The word “quality,” like “taste,” “local,” and “traditional,” is one of the most abused terms in culinary literature. With the growing awareness among the public of the need for a healthy diet, “quality” is demanded and invoked for various reasons by everyone involved in agricultural and food production, and is widely used as a means of promoting a product.

The rise in popularity of the term is a fairly recent phenomenon, which came about mainly as a result of food scandals such as mad cow disease, dioxin-contaminated chicken, and various other dangers that have occurred periodically in the agricultural and food system since the late 1980s. Certainly, a more recent part of the credit—or blame?—for the spread of the word is undoubtedly due to the relative success of traditional products, generally produced with a heightened concern for the final result in terms of taste and originality. But it was the scandals in particular that opened the eyes of the average consumer (the recent success of certain “minor” producers, achieved in the face of current trends, proves this), shocking the general public because they entered homes, affected local farmers, and introduced fear and uncertainty—due to a profound lack of information—into the act of shopping. No media campaign in favor of quality would have been so effective, but soon the term became a feather to put in any cap, a term with infinite connotations that could be used in the most disparate contexts.

In the early 1980s, “quality” usually implied a concern with superior production methods and organoleptic characteristics, and was intimately linked with the idea of status, in accordance with a still very elitist concept of gastronomical knowledge. Toward the end of the century, however, the need to “democratize” the term after the food scandals (and the market success of the “local” and the “traditional”) soon led to it acquiring a sense—warmly approved by the world of production—which in effect associates quality with hygienic-sanitary safety or at least equates quality with “local” and “traditional”: “this product is not harmful to health, and does not kill, therefore it is a quality product”; or “this product is traditional in our nation and in this particular town, therefore it is a quality product.”

This highly reductive concept is readily traceable to the intellectual tendencies imposed by technocratic and reductionist thought: when defining quality became a matter of urgency, people tried to regulate it on the basis of calculations or minimum quantifiable measures and requirements, which were often superficial. The most blatant example is provided by the European Union (EU), whose response to the demands prompted by the food scandals was to introduce an extremely restrictive type of regulation that had been under consideration since the early 1990s: HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points).

HACCP is a method first developed in the United States by NASA in 1959 to guarantee the quality of the food that was eaten in space programs; it was adopted by the EU as a way of controlling food production in 1994 and incorporated into Italian legislation in 1999. It consists of a set of norms and procedures for analyzing the risks of the contamination of products, from raw materials to the final product. It is a very restrictive and detailed method which, though possibly sustainable by the food industry with huge but proportionate investments, is impossible to sustain for small producers, especially those that use traditional or non-mechanized methods and tools of production. The main effect of HACCP has been an intolerable increase in red tape, a considerable rise in costs to meet standards, a standardization of production to the advantage of the food industry, and greater power of harassment for the controlling bodies. The vigorous opposition of some associations—Slow Food prominent among them—and of many small producers later induced the EU to soften its stance, allowing proportionate exemptions for those kinds of production that for structural reasons are unable to comply with these hygienic-sanitary criteria, which in fact only correspond to the characteristics of industrial methods of food production.36

This predilection for a quantitative idea of food quality—which had the immediate effect of equating quality with safety—went even further, producing more complex attempts to calculate and define quality. But these attempts were abandoned as soon as they came up against the infinite number of variables which the definition encounters. What characteristics must a cheese have in order to be considered a quality product? Must it be pristine, well-preserved, healthy, clean, fragrant, containing the right amounts of fat, salt, and dry residue? To the taste, it still might seem dull, even unpleasant: quality cannot be calculated; there is no such thing as objective quality.

But there is such a thing as comparative quality: must we therefore resign ourselves to relativism?

Certainly not. We can describe quality, and we can try to define it by looking for general requirements, criteria that are open to interpretation case by case. Quality is a complex concept, arising from the complexity of gastronomy itself and therefore from numerous parameters; we must accept it and turn it to our own advantage. The subjectivity of quality must be a cause of orientation, not of confusion.

We may begin by saying that quality is a commitment that is made by the producer and the buyer, a constant endeavor, a political act (that may seem a provocative statement, but I will explain the reasons behind it later), and a cultural act; and that in order to escape from the impasse of its relativity, quality demands a lifelong education in food and taste, as well as respect for the earth, the environment, and the people who produce the food.

Perhaps this can provide us with our general criteria, or at least with ones from which we can start, applying them during the phase of gastronomic choice, when we purchase a food product: the phase of the search—without any rhetoric—for taste, which involves three ideas. The latter are also the three essential preconditions which must be met before we can say that a particular product is a quality product and from which we may start to discuss personal or collective preferences, and therefore relative quality.

The three notions are good, clean, and fair—three mutually interdependent and indispensable concepts.

{DIARY 8} THE TASTES OF MY MEMORY

In my long experience as a gastronome, I have given hundreds of interviews both as a critic and as the president of Slow Food. In all these interviews, there have been very few occasions when the interviewer did not ask: “What’s your favorite dish?” or “What’s your ideal meal?” It is repeated like a kind of mantra, and it shows how often culture and gastronomic journalism become banal and concentrate reductively on two elements alone: recipes and recommended restaurants. I confess that I find the question very irritating, especially if I am trying to describe the complexity of gastronomic science in the interview. Over the years, however, I have learned to relax and not worry too much about it, replying that my preferences depend on the place and situation I find myself in. But the fact remains that the question is an irritating commonplace which does justice neither to the gastronome’s curiosity nor to the seriousness of the subject.

What is no joking matter, at the level of personal tastes, is the gastronome’s formative experience, which is highly individual and rooted in the childhood of each one of us. This is what makes the adventure of food wonderful, because for each of us it has a different point of departure, which can be traced back to the community and family into which we were born. I, for example, come from southern Piedmont, and began to learn about food in the postwar years, between 1949 and 1958, the period which has been recognized by the Italian National Institute of Nutrition as the time when Italians had the healthiest diet—not because people were affluent (they were not), but simply because of the quality of the food.

Coming from a family on the borderline between the working class and the lower middle class, my roots lie in a culinary tradition that derived from what can still be described as a subsistence economy, and of which my paternal grandmother was a representative. My grandmother’s patience in producing food and teaching you to love it was very common among the women of those days, who could make profitable use of the scanty materials that they had at their disposal, preparing unforgettable dishes in conditions of great economic hardship.

That is why certain tastes have remained etched on my memory—the first tastes, always linked to particular moments, which remained vivid reference points for everything that came later.

I remember the afternoon snacks consisting of soma d’aj, a slice of bread spread with a clove of garlic and a little salt and oil, and toasted on the stove: too rich for a child at four o’clock in the afternoon. Nowadays, no one would ever dream of preparing such a snack, but that was my first experience of garlic, a food it is always difficult to persuade children to eat. Then there was Sunday lunch, which consisted of meat-filled ravioli (le raviole, in Piedmontese), the meat being in fact the week’s leftovers. My grandmother liked to add rice to it, and the lightness of the pasta gave the dish a unique consistency and a richness of flavor you would never have expected from leftovers—a real Sunday feast.

There was another dish, which was the quintessence of poverty and which I have never seen anywhere else since: rice boiled in milk, which was the food of the evening, when you tried to make a virtue of necessity. And finally there was rolatine, thin scraps of meat rolled around a filling of eggs, vegetables, cheese, and breadcrumbs, and served with a typical Piedmontese salsa verde.

It is strange to see how all these dishes, which are part of my makeup, are rarely made any more, except in some restaurants that recreate the gastronomic tradition with scholarly accuracy. Those tastes are in my head, but I have seldom come across them in later years.

I feel the same dismay when I no longer find good bread on our tables, but odorless and tasteless white rolls, lacking the flavor I remember in those loaves made with sour dough and live yeast. Besides, a copious consumption of bread at meals is part of the history of Italian cuisine, whose roots lie in an agricultural society. I have always been amused by the fact that when I go to France people tell me that the Italians’ idea of an hors d’oeuvre is bread and water. But it is part of our flesh and blood; today, I really miss good bread, and it is always a pleasant surprise to be served excellent bread with a meal. Many restaurants in California, for example, offer delicious bread.

Food changes with time and so do traditions, which are not immutable; but a gastronome’s gustatory-olfactory memory is like a bank, a filing cabinet that preserves knowledge and flavors which accompany him through life. That is why a constant training of his sensoriality can only help the gastronome and the culture of which he is part: the more conscious this memory is, the less gastronomic knowledge will be lost in the future.

1. GOOD

Trying to define the concept of quality by saying that a product, in order to be considered a quality product, must be good does not solve the problem of relativism. “Good” is what one likes, and what one likes should be related to the sensorial sphere, which is strongly influenced by personal, cultural, historical, socioeconomic, and contingent factors. It is difficult to find objectivity in all this. In fact, however, it is by renouncing objectivity, the desire to establish a rule that is valid for everyone, that one can arrive at an understanding of what is good. What is good in gastronomy is good if two conditions hold: first, that a product can be linked with a certain naturalness which respects the product’s original characteristics as much as possible; secondly, that it produces recognizable (and pleasant) sensations which enable one to judge it at a particular moment, in a particular place, and within a particular culture. What is good for the present writer is not necessarily good for a twenty-year-old Londoner, a Mongolian shepherd, a Brazilian samba dancer, or a Thai doctor, let alone for a Masai from Tanzania. And in a hundred years, if I could still be here to taste it, it might not be good for me either.

In defining what is good, two kinds of subjective factors are crucial: taste—which is personal and linked to the sensorial sphere of each one of us—and knowledge—which is cultural and linked to the environment and to the history of communities, techniques, and places.

1.1 Sensoriality

The knowledge of the senses is scientific, in the classical sense of the term—that is to say, it has an objective basis, though a very weak one—because it is the way we perceive through sensoriality: it is a physical, physiological fact, which is natural in a healthy person.

The study of the human body on the one hand and the decoding of tasting techniques on the other have made it possible to explain how our senses function, how perceptual activity occurs and how it becomes cognitive. The tastes, the colors, the textures perceptible to the touch, the sounds, and the primary smells have all been identified and described.

