Gastronomy is a complex science and, if we study it with a multidisciplinary approach, it enables us to regain our sensoriality and provides us with tools for interpretation, values according to which to work, new traveling companions, and an understanding of reality. It helps us to identify the cultural and productive mechanisms that serve the cause of a fairer and happier world; it prompts us to intervene, in the awareness that we have the ability and opportunity to do so. It makes us creative.
It creates a common sensibility, which leads us all to be active participants (as gastronomes, producers, and co-producers) in the quest for an idea of quality (quality of life and quality in products). This is appropriate not only for our own personal well-being, but also for that of others and of the land. This common sensibility induces us to redefine our behavior and our daily objectives, and it gives a new meaning to gastronomy—or rather, to that which stands at the center of human activities: food itself.
The tools of this research and of this redefinition we have already seen: a complex and redefined science; the notion of good, clean, and fair; the desire to educate ourselves and not to succumb to ignorance of the senses and the intellect; the awareness of belonging to a community of destiny; and the desire to develop a new way of promoting and practicing knowledge. There is a new quest for taste, which includes all these ideas, and which, if it is not to be merely idealistic and impracticable, requires planning and pragmatism.
There is a network from which we can start and which can be made as functional as possible—a network of feelings, aspirations, forces, knowledge, and people.
If we restore food to its rightful place at the center of our lives, we see that food is the network, and that it must be strong, transparent, good, clean, and fair. If we are what we eat, we are the network: a pragmatic network, which strives to communicate as much as possible. So we need planning and the desire to act, to realize ideas.
{DIARY 14} THE SAMI AND THE MONGOLS
After Terra Madre, many of the participating communities invited the staff of Slow Food to visit them. I myself, when I am on my travels, always drop in to see them if I happen to be in the neighborhood, and the first opportunity arose very soon (in November 2004, a month after the event), during a trip to Sweden, where I had gone to meet the local representatives of our movement.
On that occasion, I visited the community of the Sami (usually incorrectly termed Laplanders; few people know that this is an insult: “lapp” means “patch” and is pejorative)—a population of only seventy thousand people who live in a region that has no official borders, Sápmi (most people wrongly call it Lapland), in the north of the Scandinavian peninsula, between Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. The Sami I met are those who attended Terra Madre: a nomadic community (like all Sami) of about three thousand people who follow the herds of reindeer on their migrations. Reindeer are their main occupation, and from them they make many products, such as suovas—reindeer meat smoked using a traditional method. Suovas is threatened with extinction, and Slow Food is endeavoring to protect it.
We went to visit them in one of their camps of traditional huts (made of planks of wood arranged in a conical shape, with a floor of moss and pine branches—very cozy), near Östersund, one of the southernmost places in Sápmi, where the reindeer come before the winter and are slaughtered.
I listened to the long and troubled story of the Sami, while sitting by the fireside in one of their huts. (Many of today’s Sami have modernized; they live in prefabricated cottages which they can move, and they follow the reindeer on motor-powered sledges; it would be absurd not to accept these modern advances in a place where the winter lasts for two hundred days a year and where the temperature falls as low as thirty degrees below zero Celsius.) I was also lucky enough to taste some delicious bread toasted over the fire with suovas, an excellent product with great commercial potential.
My guide during my visit was the president of the Sami Parliament, a multinational body that represents them in their relations with all other institutions, and I must say that I was delighted with their joy and interest at having participated in Terra Madre. I spent nearly two whole days with them, and we traveled across the very inhospitable but almost magically fascinating area around which the Sami move all year, following the reindeer. It seems almost impossible that in countries like the Scandinavian ones, there can still exist a nomadic population that makes nomadism its raison d’être and is fiercely proud of it. I heard them talk of the injustices they suffer in each state they travel through, of their struggles for right of way in certain areas (when in fact the movement of their herds has an ecological function, though they are not welcomed by the local farmers), of their extraordinarily rich and interesting cosmology, which illustrates how important this kind of knowledge mingled with myth can be. For example, the Sami knew long before Galileo that the earth goes around the sun: it is one of the fundamental concepts of their religion!
On the last afternoon, when the sun had already fallen below the horizon (this happens at about three o’clock in November) and we were strolling along in total darkness, I asked the president of the Sami how they had liked Terra Madre. With evident enthusiasm he said something very illuminating: he told me that no one had ever done so much for the nomadic peoples, and that they were laying the foundations for a kind of international association of such peoples, so that they could all keep in contact and help each other to cope with their analogous difficulties, exchanging information about their experiences and communicating via the Internet. He explained that the idea had originated during the Turin event and that they had already been contacted by the community of Mongolian shepherds. This group of nomads travels across the immense Asiatic steppes raising animals (including the extremely rare Przewalski horse, which is on the verge of extinction), for meat is the only source of nourishment in an environment where nothing grows.
