with respect to the working surface from the one he had been shown. Pierangelini was incensed, and after several reprimands eventually sacked him. What particularly infuriated him, he said, was that the young man defended his poor workmanship by saying that cutting was cutting, what difference did it make?

It would be interesting to ask for an opinion on which of the two men was right from a sushi chef, who does not dare to cut fish in the presence of customers until he has had years of training in the kitchen. Or we could just try to make sushi at home ourselves and observe the effect of our unskilled cutting on the flavor of the final product.

Often, moreover, this kind of knowledge was the exclusive property of women, as the principal occupants of the kitchen. Pierangelini tells me that in his kitchen no man, not even he, is allowed to clean and wash the salad and vegetables: this task is reserved for women, because he says they move in a different way from men. We may call it grace or skill, but the fact is that Pierangelini treats his older female assistants with utter devotion, and he told me this anecdote in a slightly despairing tone because one of them was soon to retire. He feared that nobody else would be able to prepare the vegetables for his kitchen as she did, her actions “mechanical and decisive, but with a grace and precision only possible for a person of great sensitivity.”

The heritage of these movements, these manual skills, this unwritten and unwritable know-how, must be preserved, and some of the resources available for research should be dedicated to them, so that we can at the very least record them before they completely disappear. It is necessary, indeed urgent, to use all the available technologies (photography and computing, for example) to catalogue and store these manual acts and traditions in a kind of “skills bank.”

It may be obvious that production techniques are an integral part of gastronomic science, but it bears repeating that modern gastronomy must concern itself with the oldest forms of knowledge, those practical and manual skills which I provocatively include here, under the heading “know-how,” among the scientific disciplines: first of all with the aim of conservation, and secondly in order to revive or reproduce valid alternatives to the present unsustainable model, practicing at the culinary-productive level, too, that “matrix of dialogue between different realms” (official science and traditional knowledge) that Professor Altieri demands for agroecological theory. In effect, it is a question of studying all the methods of production and according them all equal dignity, so that we can abandon those that are most harmful to the human race and preserve the good ones that still have much to teach us.

2.7 On cooking and kitchens, or On the home and the restaurant

By cooking we mean the art of preserving, preparing, and cooking food. Some describe it as a form of language:²⁹ it has words (the products and ingredients), which are organized according to rules like grammar (the recipes), syntax (the menus), and rhetoric (table manners and behavior). Like language, cooking contains and expresses the culture of the person who does it; it is a repository of the traditions and identity of a group. It self-represents and communicates even more strongly than language, because food is directly assimilable by our organism: eating someone else’s food is easier and more immediate than speaking their language. So cooking is the area par excellence of cultural interchange and combination.

The history of cooking was written in the recipe books of the aristocracy, a fact that has generated a false separation between gastronomy, perceived as elitist, and mere eating, aligned with the lower classes. In reality, the two things belong to the same sphere, since the cooking of the nobility has always drawn liberally on the popular, peasant, and lower-class tradition. At any rate, the aristocracy codified cooking through their chefs and through the works of history that have come down to us. Then, after 1789, with the French Revolution, the cooks left the palaces, and restaurants were born. Chefs became the repositories of “official” cooking. Alongside this official strand of the tradition, for at least two centuries people continued to practice in their homes an everyday kind of cooking that was open to the field and the kitchen garden, to the local market, to the small neighborhood shop. But now, even within the home, the most dramatic changes have taken place: industrialization has had a profound impact, globalization has brought a greater exchange of products and culinary models, and restaurant catering has become affordable to ever larger sectors of the population. Is it any surprise that we have bartered the everyday art of gastronomy for its monetized version? In the rich countries, kitchens in the home are less used than previously; people do not cook anymore, they buy food ready-made, whether in the form of prepackaged meals, lunch at a fast-food joint, or a sumptuous dinner in a restaurant that specializes in nouvelle cuisine or fusion cooking. It is not a matter of class—the evolution of social customs has distanced everyone in the industrialized West from their kitchens, whatever their background.