The serious tasting of a food product, before one expresses a value judgment on it, passes through the most meticulous description of its characteristics: visual, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory. Some perfectionists even take pains to explain the influence of the sense of hearing on the total experience of taste. It has to be said that this approach can be described as a kind of aesthetics of eating and drinking, which already introduces a cultural element,37 but the point of departure remains objective; only the value that is subsequently given to this or that taste, to this or that smell, changes.

The history of cooking comes to our aid to explain how the concept of the good is variable and how it has changed profoundly over the course of our history, completely overturning judgments. The ancient Romans were exceedingly fond of garum, a sauce made from fish entrails steeped in oil and various spices, a condiment we would abhor if it were still produced today; and yet, a very similar one is very common and much appreciated in present-day Thailand. There have been periods in history when the sour triumphed, others when the sweet was preferred, others still when the sweet, salty, and sour were used simultaneously; there have been periods when spices and artifice with respect to natural taste were synonyms of good, and others when a stronger need was felt for the final dish to respect as closely as possible the original taste of the raw materials.

At any rate, this variability, which we might describe as “evolutionary,” and which is always linked to environmental conditions, does not mean that there is no objective way of recognizing flavors, the sensorial basis of all our approaches to food. And if we take the historical perspective, this basis has never been so much under threat as it is today. Human sensoriality is attacked by the multiplication of stimuli, by the diminution of the amount of time we have to select and perceive them, and by certain methods of industrial production which alter the natural flavors and end up deceiving us, indeed atrophying our overexposed and increasingly ill-educated senses.

Re-educating the senses and keeping them in constant training becomes the principal gastronomic act, the primary and indispensable task that enables us to recognize quality. If we cannot identify flavor on the basis of objective data, we cannot achieve knowledge. In this way we lose pleasure, our freedom of choice, and any chance of directly or indirectly influencing the decisions of producers. In so doing, we renounce quality from the outset and are compelled to trust those who sell it to us as such.

But it would be wrong to trust them too much; from this point of view, our regained and educated senses have a very important political role. The coarsening of our senses is a surrender to the ruling model, which does not want us to be pleasure-loving, satisfied people but unfeeling cogs in the juggernaut propelled toward profit (and the grave). The dulling of the senses to which we are subjected is both a consequence and a contributory cause of the proliferation of a system, a mode of thought and production, which has nothing in common with what food ought to be. Reappropriating the senses is the first step toward imagining a different system capable of respecting man as a worker of the land, as a producer, as a consumer of food and resources, and as a political and moral entity. To reappropriate one’s senses is to reappropriate one’s own life and to cooperate with others in creating a better world, where everyone has the right to pleasure and knowledge.

1.2 Taste

Taste is both flavor and knowledge, sapore and sapere in Italian: the alliteration of the two terms says a lot about the close connection that exists between the perceptual and cultural spheres. Taste changes according to whether you are rich or poor, whether there is abundance or famine, whether you live in a forest or in a metropolis. But for everyone, taste is the right to transform their own daily sustenance into pleasure.

This natural tendency has not always corresponded to criteria of cheapness with respect to costs and benefits: it may be a matter of expediency, as Marvin Harris maintains, but eating a particular kind of food does not necessarily mean that one appreciates it, as Jean-Louis Flandrin has pointed out.38 The rich always seem to have taken expensiveness as the main criterion of their culinary choices:39 to them, the rarer, and therefore the more costly, the product, the better it is. The greater diffusion of wealth nowadays—if not in the absolute sense, at least in the sense related to the cost of food—combined with the sensorial ignorance that is becoming ever more widespread, have also led to the criterion of expensiveness, only now it is inversely proportional to, and more unconscious than, elitist ostentation, but equally inexpedient: the cheaper a product is, the more I eat it, never mind if I deprive myself of pleasure and if it does damage to me, to the ecosystem, and to those who produce it.

But leaving aside all these anthropological and economic considerations, taste remains the crucial factor in establishing the goodness of a particular food. Its formation depends on the culture and the economic situation, and in light of these factors, it is the gastronome’s task to succeed in defining what is good for the world of today.

As I have already said, however, it is not easy to arrive at a definition that is “good” for everyone: the variety of factors that are involved makes generalization difficult. The study of what is good, therefore, necessarily restricts the field to a single culture and a single social group. It sets limits (spatial, cultural, and social) and confronts us with all the complexity of multidisciplinary gastronomic science. But this very complexity and this cultural diversity, if accepted fully and open-mindedly, can enable us to clear away many factors which are unimportant (and very relative), so that we can single out those elements that occur in all cultures, a common point of departure. One of these elements might be, for example, a preference for the artificial or for the natural, which I consider to be a good starting point. Other rival factors belonging to other contexts will be superimposed on macrocriteria of this kind.

Another preliminary remark should be made: in order to develop these arguments, I will refer to the history of our taste here in the West, but I would like to state clearly at the outset that I totally reject Eurocentrism and any suggestion that our gastronomic culture is superior to others.

I start from “us” simply because we have more historical sources at our disposal, and many other scholars have given detailed descriptions of these dynamics. It has been demonstrated, for example, that Western history has been characterized by a cyclical swing between the artificial and the natural. Artifice was preferred in ancient Roman, medieval, and Renaissance cuisines, when cooking was perceived as a combinatorial art whose purpose was to change the natural taste of food as much as possible. But to delve less far back in time, the same alternating prevalence of the artificial and the natural is found even in the more recent development of haute cuisine; in the mid-1970s, there was a new vogue for nouvelle cuisine, which put the technical ability of the chef before all else as the key element in the success of a great dish, a dish that could be considered good. During this historical phase, the raw material was depreciated in its importance with respect to the good: according to the supporters of nouvelle cuisine, even the worst point of departure could be transformed into something exceptional by the technical ability and creativity of the cook.

After only a decade, in the mid-1980s, the popularity of new chefs such as Alain Ducasse inspired a new school whose aim was essentially the quest for excellent raw materials, which it held to be the only indisputable factor on which the chef’s ability can legitimately intervene, to present the originality of the flavors in all their splendor. Then came the Spanish school led by Ferran Adrià, who with an injection of flamboyant and highly technical creativity reintroduced artifice to the kitchen: consistencies which change and cannot be traced back to the original appearance of the ingredients, flavors which do not correspond to appearances or smells. This continual and increasingly provocative game found intellectual justification in the work of Adrià, the only true innovator of the school (to call him a genius would not be an exaggeration), but became an exercise in sterility and bad taste in the hands of most of his followers.

Today, there is a continuing debate between this trend toward the technicalizing of cooking and the theories of those who favor a revival—or an adaptation to modern tastes—of traditional cooking. The traditionalists look to the work of those chefs who have in some way been inspired by these traditional cuisines in the sincerity with which they attempt to treat the original and natural tastes of the products. The tension between these two worlds is great, and the antagonism is exacerbated by the exigencies of a world so global in thrust that it is in danger of self-destruction.

It is increasingly obvious that any movement in a certain direction in a society like ours immediately prompts an opposing movement. When fast food became universal, Slow Food found its raison d’être; when globalization exercised its homogenizing power over taste, at once reactions sprang up which regarded localism and diversity as a value. If artifice comes into fashion, there is immediately a revival of the “natural” school. And in the midst of all this, the exchanges and amalgamations grow more and more uninhibited: fusion cuisine, for example, which blends together different products and culinary traditions purely on the basis of flavors, defying all territorial and cultural boundaries, can either lead to complete chaos (con-fusion), which completely distorts the value of the raw materials, or have the positive effect of introducing new cultural stimuli into the evolution of collective taste, spreading the knowledge of new products by means of respectful and pertinent combinations.

In this chaotic and rapidly changing situation, it is important to take up a position in favor of “natural” taste: for in the welter of stimuli that surrounds us, taste must first and foremost be clearly identifiable, both as flavor and as knowledge. Rejecting artifice for artifice’s sake is an act of responsibility, a summons to go back to reality. Few artifices can justify a knowledge which is so great as to eclipse flavor (as in the case of Adrià).

1.3 Naturalness

Bearing in mind the characteristics assumed today by almost all agricultural food production of the industrial type—which is very influential on and influenced by technicalized and “unnatural” thought—and leaving aside any discussion of the validity of the techniques at the center of the debate, there remains today the question of raw materials and respect for them. This is the first factor in discussing the good.

Raw materials and respect for them: these are the minimum conditions on which to construct an axiom whereby the goodness of a product is proportional to its naturalness. The natural integrity of the raw material is what makes possible the cultivation and perception of the good.

At this point, we need to clarify what we mean by natural. Here we are discussing a general system, the method of production in its entirety. Natural means not using too many elements that are extraneous and artificial with respect to the system / environment / mankind / raw material / processing: no additives and chemical preservatives, no artificial or supposedly “natural” flavorings; no technologies that subvert the naturalness of the process of working, raising (in the case of livestock), growing, cooking, et cetera. The raw materials must be healthy, whole, as free as possible from chemical treatments and intensive procedures. They must be treated with processes that are very respectful of their original characteristics. The quality of a cheese, for example, is intimately linked with the quality of the milk that is used, and the milk will be good to the extent that the feed given to the animal that produced it was good. The same goes for meat, which will be good if the breeding of the animal has respected the criteria of naturalness: no growth accelerators, no hypercaloric or antibiotic-laced fodder. The animals should lead a stress-free life. Great respect should be paid for their well-being. In other words they should lead as “natural” as possible a life while they are being raised: adequate space if they are kept in stalls—but preferably they will be put out to pasture; very short journeys, made only when necessary and without them being crammed into trucks; no violence. It is not just a question of not being cruel to animals—all this is also a guarantee that the final product will be better: stress and trauma have a significant effect on the sensory qualities of meat.

But to what extent can human technology be reconciled with “naturalness”? Every agricultural technique, even the most archaic, introduces an element of artifice into nature. The same can be said of transformation (whether by cooking or other processing method), for it is true that with absolute naturalness the process of producing our food would not be “cultural”: our diet would not be very different from that of animals, which eat what they find in nature without modifying it.

In this case, as in other areas of life, common sense should prevail: a technique is natural if it respects nature, does not abuse it, does not waste it, does not irreparably alter its balance. From this point of view, one may cite the example of wine production: is using a barrique to enhance its flavor in the cellar natural? It is certainly more natural than a concentrator, which alters the biochemical values of the grapes produced that year. The barrique is a cellar technique that does not alter the wine’s “naturalness.” The same is true of thinning out in the vineyard (the technique of eliminating some bunches of grapes to concentrate the sugars in the remaining ones and thereby improve the quality of the grapes at the expense of quantity): this could be seen as an attempt to alter the productive season by external intervention. Yet thinning out is certainly more natural than the use of a concentrator or chemical treatments on the plants, for it is part of a process, a human know-how which is consistent with the “naturalness” of things, and it does not compromise production—indeed, it improves it without putting too much stress on the soil and the vegetation. A similar comparison could be made between, on the one hand, the techniques of cross-fertilization and varietal improvement through selection (the first is used in botany, the second by farmers and nurserymen after each harvest), and, on the other hand, the creation of hybrids invented for productive reasons or, even worse, the creation of genetically modified organisms—for the same productive purposes. (Surely the reader does not believe the lie that GMOs will solve the problem of world famine? But we will return to this point later).

This, then, is another essential prerequisite in our quest for the good: the product must meet the criteria of naturalness throughout the production process which brings food from the field to our tables.

1.4 Pleasure

The good is what we like. Pleasure has always been the gastronome’s joy and torment. On the one hand, it is undeniable: if we strive for the good, we do so in order to experience, and enable others to experience, culinary pleasure. On the other hand, it is evident that those parts of Europe where a gastronomic culture has developed are the same ones that have most strongly felt the influence of the Catholic religion and whose dominant moral code rejects pleasure and associates it with vice, sin, and damnation. At the same time, the militant characteristic of certain political ideologies has considered the quest for gastronomic pleasure as succumbing to one of the worst bourgeois vices.

The enjoyment of food, which is constantly sought with the utmost ingenuity even where food is in short supply, is a physiological, instinctive matter, but one that is somehow rejected by our society. Gastronomy has not attained the status of a science, nor even really been taken seriously, because it is a subject that concerns pleasure.

This underlying problem has impeded the quest for the good, and has been a perfect accomplice of that industrial process of food production that has depreciated the importance of quality so much that it has almost disappeared (or merged with different concepts, such as hygienic-sanitary safety); as a result most people have become accustomed to highly artificial aromas, tastes, and sensations and are unable to choose the good because they cannot recognize it. The rejection or concealment of culinary pleasure has meant that the cutting of the umbilical cord that tied us to the soil and its fruits has been painless for most of us. Yet that break has separated producers from consumers, excluding the latter from any phase of the production process during which taste is created, flavor can be respected, and knowledge is fundamental.

The pleasure principle is fundamental. The pleasure principle is natural: everyone has a right to pleasure, as we saw earlier. To reaffirm this principle unambiguously and without any psychoanalytical implications is in the first place an act of civility. Since pleasure is a human right, it must be guaranteed for everyone, so we must teach people to recognize it, to create the conditions whereby “naturally” good products are producible everywhere.

This aim immediately eliminates the erroneous idea that gastronomy is the prerogative of a wealthy elite and that it must be in some way separated from food per se. That is like saying that only those who can afford it have a right to pleasure, and that everyone else, the poor, must simply eat to keep themselves alive and cannot experience pleasure.

This is not the case, and pleasure is always linked, indissolubly, with knowledge, which is itself another right: knowledge of the sensory characteristics of a product both when it is considered a raw material and after it has been processed; knowledge of the process that transforms it, so that we can appreciate its validity; knowledge of the characteristics of products that are similar but of different provenance and made with different techniques; knowledge of ourselves and our sensibilities, which must be communicated and shared with others.

Pleasure sought and expressed is contagious. It restores all the body’s vitality and stimulates the intelligence to go beyond the rules of the old gastronomic code; it is a challenge to all those food-related disciplines (such as nutritional science) which often declare, in their inward-looking way, that they can do without it, whereas in fact without it they would have no raison d’être. Pleasure should be taught to children, adults, and the aged all over the world, because it is the only thing that gives meaning to the daily work of the new gastronome. It must never be introspection closed within the personal sphere, but rather a conscious philosophy of life which permeates and guides every gastronomic act, from cultivating to eating, from shopping to cooking, from the study of the food system to scientific research and development programs for those parts of the world where food is scarce.

Pleasure in this sense is a philosophy of the good, which works for the good and knows how to enjoy it.

1.5 The good as an aim

Because it is subjective, the good can be used as an instrument of division between social classes and peoples; and also of cultural division on the part of those who have an interest in the good not becoming too well known, or of those who, although their intentions are noble, believe that their “own” good is the “only” good and that it is applicable to everyone.

If I say that I seek the good, what I mean is that I seek what is good for me, what is good according to my culture, but at the same time I hope that everyone all over the world will find what is good for their cultures.

The Italians, for example, have many traditional dishes based on rabbit, but to many Americans eating rabbit is an inhumane and disgusting act, because the animal is regarded as a pet, like a dog. It is hard to explain to an American that the wild rabbit of Ischia, if bred in the traditional way, acquires superior sensory characteristics. For many Americans, rabbit is not even edible! The same can be said of the brus which I mentioned earlier: not even the inhabitants of other parts of Piedmont would consider this product good, with that smell which many would describe as a stink! Perhaps it is not objectively good, but it is part of my culture, of my memory, and there are techniques for making it better or worse. Young people, for example, even those from southern Piedmont, where brus is still produced—though only in very small quantities—no longer have the right cultural background to appreciate it. They can, however, be trained to appreciate it by understanding the reasons why it is produced, why it acquires certain sensory characteristics, and which are the right ones; and all this because it belongs to the culture they were born into. But you cannot force them to eat it; it is a taste that is dying out, for tastes do evolve through history.

When I met some entomophagous women from Burkina Faso who dry certain larvae in the way they learned from their mothers, because in such a poor country insects and larvae are a readily available source of protein, they gave me a little bag of those caterpillars; out of politeness, but also out of curiosity, I tried one. Objectively speaking, I did not find anything that corresponded to my categories of “good” (though when I was served some similar larvae, fried, in Mexico City I found them delicious). To my personal taste, those insects are bad, but since they are important for that culture—they are part of the tradition, they meet the criteria of naturalness, their consumption helps agriculture because they are parasites, and what is more they improve the diet of the burkinabé (who love them)—I must say that they are good. Just as brus is good and the wild rabbit of Ischia, which is almost extinct, is good. This is the absolute relativity of the good: according to culture, according to “naturalness,” according to sensory characteristics.

Taking this relativity in toto, the concept may therefore mean in the first instance respect for other cultures, for diversity. This respect must guide every contact we have, every intervention we make in order to support or exchange with others, every tasting of food we make when we are in another country. No one has the right to judge someone else’s food on the basis of their own “cultural” taste: if we accept the description of food as a language, it becomes a means of communication, and in order to judge it we must learn to recognize the categories of the good which have codified it, as a language, in that particular culture. We must learn other culinary languages.

This respect is difficult to put into practice and is the first obstacle and source of error when we try to organize international interventions to protect or support products, agricultures, or social groups connected with food. Usually, the nongovernmental organizations, the associations and institutions that work in these fields, are the products of Western culture and must not presume to impose their mode of thought—their taste—on others. They cannot even afford to do it in good faith. Even Slow Food, which through its international Presidia strives to defend small producers all over the world, finds it very difficult and makes a great effort to learn about the cultures where it intends to operate. If we strive to promote sustainability, naturalness, and local tradition, we also work to promote quality, and if we start from an erroneous concept of the good, we will fail.

In conclusion, the good as an objective has a political connotation. In order to reappropriate reality, we must take two important steps: recover our sensoriality as the founding act of a new way of thinking and acting or reacting; and gain respect for other cultures by learning to understand other people’s categories (categories necessary for recognizing the good). These steps can help us to communicate, to work together to redeem food-producing communities, and, ultimately, to perceive reality through our senses as a great network of flavors and knowledge.

This global reality must be matched by an act performed at the most local level: eating in our own homes. This act of survival is aware of the good to the extent that it is aware of the planetary diversity that surrounds it. Although this act cannot have the benefit of omniscience, it starts from the sharing of criteria for making a “good” choice within a complex reality, which is accepted as such. The good is an aim, for quality is the aim of a new and universally shared sensibility or sensoriality.

1.6 Is it good?

The first of the three indispensable and interdependent prerequisites (good, clean, and fair) for a quality product is therefore that it be “good”—good to the palate and good according to the mind. The good has superior sensory characteristics, the best ones that can be obtained while respecting a criterion of naturalness. It will be the new gastronome’s task to respect these characteristics, to learn to recognize them, to produce them or encourage others to produce them according to the culture in which he lives, and to prefer them always.

This is a political task. The purpose of politics is to improve the quality of life, and the good has the same function. If anyone should object that politics is a serious matter, that it has nothing to do with these questions, I would reply that the good, too, is a very serious matter. This is no heresy; there is nothing to be ashamed of.

Good is respect for others and for ourselves, striving to ensure that it becomes a right for everyone is part of our civilizing mission. Reaffirming the good must lead to respect for the earth and for its different cultures: we are talking about happiness. If anyone is alarmed to see how democratic the good can be, that is not the gastronome’s problem. If this reaffirmation of pleasure offends the bien pensants (who, however, take their own enjoyment selfishly and irresponsibly and never renounce pleasure), that is not our problem. Nor will it ever be, at least until the good, flavor, knowledge, and pleasure are denied us, withheld in the name of that fear and offense or, more dangerously, in pursuit of profit. Should that happen, then the gastronome will indeed be forced to intervene. We are talking about happiness: happiness for the earth and for its inhabitants.

{DIARY 9} THE INDIAN PRAWNS

On December 27, 2004, the world awoke to pictures of a disaster of apocalyptic proportions. A powerful earthquake a few kilometers off the coast of Sumatra had caused a huge tidal wave, which had struck thousands of kilometers of coast in Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and even East Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, towns razed to the ground, and a wasteland of ruins was left where previously there had been human settlements. Human lives were destroyed, societies torn apart, cultures threatened; the losses were incalculable. The rest of the world at once showed great solidarity; aid for the victims was mobilized on an unprecedented scale. Once the emergency was over, people began discussing the future of the areas affected—tourist resorts, coasts inhabited by simple fishermen and farmers, places where the local population, already beset by numerous problems, had to start all over again.