Even gastronomes—I myself am a good example here—have gradually abandoned the kitchen. In order to write his classic cookbook La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiare bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), the chef Pellegrino Artusi spent years in the kitchen aided by the faithful assistant Marietta, trying out all the recipes he collected; but the gastronome, since the days of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de La Reynière, has come more and more to resemble a critic, indeed a judge. He enters a restaurant, does not even visit the kitchen, samples the final dish (the result of a long and complex procedure), and pronounces his verdict. I myself—I freely admit my deficiencies—am not a good cook. But I am aware of the respect and the scientific interest that culinary skill merits, and I know that I must take this into account if I wish to judge a dish in a restaurant; so I always make a point of asking to meet the chef and his team, of visiting the kitchen and watching the staff at work. Indeed, in light of the current situation around the world, even the cooks themselves deserve our efforts at preservation: whether they work at home or are employed in small traditional restaurants all over the world, such cooks possess recipes and culinary skills that must not be lost.

If we considered only the general situation, we might well conclude that cooking has died out; but in reality, it is only a question of retrieving knowledge and know-how that still exists, of learning it, supporting it, and replicating it. For globalization in cooking is in fact a big paradox.³⁰ In the past, the aristocracy pursued a certain kind of universalism; they could afford whatever they liked, they had access even to foodstuffs that were produced a long way away. Their cuisine was, or at least aspired to be, globalized, in the sense that, even though there might be countless local variants of a dish, the name and the main ingredients were always the same, shared at a national level. Globalization was a luxury of the wealthy.

Today, however, globalization, with its standardized industrial products, is within the reach of the middle and lower classes; but this advance has led to a drastic deterioration in our diet, and we eat food that has been mass-produced with little attention to gastronomic values. If you want to have a better diet nowadays, however rich or poor you are, you are forced to seek out local food and immerse yourself in nonglobal traditions. While modern globalization has favored the standardization of all the main culinary traditions, it has also generated new diversities and given new importance to the rediscovery of culinary identities. Local cooking, for example, is a fairly recent invention in the history of cooking, and it grows more attractive and important the more standardized the world becomes from the cultural point of view.

For many people, cooking—and the kitchen as the place where the activity takes place—is becoming an antidote to the lifestyles imposed by the dominant social models, a form of gastronomic resistance and protection of diversity.

Cooking, despite those who proclaim its death, is the main source of nutrition, identity, and perpetuation for a culture made up of thousands of individual people who repeat the same gestures and communicate with each other. However far the distance between those people, cooking is a matter of repeating actions, combining ingredients, inventing variants—it is the space of shared memory and identity.

Cooking is the mental place—as the kitchen is the physical space—of gastronomy. It is an area that is constantly evolving, and the only thing that threatens it is abandonment, which is a brutalization of our civilization that we simply cannot afford. We must give cooking back its rightful dignity and make it a subject of scientific research; gastronomes, and everyone else, must return to it, starting in their own homes. They must learn, if not the practical techniques of cooking, at least its theoretical importance, the incalculable value of the stock of cultural knowledge connected with it, and the awareness that without cooking, gastronomy is hardly possible. When I asked the chef Alain Ducasse what his definition of gastronomy was, he told me:

Gastronomy is looking at a product and trying to respect its original flavor, the flavor of the people who cultivated, raised, or invented it, using the right method of preparation, the right duration of cooking, and the right accompaniment. The message of gastronomy must be clear to everyone and remain permeable so that we can appreciate what nature has given us. It is the respect for the product.

Gastromony can be attained only with good raw materials, of course, and with an approach to cooking that respects them. The message we receive from nature must remain “permeable” until the end: only cooking can achieve this.

2.8 On the physiology of taste, or On sensoriality

Taste—today a very overvalued word which adorns the titles of books, events, TV shows, and village fêtes because of its cachet—is primarily a matter of physiology. Although “taste” can indicate not only something that is good to eat but also something that is good to think (indeed, it is often used in this more “cultural” sense, as the outcome of the preferences of a social group), it is first and foremost one of our five senses. Together with the other senses, it enables us to taste and evaluate a food product in an almost objective, or at least comparative, manner. Certainly, a number of factors influence our perception of what tastes good or bad; taste is the knowledge of flavors extended to the entire heritage of an artistic and intellectual culture. But if we restrict the field to sensoriality alone, removing all the other admittedly interesting meanings of the word, there is no longer any power of discretion, and taste can be defined scientifically. This definition is based on the practice of tasting; an example is what happens with wine, where descriptive categories have been created for what we perceive with the senses of sight, smell, and taste. The same thing can be done with every kind of food, and this constitutes a firm scientific basis, which today can be said to have been completely defined and scientifically proved.