The debate about how to use the aid from the rich West was very intense in the months following the disaster, and for our part, to clarify our ideas on what needed to be done, Slow Food decided to hold a public debate, comparing two different points of view, two different visions of the world. The East and the West between Nature and Food was the title of the event, and it took place in Turin on February 14, 2004. We invited two friends to lead the discussion: Enzo Bianchi, prior of the monastery of Bose in northern Piedmont, and Vandana Shiva, the Indian scientist and activist.

The debate that evening sought answers, ranging over a variety of questions from our relationship with the supernatural forces that influence earthly actions to the culture clash in the tourist resorts that had been ravaged by the tsunami. The debate was of a very high level, and I was particularly struck by the opening words of Shiva, which were brutally direct and provocative:

The effects of the wave that struck the coasts were mainly the fault of the human race. The coasts, bereft of their natural defenses because of the construction of tourist villages and the destruction of the mangrove forests for agroindustrial purposes, have been left completely exposed. As a result hundreds of thousands of lives have been put at risk. The principle of human responsibility toward nature has been disregarded and we have been hit with unprecedented force.

A responsible attitude to the environment characterized by a sacred respect for nature, for other human beings, and for future generations: this noble philosophy is part of everyday life in those countries, and is observed in agriculture and in human relationships of all kinds, but it has been suffocated by the irruption of a different culture and different methods of production.

Shiva told us a story of incredible “mal-production,” which is in danger of being repeated with even more disastrous consequences now that reconstruction is underway. In many coastal areas affected by the tsunami in India and Bangladesh, intensive prawn farms have been created which have devastated the existing ecosystems, with serious consequences for the lives of the local inhabitants.

In the early 1990s, promising rapid development, huge profits, and the creation of new jobs, the experts of the World Bank managed to convince the Indian government that intensive prawn farming would put an end to centuries of poverty and of small-scale subsistence economy along six thousand kilometers of coastline. Prawn farming seemed to be the panacea which, under the far-sighted direction of the World Bank, would guarantee India lasting prosperity.

But these farms occupy vast areas. Within a few years, thousands of hectares of fertile soil, where the farmers had previously cultivated simple but diverse crops—especially rice—for their own needs, were transformed into huge open-air basins. Filling them requires a large amount of fresh water, so large that it has drained the water-bearing strata below the nearby villages. They also need a certain amount of seawater, which, in time, penetrates the soil, rendering it unfit for use in the short term.

The prawns are given massive doses of antibiotics to protect them from the diseases to which they are most susceptible, because they are living in extreme conditions: the population density in those basins is far too high. The antibiotics also serve as growth accelerators and, mainly for this reason, are overused. Moreover, the prawns are sprayed every day with the right quantity of chemicals to balance the artificial conditions of the ecosystem in which they live. This treatment of course requires a constant supply of water, which, for the sake of economy and simplicity, is then discharged into the sea.

In addition to the damage that has been done to agriculture, therefore, the fishing industry has also been crippled. The polluted water, which is rich in nitrates and nitrites from the prawns’ excrement, accelerates the decline of the mangrove forests, which were already seriously depleted by the installation of the prawn farms. The presence of mangroves is extremely important in these areas because they protect the coast against the force of the sea (significantly, the tsunami did less damage along those parts of the coast that were still protected by the mangroves) and provide a refuge for the fish, which, once they are deprived of their natural habitat, either die or move elsewhere. The fishermen, who used to work inshore, are forced to buy deep-sea fishing boats—if they can afford them—and go further out to sea in order to catch anything.

The result? Widespread ecological damage, villages reduced to desperate straits, and widespread unemployment. A basin for a prawn farm employs two people, in an area which previously guaranteed work, year round, to 120 rice-growers. What is more, the prawns are intended for the markets of the United States, Europe, and Japan, which in recent years have been inundated with tons of these crustaceans. It should be mentioned that prawns were produced on the Indian coast even before the introduction of intensive farming, but in those days they were rotated with the growing of rice, a rotation that refertilized the soil ecologically (with unpolluted excrement) and also made use of the soil, which would otherwise have been left fallow for a year. Consumption was mainly local, but that is no longer the case: the local people, now jobless, cannot afford the expensive “industrial” prawns, a food which they once produced in harmony with nature for their own subsistence.

In the last few years, two disciples of Mahatma Gandhi, Krishnammal and Jagannathan, have been giving voice to the protests of the coastal population, which were being ruined by the aggressive invasion of these farms even before the tsunami. The World Bank, for its part, has already planned to rebuild the flooded farms—indeed, to enlarge them. I have no doubts about which side to take, and Shiva’s story—published in Italy by Laura Coppo in her book Terra, gamberi, contadini ed eroi (Earth, Prawns, Farmers, and Heroes)—is another example of how a failure to respect local cultures and thousand of years of sustainable production can only worsen the lives of those we claim to be helping.

Moreover, failing to respect nature can be very risky: when nature rebels with such violence, whether or not it is a coincidence, technocratic man is always the first to aid in the destruction.

2. CLEAN

The second prerequisite for a quality product is that it should be clean. “Clean” is a far less relative concept than “good,” though equally complex. Clean, too, corresponds to a criterion of naturalness, but in a different sense, or at least in a different conceptual development from that which we have described in the case of good. Naturalness here is related not to the intrinsic characteristics of the product, but rather to the methods of production and of transport: a product is clean if it respects the earth and the environment, if it does not pollute, if it does not waste or overuse natural resources during its journey from the field to the table. To use a more technical term, a product is clean to the extent that its production process meets certain criteria of naturalness, if it is sustainable.

It is around this word, “sustainable,” that the definition of clean revolves. Sustainability, too, may be considered a very relative concept (but we must be able to calculate costs and benefits in order to establish exact rules: often the pollution resulting from production is accepted only because the real environmental costs are not known, or underestimated), so a limit must be set. The limit, in this case too, is primarily dictated by common sense, at least when it cannot be precisely calculated.

Finally, we should note the interdependence of the two concepts “clean” and “good” (and also of “fair,” but we will come to that later): respect for the criterion of naturalness is the basis of both these principles, and there is a reciprocal relationship between them. A soil that is neither stressed nor polluted will yield products that have superior sensory characteristics; healthy air will make possible a better processing of the products. Giving the right balance to an ecosystem will help to reduce production costs and to fulfill the potential of any raw material.

2.1 Sustainable

What do we mean by “sustainable” in the context of food? Which is more sustainable—a crate of organic Brazilian mangos imported by ship, or the bread made by the local baker two blocks away from home? In order to be able to judge the sustainability of food products, we need to know the ecological consequences of the actions carried out during their journey from the land to the table. We must ask ourselves whether a particular food is healthy and safe, whether it has been produced in order to satisfy the needs of those who consume it (sustainable good), and whether its production and processing guarantee jobs and fair means of support (sustainable fair).

A product will be clean to the extent that it is sustainable from the ecological point of view. So in order to be able to assess all the effects that its production and processing have on the environment, we need a large and diversified body of knowledge. We need to know whether the varieties used are among the strongly commercial ones that reduce biodiversity; whether the techniques of cultivation and farming impoverish the soil with pesticides or excrement from animals “pumped up” with fodder and drugs; whether the processing has been carried out in factories or in artisanal workshops that do not pollute and do not use polluting products; whether the means of transport the product has been subjected to were too long or involved producing a high level of atmospheric pollution; and whether we ourselves harm the environment in obtaining or buying them. It is not easy; the judgment of sustainability requires a process of investigation and reflection that we as consumers have never before been required to go through.

To return to the example of the mangos and the bread: at first sight, the Brazilian mangos might seem to be less sustainable than the bread, simply because they come from a long way away. But they may not be: they are certified as organic products, so presumably no pesticides have been used in producing them; they have been transported by ship (and from the port to our homes perhaps by train), which pollutes much less than a plane or a truck. The bread, on the other hand, may have been made with flour from intensively cultivated wheat, which may have been transported for many kilometers on a truck before reaching the mill; moreover, the baker’s oven may not be working properly and may emit noxious gases into the atmosphere, which, combined with those of a van which travels short distances but is highly pollutant, is perhaps worse than long journeys by ship or by train. One is tempted to say that sustainability is relative too, but only because the example I have been considering is a hypothetical one: these data can in fact be precisely calculated and the judgment would be fairly objective.

The time has come for everybody—producers, traders, institutions, associations, and individual citizens—to ask themselves whether their lifestyle is sustainable and to take steps to make sustainability measurable and testable. That our lifestyle has not been sustainable until now is an established fact: the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report quoted in the first chapter is quite clear on this point, and it is only the most recent and exhaustive of many reports that have been made over the past twenty years. It was in the early 1970s that the first warnings were sounded: the growth of our economy had limits which we had almost reached, and our consumption of resources far exceeded what was available in nature. The first major debate then took place in 1992, with the Rio International Conference on the Environment and Development; at the end of that meeting, the world governments drew up a document, Agenda 21, which was supposed to lay down the criteria of sustainability for the next decade. It was an important document, which discussed the struggle against desertification, the protection of the climate, biodiversity, and many other problems affecting the whole world. It contained all the guidelines for the effort that needed to be made by governments and individual citizens. Ten years later, at another conference in Johannesburg, it was clear that all those good intentions had not produced any concrete results. The guidance that had been given had not been followed, simply because there were no rules and sanctions, and people were completely free to decide what was sustainable or otherwise. No one can really be said to be against sustainability, but changing one’s lifestyle to conform to it is a different matter. It is difficult enough to do on a personal level, let alone on a national one.

Environmental sustainability is the first and most important prerequisite for a “clean” product, and at present it remains a matter for the private judgment of the consumer, not least because it may conflict with economic practicality (and with the economic interests of the producers), as well as with questions of social justice (as we shall see later). But that is not all: environmental sustainability can be measured; it is based on precise knowledge and information that is not provided to us, and which we cannot be bothered or are not able to obtain. To strive to ensure that this information (the agricultural methods used to produce the raw materials, the areas of production, the forms of transport used, the respect for biodiversity and for ecosystems throughout the production process) be made public and accessible (ideally on the label) is the task of the new gastronome. In this case, too, it is a question of social responsibility. The responsibility for what is sustainable is shared by all of us: the farmer, the processor (whether industrial or artisanal), the politicians who can legislate about it, and the ordinary people who every day, while they are shopping, can influence production with their purchasing decisions.

The second question we must ask ourselves when we evaluate a product, after we have asked ourselves whether it is “good,” must be, is it “clean,” is it “sustainable”? If the information necessary for us to make a judgment is not available, let us apply pressure to ensure that is made available. We must all be able to evaluate and to choose in accordance with our evaluations; that is the only path that leads to quality.

2.2 Agriculture

The prime suspect in our investigation of environmental sustainability is agriculture. Since the 1950s, the progressive industrialization of agricultural methods has profoundly changed the nature of the countryside. The use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers has drastically increased, killing the bacterial microflora that keep the soil alive and fertile in many areas of the world. The indiscriminate exploitation of water resources to cultivate ever more productive and thirsty varieties has consumed huge reserves, and at the same time the water-bearing strata have been polluted by the fertilizers and pesticides. The desertification and drying out of the soil is occurring in places where it was unheard of a few years ago (to say that the southern Italian region of Basilicata is at risk of desertification is a very different matter from saying that sub-Saharan Africa is running the same risk, is it not?). Intensive stock farming has not only worsened the quality of our meat and led to the extinction of many excellent breeds, it also pollutes the soil with excrement that is full of antibiotics and other substances present in the fodder which are not broken down or absorbed by the animals. (Why does the treatment of sewage from an intensive stock farm have to be carefully regulated? Why can it not reenter the natural cycle in the normal way? It is only dung, after all: this is quite a paradox.)

In many parts of the world, the countryside is increasingly coming to resemble an industrial landscape: there is no life in it. Farmers are nowhere to be seen—they have become more and more like factory workers who mass-produce goods. Landscapes have been irremediably scarred; the fields express their failing struggle for survival in their faded colors, alongside ugly buildings—stalls, sheds, and gigantic machines offend the eye that surveys the place where our food is produced, but where death hangs in the air, arousing feelings that are far from bucolic.

We have gone far beyond the breaking point; we need an immediate change of direction and a profound change in mentality. Agriculture must be deindustrialized; the earth and the natural environment must be given priority again. The earth must not be allowed to die, or kept alive like a terminally ill patient, with traumatic methods. Stressed soil does not produce properly, and in the end produces only death. Stressed soil is not the result of a harmonious relationship between man and nature: it is nothing but a food-producing machine—a sad machine, which does not generate happiness.

How, then, can agriculture be deindustrialized?

We must begin, in this case too, by rejecting everything that is unnatural, everything that introduces unsustainable artifice into the relationship between man and the earth.

Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are not sustainable as a method of production. They are useful in extreme cases, but we cannot keep the earth alive in a perpetually critical condition. They must be avoided as much as possible; they are harmful to the land and to our health, and are not conducive to life in the long term. If we go on like this, we will leave our children nothing but barren fields.

Intensive methods of production, both for plants and for animals, must be rejected. We do not need to increase production. We need to improve and “clean” it. We cannot demand more each year from the soil or from a cow, or expect a chicken to grow in half the time it would naturally do: they are not machines, they are living things, and their natural mechanism, if it breaks down, cannot be repaired like an industrial milling-machine.

We must give preference to local varieties and breeds: their survival ensures the biodiversity that enables the natural system to regulate itself. They are part of the ecosystem where they originated and evolved, and are a guarantee of the maintenance of that ecosystem. They ensure a wider variety of tastes, and their genetic heritage is a legacy to all humankind. If they are catalogued and preserved, they can help us find solutions where none seemed to exist: in this way, modern genetic technologies can help make up for the losses, instead of impoverishing biodiversity even further. Industrial breeds and varieties created for productive purposes reduce biodiversity and require too many natural resources in order to be nourished and complete their life cycle. They are not good; they are not clean.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) must be rejected. I will not go into the question of whether they are harmful to human health (this has not been conclusively proved; longer-term studies are needed, because they are such a new technology); I will not dwell on the ethical considerations (to what extent is it permissible for man to interfere with living beings? Should crossbreeds be made which would not normally occur in nature? Is it possible to patent a living thing?); nor shall I discuss whether they are economically advantageous for farmers (though the experience and data available to us after the first years of commercialization in the United States indicate total failure).

GMOs are not sustainable from the environmental point of view: more than one study has shown that their impact is often excessive, comparable at best to that of hybrids used for intensive cultivation. Some kinds of GMO (especially corn) are highly contaminant of conventional crops: they invade other fields and spread throughout the environment. GMOs are the “perfect” product of the agricultural industry, the pinnacle reached in the quest for the “perfect variety”: more resistant, more productive, the ideal monoculture. But even leaving aside assessments of their environmental compatibility, which appear to be very negative but which have yet to be completely proved (though the first studies seem very clear), they are the prime product of a productive system which subverts every principle of naturalness. The system is wrong: GMOs are the highest expression of a concept of agricultural production which no longer has any raison d’être because it is unsustainable from every point of view.

Monoculture must be rejected. It is the embodiment of the impoverishment of biodiversity in the fields and soil. Extensive monocultures remove both the good weeds and the bad; in order to make room for themselves, they eliminate the flora and fauna native to the ecosystem into which they are introduced. Woods, hedges, beneficial insects, birds, amphibians—almost everything disappears in the face of hectares of vines, corn, and olive trees. This is true even in the case of organic farming: if the monoculture is too extensive, it threatens biodiversity.

In the case of products that are not grown or raised, but simply picked, the same principle of sustainability in the production of raw materials applies. For example, we should sound the alarm about fishing, which must be sustainable and must not irreparably exhaust reserves of fish; the state of the seas is perhaps even worse than that of the soil when it comes to pollution, the reduction of biodiversity, overfishing, and intensive exploitation for food purposes.40

Deindustrializing agriculture means rejecting a system. It is not just a question of introducing techniques different from the present ones such as small-scale production, organic farming, and biodynamics. Even crops that do not involve the use of chemical agents can be unsustainable if they are part of the agroindustrial system of food production—if they reflect a reductionist and profit-oriented mindset, which takes no account of the environmental costs and which has no respect for the life of the earth and of those who live on it. Deindustrializing agriculture requires a new relationship between man and nature, an approach which is more open to complexity and which draws on all the scientific tools, both modern and traditional, to evaluate the sustainability of a new model of production.

2.3 Processing

By processing, I mean here any kind of human intervention between the raw material and the final product, any human action concerned with processing—technical know-how, talent, tradition, or innovation. It goes without saying that in this case, too, the food production industry is another prime suspect in the investigation into the judgment of sustainability. Fueled by intensive agricultural methods, propelled by techniques that make it possible to destroy and reconstruct the natural taste and appearance of a product, and reinforced by global distribution networks, industry is responsible for another unsustainable model of food production. Let me make myself clear: I am not saying that the industrial model should be eliminated entirely, merely that it must be brought into line with sustainability. The environmental costs must be included in the balance sheets, quantified in some way, and paid for. Otherwise, there are no limits.

It is not industry itself that is unsustainable; there are examples of industries that produce good products, have an environmental policy, and are respectful of their workers. But we should always be wary of those who exploit this scrupulousness for promotional purposes, for they often conceal other far more serious unsustainabilities. It does not impress me if Monsanto channels a small percentage of its profits into sustainable projects: almost all multinationals do so nowadays, to salve their consciences. I want all their productive processes to be sustainable, I want them to include everything in the accounts, even the costs paid by the environment and all of us who live in it. It does not impress me if a proportion of their profits is donated to charitable causes in partial compensation of the damage they have caused; that damage should not be done in the first place and should never have to be paid for later.

But let us not put all the blame on industry (although it deserves a great deal of it, given the scale of its production and the constant stream of unsustainable inventions it churns out): let us reject its model, but admit, for the sake of intellectual honesty, that many other activities which at first sight seem more harmless are in fact equally harmful. Man’s hand must always be light in processing raw materials: just as he should respect the original tastes, so he should respect the environment.

In this vein, I should point out the crucial importance of the choices made by small processors, particularly those who enjoy the greatest prestige and the greatest media exposure: the chefs. It is up to them to promote sustainable agriculture, to create virtuous production cycles, and to seek out farmers and artisans (from as close at hand as possible) who use sustainable methods in their work. Cooking, as a body of noble and scientific knowledge, has a duty to reject anything that is not produced in accordance with nature. Such products are not in the interests of good cuisine, and cooks who strive to serve good food, competing to be the best, know this perfectly well. Let them say it loud and clear, then: let them indicate the provenance of their products in their menus, let them recommend the best agricultural and artisanal goods. Let them make their own quest for excellence the driving force behind sustainable development at all levels, including the home.

Where processing is concerned, we are, again, all partly to blame: we are implicated each time we buy a product that does not respect the environment in its various phases of production. So we must do our best to ensure that we are aware of the methods of processing, and we must demand the necessary information. Let the consumer who is tempted by a very low price ask what makes that price possible. How many public subsidies were given in order to make the product so cheap? How much damage was done to the environment and to biodiversity by the intensive agriculture that produced it for the food industry? How much pollution did those who produced it generate through their production methods and through the use of artificial agents in a process that ought to be always in harmony with nature?

2.4 Transport

For a food to be “clean,” it is not just the phases of agriculture and processing that must be sustainable; there are often other factors that we do not consider because we take them for granted, but environmental costs lie hidden everywhere. Food produced and consumed locally, for example, can actually be more sustainable, “greener,” than organic food produced further away. This was the provocative conclusion reached by professors Tim Lang, of London University, and Jules Pretty, of the University of Essex, in a highly interesting study recently published in the Food Policy Journal.41

The authors set out to calculate scientifically the costs of the so-called food miles, the distance that food travels before it reaches our tables: they came to the conclusion that if the British restricted their consumption to food produced within a twenty-kilometer radius of their homes, the total annual savings for the country would be £2.1 billion. On the basis of a typical household budget, they succeeded in calculating the cost in millions of pounds of the pollution caused by pesticides, exhaust emissions into the atmosphere, soil erosion, the reduction of biodiversity, and the various effects on human health. Then, using official British statistics, they calculated the cost (in pence per kilometer by each means of transport) of each journey from the farm to the supermarket and from the supermarket to the home. They meticulously took into account all the various forms of transport, even noting the differences between a home delivery, a shopping expedition by bike or on foot, and one made by car. The results are surprising. Totaling up the pollution produced by intensive agricultural methods, the various journeys the food has to make, and the subsidies paid to agriculture, the hidden costs are equivalent to 11.8 percent of the price paid by the consumer on a typical shopping basket full of conventional British agricultural produce. And these costs of course devolve upon the community.