The most obvious and least “scientific” proof is an experience common to us all, deriving from the power (a power which has been scientifically demonstrated) of the gustatory-olfactory memory, the most persistent kind of memory in all human beings: there are flavors and smells that take us straight back to periods of our life that we had forgotten. I, for example, can well remember the aroma (not a particularly delicate one, but central to my Piedmontese gastronomic identity) that wafts through the air when slices of bread spread with brus are placed on the stove. Brus is a cream made by softening cheese and periodically stirring into it a little milk or rum. It is rarer than it used to be, as are the stoves and the practice of warming it on a slice of bread, but when I was a child I often had it for a snack, and the pungent smell is still etched on my memory more powerfully than any recent memory. The same is true of my predilection for the acid and the sour. In the warm months, my mother used to cook giardiniera (vegetable soup) and carpione (fried and marinated fish), both of which were based on vinegar, and now the taste is ingrained in my memory, unconsciously linked as it is to special, important experiences of my life—experiences I could not even describe without reference to my gustatory-olfactory memory.

Taste, as a sense, is the gastronome’s principal tool, and it depends entirely on him. By this I mean that sensoriality is a capacity that needs to be trained, educated. The human sensorial universe in the present age has been impoverished as never before: artificial flavorings confuse and atrophy our senses, continuously raising the threshold of our perception and bombarding us with tastes and smells that do not exist in nature. Our senses, incomparable tools for a deeper understanding of the environment and of ourselves, have undergone a regression owing to the rhythms of life to which we are forced to conform, and which deprive us of many exquisite ways of tasting the world. Meanwhile, the stimuli multiply, and our perception becomes too selective, to the point where it will only accept the sensations which are necessary at that particular moment. But the senses can be re-educated, as I have mentioned, and this is the gastronome’s mission.

I will go further: in a world where “sensorial deprivation leads to the dulling of our abilities to see, touch, taste, and smell,” the training of the senses becomes “an act of resistance against the destruction of flavors and against the annihilation of knowledge.”³¹ It becomes a political act, for, once we are able to control and manage the mechanisms that regulate the transmission of stimuli and conditioning factors, we are also able to control and manage reality: the more vigilant our attention, the lower the risk of perceptual deception; and the richer our analysis of our perceptions, the greater our satisfaction and pleasure. The senses can become tools of choice, defense, and pleasure; they give new “sense” to our actions in all fields. The gastronome, from this point of view, may be seen as a privileged person who can discern and who, by his choices, which are guided by a sensibility immune to the distractions of industrialized society, can direct our future.

Recaptured sensoriality is the main, almost primitive, tool for orienting political action against a system in which the machine has become the real master: “Machinism produces counterfeit coin and tries to convince us that it is money. Laboratory knowledge does not reproduce life [and its flavors,] but its representation in world trade. Agroindustrial products are nothing but a machinic simulacrum of life, the result of the destruction of social relations in agriculture and the synthetic surrogate of exchange between man and nature.”³²

It is essential, therefore, that people receive a lifelong education in these matters, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout their lives. Such an education can only be provided and cultivated by the gastronome, for he alone, of all those who want to change the world, is aware that in order to achieve this goal it is possible to start from taste. One must learn to search for taste and to reject any simulacrum of it, such as artificial flavorings, which are the greatest—and also the more obscure—achievement of that system which is sapping our most natural human faculties day by day and which we must firmly reject.

2.9 On medicine, or On health and diet

Food in all societies, even the earliest ones, has always had a therapeutic function, a pharmacological component in the collective imagination. Cooking, as a mix of the benefits of nourishment and pharmacological compounds, has a long history, potentially associated with the evolution of the species. The balancing of nutrients in the past was achieved without the many calculations which the nutritional sciences are constantly publishing nowadays. In societies where the diet was poor in meat, for example, people got the protein they needed by eating insects (in Central America and in some parts of Africa, entomophagy is still quite widespread).