There had been few attempts to make this kind of calculation before now; people often talk about environmental costs, but this is perhaps the first time that they have been quantified so precisely. The authors’ provocative suggestion is that if the British consumed only conventional foods that were locally produced and went shopping either by bicycle or on foot, the hidden costs would be about 7 percent—exactly the same as if they consumed only organic food produced on the continent of Europe and went shopping by car.

Whatever the merits of this suggestion, which certainly makes for good headlines—the ideal, of course, would be food that is local and organic—it cannot be denied that the two scholars have identified an effect of the producer’s location which had been previously underestimated. The original purpose of their study was to discover all the hidden ecological costs of food production; instead, they discovered these statistics for food miles, which even they themselves had not foreseen.

The choices that consumers make between organic and conventional and between local and global have very important repercussions on the environment and on agricultural systems: I repeat, these are quantifiable data that must be treated as real costs.

Wider publicizing of the statistics concerning food miles would certainly influence consumer behavior, and labeling should be a step further in this direction. Nowadays, it is compulsory to indicate the place of origin of fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat, but in many cases the indications are still too generic. Besides, in the case of many processed foods it is almost impossible to trace the origin of the raw materials. If everything were clearly stated on the label, and if consumers were educated to be aware of the cost of transporting food, I am sure that a gradual relocalization of production systems would not be long in coming.

Nor would it be a bad idea to suggest that governments develop an appropriate policy of taxation, incentives, and regulatory mechanisms. To include the price in food miles on the label (alongside a description of the method of production and a more detailed list of ingredients, which removed all possibility of misinterpretation, for example in the case of flavorings) would be an excellent marketing ploy, as well as a service to the community, who want to be able to exercise their spending power by choosing food that is as clean and local as possible.

2.5 Limits: clean as an objective

I have tried to give a brief survey of the main aspects of environmental sustainability (social sustainability still remains to be considered): I cannot make any claim to exhaustiveness, given the complexity of the subject, but I have attempted to draw attention to the meaning of “sustainable” and to give an overview of the areas in which evaluations need to be made.

It is difficult to achieve absolute objectivity, but the data available in this case is considerably more factual than it was in the case of “good,” and less related to purely cultural factors. How can we orient ourselves amid this mass of information? In the first place, we can use our common sense, on the basis of the “educated” awareness that was mentioned earlier. It should also be pointed out that common sense is dictated primarily by our awareness of limits—limits which we must know how to handle, and beyond which there is no growth and no development, but only destructive growth, long-term economic loss, ecological loss, and cultural impoverishment.

There are limits of production: a vegetable, a breed, a place, and an ecosystem have structural limits that we cannot exceed without altering their characteristics. For example Colonnata lardo (a kind of fatty bacon) can only be made in the town of Colonnata, in Tuscany, because of the microclimate that exists there, and one cannot expect to fill the whole area with the well-known marble basins in which it is matured. There is a limit to the amount of lardo these basins can take; to make them too big would be to alter the nature of the product. There is also a structural limit, which cannot be exceeded merely to satisfy the demand for Colonnata lardo: one ought to aim rather at differentiation and at the production of different kinds of lardo in other places, using similar methods and giving them different names.

Consider that some native cows produce tiny amounts of milk compared to Holstein cows, which are veritable milk machines. But the milk of these native cows has unique characteristics and should not be replaced simply for the sake of increasing productivity. Nor can one increase indefinitely the number of native cows, which may well be accustomed (and physically suited, by constitution) to grazing rather than to other kinds of farming.

The Langhe, in Piedmont, an area mainly used for the production of great wines, should not become a vine monoculture simply because the wines are very successful on the international market. In the areas where Barolo is produced, we should not try to plant vines everywhere, even on north-facing hills (the worst position for a vineyard; in days gone by, no one would have ever dreamed of doing such a thing), relying on fertilizers and chemical pesticides to make the vines grow despite the conditions. The soil is destroyed and dried out; woods, fields, pastures and hedges, with all their flora and fauna, are removed to make room for the vineyards. Biodiversity is diminished, and the ecosystem of the hills is reduced to being a winemaking machine: this indiscriminate exploitation will soon seriously affect the production of the great wines in the region. The limit is being exceeded.

A distributor of food products should not transport products indiscriminately from one side of the world to the other merely for his own convenience. Food mile pollution would increase and serious imbalances might result.

There is a limit to abundance. World food production is already sufficient to feed us all—why should we increase it? Where is the need for inventing GMOs? Why do we persist in exceeding the limits of the earth? All we achieve by this is the creation of new limits, until it is impossible to rectify the situation. As the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote:

Man, monotonous universe,

thinks he is increasing his goods,

but the only numberless things produced

by his frantic hands are limits

Managing limits is the first step toward sustainability, and not just in an environmental sense. But in order to achieve this, we must renounce economic growth as the sole criterion of human progress. We calculate our fortunes—the fortunes of a state—on the basis of its GNP (gross national product). I agree with the proposal of Amartya Sen, the Indian Nobel Prize winner for economics and an expert in the economics of happiness: we need to start calculating our GNH, gross national happiness. Let us ask ourselves which limits we have already exceeded and which ones we are about to exceed: let us learn to change our ways and to manage them. Within the limits, we can find all the growth opportunities we want, provided that we do not count money alone. Within the limits, there is the “good,” indeed all the “goods” of the world; within the limits, there is the “clean,” there is quality.

2.6 Is clean good?

Clean, sustainable production creates all the right conditions for the good. It is important to add this latter consideration, because in any discussion of quality it is a fundamental concept. Soils that are not stressed, cheapened, and killed by unnatural substances bear better fruit. Animals raised in a natural way, without haste and without exceeding the structural limits of an activity such as stock farming, can produce meat and milk (and hence also cheese) with sensory characteristics far superior to those of animals that have been exploited, “drugged,” and kept in miserable conditions in small stalls without any regard for their well-being.

Finally, a product that does not make long journeys will be fresher and will preserve its gustatory potential better. Chef Alain Ducasse once said to me in an interview: “If I pay a lot for a mullet in Paris, it probably comes from Dakar. It doesn’t make economic sense; its journey has created pollution and it is tired after the journey. It cannot be better than a mullet caught on the northern coast of France and brought to the market the same morning.”

The clean creates the conditions for the good. However, the equation “clean equals good” is not valid. A good product is not necessarily clean; the fishing of date mussels has been banned for years because it destroys kilometers of rocky coast in order to catch a product which is so slow-growing that it cannot guarantee the survival of the species—though they are delicious. And a clean product, even if it has all the right prerequisites to be good, can become very bad in the hands of unskilled producers. There are some products of organic agriculture, for example, which are totally unacceptable from the point of view of taste. We cannot stake everything on the added value of a product which does not harm the environment; we must also work for the good.

However, it should be repeated that a clean product is of the greatest significance to taste; the probability that the two values, clean and good, will go hand in hand and be causally linked is very high.

2.7 Is it clean?

The second of the three essential and interdependent prerequisites for a quality product is that it be clean—clean for the earth and for the ecosystems. Clean is sustainable; it does not pollute, it does nothing to put the earth in a condition of ecological deficit. Sustainability is obtained by respecting a criterion of naturalness, and by being aware of limits, whether human, vegetable, animal, or productive. The new gastronome’s task is to be aware of these limits, to learn how to recognize them: to produce, or support the production of, foods that are sustainable throughout their journey from the field to the table.

This is a commitment to knowledge and requires study and access to accurate information about what we eat. This, too, is a political task, whose purpose is to improve the quality of life, and the clean itself improves the quality of life. Should anyone dismiss the idea that unsustainable production is harmful to the land, and continue to produce and consume in a manner incompatible with our happiness (and therefore continue to produce unhappiness), I say that the clean has become indispensable. The earth is dying, with ever-increasing rapidity.

Clean is respect for others and for ourselves; to work to ensure that it is practiced by everyone is another part of our civilizing mission. This is a concern of the gastronome, and leads to the eco-gastronome, who enjoys, knows, and eats in the awareness that he must leave a better planet to future generations.

{DIARY 10} GREEN CALIFORNIA

In autumn 2003, I participated in a conference at the University of Berkeley, California, attended by hundreds of students, professors, and farmers. I was in very good company: Vandana Shiva; Wendell Berry, the farmer poet from Kentucky; Michael Pollan, of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley; and Alice Waters, perhaps the most distinguished chef in the United States. My stay in California lasted about a week, and during that period I took the opportunity to find out more about the powerful local organic farming sector, and to interview one of the founding fathers of agroecological theory, Professor Miguel Altieri (see this page).

For once I neglected my contacts with the Californian wine world, which were what first took me there in the early 1980s, and concentrated instead on the wonderful results achieved by a largely reconverted agricultural sector which produced excellent raw materials without recourse to fertilizers and artificial manure. I was very curious to find out how far they had got, and to talk to the farmers who were leading this minor revolution that ran counter to current trends elsewhere in the world.

By coincidence, the program of my trip included in one day a visit to the luxurious and very important Ferry Plaza farmers’ market and an afternoon at the university talking to Altieri. What follows is a diary of that day.

Morning. The cool morning began quite early: if you are going to the market, it is best to be ready by seven o’clock at the latest. The sun was not yet warm enough when, in the company of my chef friend Alice Waters, I entered an elegantly refurbished area of the docks; pretty little coffee shops were serving warm mugs of excellent organic fair-trade coffee; sumptuous bakeries were putting out all sorts of good things, spreading the fragrant aroma of some wonderful kinds of bread. Oil and wine producers were offering samples in marquees, while hundreds of open-air stalls were selling excellent products: fruit and vegetables, fish, meat, sausages, and even flowers—fresh, healthy-looking food, all carefully marked organic.

One could have easily spent a fortune there. The prices were astronomical, twice or even three times as high as those of “conventional” products. But how hard it is to produce things so well, and what costs are involved in obtaining certification! I am convinced that the farmers’ intelligent, productive efforts deserve to be paid for generously, so I was not too scandalized by the prices, even though they were those of a boutique. Yes, a boutique: for I soon realized I was in an extremely exclusive place (bear in mind that this is one of the oldest and most important farmers’ markets in town, la crème de la crème). The amiable ex-hippies and young dropouts-turned-farmers greeted their customers with a smile and offered generous samples of their products to a clientele whose social status was pretty clear: either wealthy or very wealthy.

Alice Waters introduced me to dozens of farmers: they were all well-to-do college graduates, former employees of Silicon Valley, many of them young. Meanwhile, their customers, most of whom seemed to be actresses, went home clutching their peppers, squashes, and apples, showing them off like jewels, status symbols.

Two of the producers in particular struck me: a young man with a long beard and a man who was selling oil. The former, with long hair and a plaid flannel shirt, held his lovely little blond-haired daughter in his arms and told me, in a conspiratorial tone, that he had to drive two hundred miles to come and sell in that market: he charged incredibly high prices for his squashes, it was “a cinch,” and in just two monthly visits he could earn more than enough to maintain his family and spend hours surfing on the beach.

The latter, who wore a tie, extolled the beauties of his farm: it consisted of hundreds of hectares of olive trees, stretching as far as the eye could see, and nothing else. While I was tasting his excellent organic oil on a slice of bread which reminded me of Tuscan bread—absolutely delicious—I was thinking of what he must have uprooted and cleared away in order to grow all those plants, each one of them impeccably organic.

Afternoon. In the early afternoon, with those odors and aromas and the faces of the marvelous farmers’ market still in my head, I was sweating in a taxi (it lacked the usually ubiquitous American air-conditioning) on the way to Berkeley for my appointment with Miguel Altieri. The professor, an entomologist, teaches agroecology at the university. He spends six months a year in California and the other six elsewhere in the world, especially in South America, where he carries out fieldwork and projects of sustainable, family-based, organic farming. He is a champion of biodiversity, with his theory that agricultural systems, like all ecosystems, ought to have all the necessary capacities for self-regulation, without the intervention of external factors such as pesticides and fertilizers.

According to Altieri, the existing biodiversity—on which farmers’ knowledge has been molded for thousands of years—and local people’s know-how are the only basis for developing agricultural systems that are sufficiently productive and respectful of cultural diversity all around the world. By blending the local farmers’ knowledge with the discoveries of “mainstream” science, it is possible to create a clean and productive agriculture which will foster human well-being while respecting nature.

I walked across the beautiful Berkeley campus under a warm, dazzling sun (green California gets it even in the fall) and reached Altieri’s small office. I listened spellbound for over an hour to his theories, conversing in Spanish (he is Chilean) and relishing his militant passion and the unmistakable honesty of this man who works and struggles for a better world. Biodiversity before all else: this is the only secret behind sustainable development. His aversion to the use of chemical substances in agriculture is clear, absolute, and motivated. He proposes alternative methods with such utter conviction that in South America he is considered a luminary and is respected by universities, research centers, NGOs, and governments.

In his opinion, the main task is “to promote sustainable agriculture; a development program which is socially equitable, environmentally healthy, economically affordable, and culturally sensitive.”42

I asked him what he thought of organic farming and its rapid expansion in California, wanting to test his agroecological “extremism.” He replied:

There are many cases of organic farming that are not sustainable, because they create a vast monoculture, one that relies on the use of integrated pesticides which greatly reduce the surrounding biodiversity: vast stretches of vineyards in Chile and in Italy, huge plantations of vegetables in California, hectares and hectares of olive groves in Spain.43

Olive groves … I thought of the man I had met that morning. I remembered the faces of my wine-producer friends in southern Piedmont, who, since Barolo sells well, have in the space of a few years planted vines everywhere, even in ditches, removing woodland and fields, indeed most of the surrounding biodiversity.

Altieri continued:

And in addition to the environmental question, there is also a socioeconomic one: nowadays in California there is a lot of organic agriculture which is unsustainable because, although it has a limited environmental impact, it exists at the expense of people who are paid very little, just as in conventional agriculture. Hosts of Mexican immigrants exploited like slaves, with no rights and earning a pittance. It is not fair, because the organic product is sold at a much higher price than the product of conventional farming. And only the very rich can afford it, the fruits of this work; the minorities don’t eat organic food in the United States.44

I had seen confirmation of this a few hours earlier, and indeed, as Altieri flowed on:

In California, 2 percent of organic producers make 50 percent of the total amount produced by the industry in this sector; I use the term “industry” advisedly: we are facing the same problems as conventional agriculture. The concentration of production, the exploitation of the work of ethnic minorities, monocultures, the reduction of biodiversity, and prices determined by a free market which is not sustainable. Social sustainability can be achieved through public intervention, through politics: in Brazil, in those regions where the Workers’ Party controls the local government, all food served in public cafeterias must by law be organic and must be produced by small local producers at fair but accessible prices. Agroecology has a scientific basis, but it also has profound political implications, because it is badly in need of public intervention: before an agroecological approach can be established in Latin America, there must be agrarian reform and public intervention in the market to protect small farmers or to guarantee fair prices for producers and consumers. All these factors are crucial, and they affect both science and politics.45

Evening. On my way back to town, I pondered those words and the market I had visited. Organic farming is undoubtedly a very good thing; it is an excellent alternative to agroindustry, and I do not like to find fault with people—my friends of that morning—who sell products that are so naturally good. But perhaps it is better to have doubts. Reality is complex and resists labels. There is a risk that technocratic thought, when it is deeply rooted, may shape and influence even those tendencies that are opposed to the system, thereby creating other anomalies.

As the outskirts of town flashed by outside the window of the taxi, chains of fast-food joints succeeded one another on almost every block. They were all crowded with ordinary people, very different people from the customers I had seen at the farmers’ market.

In the evening I returned to Berkeley, and went to Chez Panisse, the restaurant owned by my friend Alice Waters, where I had a memorable dinner based on raw materials so fresh you could almost taste the life that had animated the vegetables only a few hours earlier. They served me the best agnolotti I have ever eaten. At Berkeley! Green California … vive la contradiction!

3. FAIR

The third and last prerequisite for a quality product is that it should be fair. In food production, the word “fair” connotes social justice, respect for workers and their know-how, rurality and the country life, pay adequate to work, gratification in producing well, and the definitive revaluation of the small farmer, whose historical position in society has always been last.

It is not acceptable that those who produce our food, those people (half the total world population) who work to grow crops, raise livestock, and turn nature into food, should be treated like social outcasts and struggle to make ends meet amid all kinds of difficulty. In different parts of the world, farmers are facing a vast range of problems: history has given them a different relationship with the countryside, but few farmers prosper (and of those lucky few, most are neither “clean” nor “good” and do not produce quality food). The global food system should be engaged in finding out what is fair for everybody, in accordance with the characteristics of the various geographical areas of the world, but at present it is only creating unfairness and terrible hardship.

Our definition of “fair” is closely linked with the crucial concepts of social and economic sustainability, the dependants of ecological sustainability, the missing elements in our descriptions of sustainability in the broadest sense of the term. The fair, socially speaking, means fairness for the people who work the soil, respect for those who still love it and treat it with respect, as a source of life. La tera l’e’ basa, “the land is low,” they say in Piedmont: the farmer’s life is a hard one, and the conditions to which many of them have been reduced cry out for revenge. Agribusiness has turned small farmers into factory workers, slaves, paupers with no hopes for the future. Millions of farmers in the world do not even own the land they work.

We must create a new system that will give these people due recognition for the vital role they play: we cannot do without the farmers, the producing communities. It is on this concept of “community,” of destiny and belonging to the human race, that the new system must be founded. Starting from them, from these producing communities, we must build a worldwide network that is capable of opposing the dominant system. We must put man, the land, and food back in the center: a human food network which, in harmony with nature and respectful of all diversity, will promote quality: good, clean, and fair.

3.1 Social sustainability

From a social point of view, “sustainable” means promoting quality of life through dignified jobs that guarantee sustenance and fair remuneration. It means guaranteeing equity and democracy all over the world, giving everyone the right to choose their future. There are still too many peasants, farm laborers, that are virtual slaves who work to produce food and cannot live above the poverty line in a world that can produce enough for everybody.

In Latin America, the big fazendeiros exploit the work of farm laborers, giving them no rights and paying them so little as to effectively reduce them to slavery. In Africa, farmers are dying of hunger; Indian peasants commit suicide, crushed by the competition of agribusiness. Agricultural production in many parts of the world is indistinguishable from industrial production before the advent of the trade unions. Peasants die on the job or leave the country to go to live in miserable conditions in huge cities like Mexico City, Lima, Saô Paulo, New Delhi, and Beijing. At the same time, farmers in the rich areas of the world who want to produce the “good” and the “clean” find it difficult to compete with the low prices, supported by subsidies, which agroindustry can afford. The system is perverse: it does not allow other models, but where will this all end? Who will produce our food?

The small farmer can save the world from the abyss: let us give him the chance to do so.

We must create the conditions for a new, rebalanced global order based on social justice for those who work the land, for the real and potential custodians of our land. In the areas that have been conquered by agribusiness, we must give small producers back their dignity and encourage “clean” small-scale production. But in order to make this possible, those who exceed the limits will have to be penalized, and governments must support the birth—the rebirth—of a new rurality. By this I mean a countryside that is “clean” and attractive, and not only in the aesthetic sense of the word: a pleasant place to live where the quality of life is guaranteed. At present, wherever agribusiness triumphs, the countryside is a lifeless place, lacking in basic amenities (small businesses, meeting points, places where one can enjoy the beauties of nature), and often ugly. Its main function is that of a dormitory for city workers attracted by a nostalgia (which remains unsatisfied) for the country life and the fact that real estate prices are lower (not surprisingly, since there is no public transport, and everyone travels by car, congesting the city centers and making the air unbreathable). A new rurality in the rich areas: this is another prime objective.