Often, however, learning from practical experience (“this food did me good when I was ill, so it can be used to cure or alleviate that particular illness with those particular symptoms”), traditional societies managed to construct an entire system made up of individual pieces of knowledge associating specific therapeutic properties to individual foods. Several examples come to mind: the indigenous Krahô people of the Brazilian cerrado had to fight hard³³ to recover the seeds of a particular variety of corn, pohumpéy, which has close links with their cosmology, but which also has a pharmacological function. This corn is said to be the gift that a goddess, the Star Woman, had given to their people: a legend tells how she appeared in a dream to a boy, showed him where he could find pohumpéy, and taught him how to grow it. That marked the birth of agriculture for the Krahô. But in addition to the symbolic value of this product, which had become extinct and was recovered from a germplasm bank in Brasilia, there is also the fact that, as the elders relate, the cobs of pohumpéy, when they are still small, green, and tender, were picked and used to make a soup believed to be energizing for pregnant women and their husbands. During the last few weeks of pregnancy and the first few weeks after the birth, the couple would feed exclusively on pohumpéy soup, which is also one of the foods reserved for frail children. Nowadays, this product is so rare that it is considered almost sacred, and its properties as a tonic are constantly praised.

In Europe, women were the repositories of pharmacological knowledge connected with herbs, until the Inquisition began to stigmatize them as witches; a vast heritage of knowledge disappeared with them, and only today, thanks to developments in herbalism, can we attempt to recover it. One only has to think of the medical school of Salerno³⁴ to realize that a good diet has always been regarded as the basis of good health. Even Brillat-Savarin and the early gastronomes laid down a particular order for individual courses, partly to enhance the pleasure of the meal, but also so that the body could prepare to absorb it in the healthiest way possible.

It is interesting to note that agricultural societies lose this traditional knowledge of diet and health more quickly than do hunter-gatherer societies, a loss which goes hand in hand with sedentarization, the concentration of the population, and documented links between malnutrition and disease. Sedentarization also brings with it the development of the medical and nutritional sciences. All this has, of course, reached its zenith in our affluent modern societies, where the obsession with a healthy diet is an increasingly evident factor. On the other hand, eating disorders have multiplied in recent years: the main causes of this, too, seem to be sedentary lifestyles and the dominant influence of the food industry, which has significantly reduced the variety and quality of our diet. Obesity is becoming a national problem in the United States, and in Europe as well, where the number of children who are overweight from early childhood is far greater than ever before.

In this very problematic context, where malnutrition and obesity are rife, and where cooking might at first sight seem doomed, the nutritional sciences appear to be flourishing. They are popular with a public obsessed with the desire to lose weight, to conform with media-imposed standards of beauty, to have a “healthy and balanced diet.” Although researchers have studied the diets recommended by various nutritionists—whatever their creed, scientific orientation, or ideology—no study, whether theoretical or practical, has found any of them to be effective. The various slimming (low-calorie) diets, when subjected to rigorous scientific analysis, have all proved to be worthless, especially in the long term.³⁵

Yet the public demands diets: it may seem a paradox, but it is the truth. In the United States, the amount of money spent on dietitians and dietary products already rivals that spent on food.

Many developing countries as well are beginning to encounter the problem of obesity and all the associated eating disorders which we in the West know only too well. And yet nobody attempts to adopt a different lifestyle or diet. The science of nutrition is regarded as a panacea and enjoys great prestige (a prestige which gastronomic science conspicuously lacks), even though it often shows dangerous signs of collusion with the world of the agricultural and food business, signs which ought to arouse a little skepticism.

Nevertheless, nutrition must be considered as a branch of gastronomy, for without a gastronomic perspective it cannot find a solution to the dietary problems of the modern world. A detailed study of diet—not a purely scientific study, but one supported by humanistic disciplines, from history to anthropology, and combined with a reevaluation of traditional knowledge—has a gastronomic perspective. If nutrition is used only to correct the effects that the agroindustrial model has on our health, it will inevitably make more mistakes and create further problems, with the enormous media interest that foments and supports it.

Gastronomy is therefore medicine to the extent that, as a complex discipline, it teaches us the elements of a correct diet: variety, quality, pleasure, and moderation. In this case, too, a blend of traditional knowledge and modern medical science cannot fail to be beneficial.

2.10 On epistemology, or On choice

Epistemology is that part of philosophy which critically examines scientific knowledge by analyzing its language and methodologies and the way it organizes concepts into theories, establishing criteria for their validity. During the foregoing survey of the various gastronomic disciplines—most of which are only partly scientific according to the official definition, but in my opinion deserve full scientific status—I have on more than one occasion underlined the importance of recovering, cataloguing, and studying the traditional forms of knowledge and comparing them with the corpus of “official” scientific knowledge.

Epistemology, therefore, becomes a gastronomic discipline—or rather, the gastronome must adopt an epistemological approach—when this reference to forms of knowledge that are distinct from official science becomes inevitable. The science of the farmers, of the producing communities, of the fishermen, of the cooks, has the same dignity as the more established academic disciplines, and is a field of human knowledge—some would put it under the heading “consumer culture”—which must not be neglected. Indeed, a better understanding of it will enable us on the one hand to establish its validity, and on the other to bring it into critical and, if possible, functional contact with the other, more modern schools of scientific knowledge. In short, I hope that the “dialogue between realms” that is called for by Professor Altieri of the University of California at Berkeley (see Diary 10) will materialize, so as to make agroecology effective and fruitful. This must happen in all the fields of gastronomy, from the natural sciences to zootechnics and cultivation; from the methods of processing raw materials to the manual and instrumental technologies; from the various forms of exchange and contact between societies to cooking and medicine.

In the first place, then, the epistemological approach serves to break down the old intellectual prejudice that to discuss gastronomy and diet is to engage in second-rate scientific activity, if not in mere divertissement—that same prejudice which made Brillat-Savarin refuse to sign the first edition of Physiologie du goût, and which influenced all his successors.

Secondly—to strain the argument a little, perhaps—if epistemology helps us understand the validity of traditional knowledge, it should be considered an essential step on the way toward gastronomic truth. That is, it enables us to interpret the reality of food in the world and, on the basis of this interpretation, to make an even greater cognitive effort, employing our trained sensoriality and gastronomic knowledge, to decide what styles of behavior to adopt and what choices to make every day with regard to the act of eating. The study of gastronomic knowledge (or gastronomic science) is a methodological process that does not follow the classical dictates of the acquisition of knowledge but takes an intellectual approach; this approach is open to the extreme complexity that characterizes any food production chain, and thereby provides us with the tools we need in order to be able to choose.

Our choice of food, from another point of view, is the most powerful communicative tool that we possess. Our decision about what to buy and consume, in a world where everything is geared to profit, is the first significant political act we are able to make in our lives.

It is the gastronome’s responsibility to become learned: not a botanist, not a physicist, not a chemist, not a sociologist, not a farmer, not a cook, not a doctor. All he needs is to know enough of these disciplines to understand what he eats. He must have some of the knowledge of each of those specialists, as far as food is concerned. And he must not be intimidated if experts look down on him as an amateur. Better to have a smattering of botany so that you can recognize a particular variety of plant, so that you know how, where, and by whom it was grown, how it was preserved and cooked, whether it can be bad for your health or not, and so that you can enjoy it more consciously. The alternative is the perfect biotechnologist, happy to eat a genetically modified organism that is harmful to farmers and the environment—a substance manipulated by the food industry, warmed up in a saucepan, and sadly lacking in taste.

The gastronome must be able to choose; that is his main “mission.” He must be able to make correct choices, and he must understand all the complexities of the food production system. In the next chapter, therefore, I shall attempt a definition of quality—the quality that we must buy, study, promote, create, and teach. My aim in doing so is not to establish infallible rules, but to stimulate the reader to think about the power we have by virtue of the fact that we eat; and I hope to do this without denying or depreciating our natural propensity for pleasure and play. Indeed, I will start precisely from this element, taste: the good, which is the first and most immediate sensation that a food can give us. Striving for the good is the principal means we possess of promoting a kind of food production that is clean and fair—that is to say, sustainable.