In other parts of the world, where conditions are often extremely serious, pressure must be put, first of all, on organizations such as the World Trade Organization or the World Bank, which have not only heightened the problems of inequality with their commercial and economic regulations, but do their utmost to maintain the status quo. The situation is full of terrible inequalities, and I am certainly not the first person to have decried it. Secondly, we must ensure that governments, overburdened as they are with debts, begin to work seriously to achieve lasting development, and will not be influenced by the agribusiness lobby, which is always making grand promises but is only interested in expanding its own market. We need international controls on the levels of corruption in certain governments, which exploit humanitarian aid to enrich themselves and contribute to the destruction of the weak domestic markets; the latter are weakened by the flood of free agricultural produce, and the collapse of the meager local production is the inevitable result. We should be providing incentives to this local production, in accordance with tradition, primarily in the interests of self-sufficiency, giving all peoples sovereignty over their own food supplies; people must be able to produce their own food by themselves.

Restoring the balance of a whole world is one of the hardest tasks imaginable, but the means by which a change of course can be made without renouncing the search for quality should be clear by now: small-scale production, self-sufficiency, crop diversification, the revival and use of traditional methods, full respect for a fruitful interaction with the local biodiversity, and agroecology.

3.2 Economic sustainability

In addition to the social point of view, in the context of “fairness” there is also an economic sustainability which needs to be assessed. I have already mentioned fair remuneration for farmers. It is not possible for one liter of olive oil to cost less than seven or eight dollars: if that does happen, it can only mean that the farmer is not being paid a fair amount, that production costs are higher than the final price, and that somewhere along the food production line unfairness must have occurred. It is not fair that the illegal Mexican immigrants who work in California should be paid a pittance. It is not fair that Indian peasants, who find it difficult to produce their own vegetables, should have to cope with unfair competition from subsidized Western products or from surpluses created by market dumping.

The fair-trade market from this point of view is doing a very good job; it has introduced a different approach to the food economy and should therefore be encouraged and respected, though in my view it ought to be combined with structural interventions in the producing communities and not just limited to the fixing of a fair price. Fair trade must never forget the other two aspects of quality: clean and good. Sometimes it does, and this is the worst advertisement it could give itself in its struggle to rectify the unfair conventions of the market.

But there is also another economic aspect, which brings us back to social justice. The global financial world, the battleground of multinationals and unfair trade, has made money an elusive and immaterial entity. Capital is not “patient”; people do not invest in businesses which guarantee social justice and the redemption of peasants, or which have a low environmental impact. A movement of money on the stock exchange can seal the fate of tens of thousands of small farmers at a stroke. We need a slower, more “patient” investment policy, which operates outside the classical framework of finance: sustainable models of investment for the agricultural communities, which give them time to grow without expecting immediate profits. Slowing down economics means bringing it down to earth, for the earth. The World Bank, the leading international financial organization, should take note of these problems and act accordingly. The imposition of a Western free-market financial-economic model in countries that are structurally very different from ours has only served to burden them with crippling debts, squeezing them in a vice from which they cannot extricate themselves.46

Money must be brought back down to earth, it must be made available to the young who want to go and cultivate the land, so as to stimulate the vitality of the countryside and restore the balance of wealth in the world, in a line that runs from the smallest farmer to the largest capital transfers.

3.3 The land for those who cultivate it

The idea of a return to the land presupposes that there is a real possibility of achieving it. In many parts of the world, farmers abandon the land and sell it off to landowners who practice extensive agriculture; those who hold out are besieged by the chemical pollution that “modern” methods pour into the environment around their small properties. In many countries, farmers are still waiting for agrarian reform which will make uncultivated lands available to them (as in Brazil, for example, where the movement of the Sem Terra, “the landless ones,” has two million members) and create conditions in which they can cultivate their smallholdings without being crushed by the power of agribusiness. Even in the rich areas of the world, many people find it difficult to go back to the land: young people cannot raise the money to buy land, and farmers often work on rented land on behalf of big companies, so they are unable to exert any long-term influence by practicing good, clean, and fair small-scale agriculture.

The problem of land ownership is still serious around the world, and seeking out “fair” products also means rejecting those that are the result of productive systems which create this regrettable situation: for often those who cultivate the land cannot own it, and are not free to choose the kind of agriculture they favor.

3.4 Always “the last wheel of the cart”

There is an Italian expression which aptly describes the condition of farmers throughout history: they always have been, and continue to be, l’ultima ruota del carro, “the last wheel of the cart,” the lowest sector of society. They have worked either for landowners—as in the feudal system with its hierarchical scale, where the military and the clergy were at the top and the peasants who worked for the sustenance of all were at the bottom—or for political leaders. They have always worked for an elite that did not want to dirty its hands producing food. Whether or not they owned land, their condition has been one of subordination: the means of dominion have changed with the historical periods and the cultural contexts, but the rule of the last wheel of the cart has prevailed. Even today, the situation in which farmers find themselves is not very different. If we consider the world as a whole, this subordination manifests itself in different ways from one macro-area to another. Progress has changed the styles and techniques of “dominion,” but those who produce food, those who feed humanity, are always at the bottom of the social scale.

We must, of course, distinguish between two large groups: the rich, schizophrenic West, and the developing countries, which are at the mercy of the momentous upheavals that we are currently experiencing.

The “schizophrenic” situation in that part of the world which has solved its own food-supply problems derives from a very particular dualism, now that class divisions have diminished almost to the point of disappearing. On the one hand, we have a few rich farmers, committed to the agroindustrial model of production, who produce vast quantities of mediocre food for people who are poor, or at least not rich. On the other hand, we have a few small farmers who struggle to produce high-quality goods and who find it impossible (except in the case of the most exclusive status symbols, such as certain wine productions) to live a dignified life, such is the pressure of the competition. The latter produce food for a rich elite, who can afford the fruits of their labor, which are sometimes distributed thousands of kilometers away. As far as social justice is concerned, in the rich West the situation is complex: is it fair to harm the interests of those farmers who have made money through massive and extensive production in favor of small farmers who produce quality food? In reality, however, this part of the world seems to be balancing out; we have already seen how every tendency always produces an opposite one and how globalization has had the paradoxical effect of reviving interest in diversity and local productions. It seems that this dualism is gradually diminishing, thus making room for choices based on merit: our family food budget has significantly decreased, which means there is now a portion of our income left over that can be used to support quality products. The range of choice is expanding, and in this context anyone who acquires food products, in full awareness of the three criteria for quality, is in a good position to bring about a change. Even subsidizing policies, which are the main source of survival for the agroindustrial system, are gradually beginning to turn toward quality, as is shown by the first tentative European steps toward a reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Consumers’ persistence in choosing good, clean, and fair products can have its effect, and it will be the task of the new gastronome to draw attention to this behavior in the act of purchasing—to foster knowledge, so that the system can recover its balance and return within its limits.

However, the Western world must take into account the rest of the planet: above all, we should not expect to be able to dump the surplus of our model (which does not work anymore) in the so-called developing countries. This is not sustainable from any point of view. The developing countries must find their own way, by seeking a food sovereignty of their own. The most we can do is to help them and avoid looking at the problem from the Eurocentric standpoint of conquistadores who “discovered” America.

The developing countries, though united by the immense problems and injustices that affect them, show different levels of development in the agriculture of different areas. Africa first suffered the invasion of colonialism and was then almost left to itself and to its internal conflicts. African colonizers did not consider local gastronomies worthy of respect: they simply cancelled them out along with a form of farming which, though very basic, would have been perfectly capable of evolving of its own accord if it had been properly supported and not impeded. In other parts of the world, colonization from the agro-gastronomical point of view was less destructive and created syncretisms (such as Pan-American syncretism or that between America and Europe), which preserved part of the local agricultural cultures. But soon the agroindustrial model appeared and rapidly developing countries such as Brazil, India, and Mexico are paying the price in the form of stark polarization of the classes and areas of grinding poverty.

We find a different situation again in the Far East, especially in China. China seems to be the great threat to the Western world with its incessant economic growth, but we should consider the problem (whether real or imagined) from the point of view of social justice. In China, workers’ rights are not respected. The level of pollution, along with the indiscriminate use of GMOs and of agricultural practices so noxious that they are banned in every other part of the world, show an aspect of Chinese development that few seem to take into consideration—the same problems that we used to have in the West, except that in China they are happening now and far more quickly.47 The harm that is being done in China in the name of development is incalculable, and the system, though nominally communist, is in fact the embodiment of perfect capitalism: political homogeneity, uncontrolled exploitation of labor, and exploitation of the natural environment with no thought of the future. We need to promote a strong international reaction, not by increasing existing tariffs or imposing new ones, not by seeking complicity, but rather by rejecting such an unfair system, and making the Chinese respect the environment and their workers. If we do not, the “Chinese threat” may become huge—not because it will deprive us of wealth, but because it will drive us even more quickly toward the precipice.

Social justice, linked with the good and the clean, must become the method of development, the only one possible. These three criteria of quality will combine differently in different parts of the world, but they remain the three cardinal points on which we must build, little by little, with new tools and with the neo-gastronomic attitude, a new model of growth on this planet.

3.5 Is it fair?

The third of the three essential and interdependent prerequisites for a quality product is that it be fair—fair for man and for society. “Fair” is sustainable; it creates wealth, and establishes a more equitable order among the peoples of the world. Justice is obtained by respecting man—the farmer, the craftsman—and his work. It is the new gastronome’s task to assess the living conditions of millions of small farmers all over the world (but particularly those close to his home), to get to know those farmers, to support the production of the “clean” and “good” ones, guaranteeing them fair remuneration through “fair trade” prices in the most serious cases.

Should anyone be tempted to ignore the complexity of the world and consume their food irresponsibly and unfairly, indifferent to social justice, I say that the fair has become indispensable. The human elite must be made up of those who produce food, not by those who consume it by consuming the land.

Fair is respect for others; working to ensure that it is pursued by everyone is another part of our civilizing mission. This is the gastronome’s concern, and it leads directly to the new gastronome, who enjoys, knows, and eats in the awareness that he must leave a better earth to future generations.