I realized that the network I had imagined had already formed without any action from us, and that Terra Madre alone had already encouraged this kind of contact. It is therefore not utopian to think that the various modern means of communication can be put at the service of this idea; indeed, the example of the Sami and the Mongolians may be a practical demonstration of a new way of circulating ideas and giving self-respect to these peoples, who stoically survive in lands where it is truly difficult to live. It is important to help them to have as dignified a life as possible, for they still have much to teach us, as Claude Lévi-Strauss recently pointed out:
Although such societies are very different from one another, they have in common the fact that they make man a receiving subject and not a master of creation. This is the lesson that ethnology has learned from them, and let us hope that when they come to join the union of nations these societies will maintain their integrity and that we ourselves may be able to learn from their example.61
It is significant that these societies had the idea of a post–Terra Madre network without anyone explaining to them why it was necessary.
The main project is the network itself. In describing food as a network of people, places, products, and knowledge (see the dish of pasta with tomato sauce on this page), we inevitably feel part of that network, as gastronomes. We belong to a food network, which goes from the global to the particular, and which exists both on a universal and on a local level, both for those who produce and for those who co-produce. At present, many of the nodes that make up this network do not even know that they are connected; they are kept almost entirely separate and do not communicate at all (think of the separation between producers and consumers). The objective is to reactivate the connections, starting with those meeting the gastronome’s criteria of quality and then extending the network as far as possible.
The network, as such, is proving to be a potentially revolutionary tool to meet all kinds of needs, from the global fair-trade economy to interest groups on sustainable activities or the defense of civil rights.
According to the prevalent theory, the main characteristics of a network system are its openness and its ability to sustain itself (which makes it more democratic and gives the right value to diversity). Moreover, a network is described in terms of its intensity and extent. Intensity means that each node or unit of the network must aim to reach and involve a larger number of people in the area where it operates. This will lead to the creation of new nodes. Extent means “expanding the network toward other areas, collaborating in the creation and development of new nodes, increasing the diffusion of the network and reinforcing it as a whole.”62
The diversities thus become functional, a force for creation and expansion; they increase the common good (which does not mean that everyone has the same aim, but that everyone feels solidarity with and acts for the interests of all), and they guarantee the survival of the system itself.
As we have already mentioned, as applied to the world of food, the network is potentially already in existence, because food is the element par excellence that connects people and social groups. But today, unfortunately, this network of food—of food as a network—does not work properly, for it has been undermined by elements of distortion (the loss of knowledge and biodiversity, the impossibility of communication, unsustainability) and undemocratic tendencies (the concentration of economic powers and of productive activities, the standardization and homogenization of taste, sensorial impediment). The idea that the gastronome wishes to propose is that the network be reactivated, and at the same time widened and reinforced (in extent and intensity), while preserving respect for gastronomic science, traditional knowledge, and human dignity, according to the new and precise concept of quality. This does not mean, however—and this should be made clear from the outset—that in the name of an aprioristic judgment we must exclude from the system the rest of the world of food, that is to say, all those parts that are not in line with this project, such as much of modern science, industry, and the present systems of distribution. We should, rather, put pressure on such sectors to persuade them to change their strategies and aims, to bring them into line with the new network.
Still on the subject of planning, we must first identify people who can act as “conscious” nodes in the network, then provide services to enable the network to function properly and be characterized by its content. The aim is to protect diversity and set in motion, or place in a dialectical relationship, the content of the nodes. In this way, if it is a good network, it will be able to sustain itself, taking in new subjects, new nodes, and therefore new diversities, which will reinforce it and promote the flow of the whole, generating new and virtuous transformations and growths. The outcome will be true sustainable development, detached from the idea of economic growth at all costs, and connected to the idea of human growth and to the diffusion of a common good—guaranteeing us a rosier future and quality food for all.
To enable me to explain more clearly the project of a virtuous food network, a network which we shall call “gastronomic”—made up of producers, intermediaries, and co-producers—I trust the reader will excuse my beginning with a personal story, a concrete example from which these considerations originated. It is only an initial idea, and it derives from the first identification of a particular kind of network: the food community network of Terra Madre.
1.1 The Terra Madre experience
I will not dwell too long on the Terra Madre meeting, which took place in Turin at the Palazzo del Lavoro on October 21–23, 2004. There is already plentiful literature and documentation on the subject,63 and it is not the aim of this book to promote the initiatives of the movement of which I am president. But that idea, that occasion, and the developments that it is generating are an excellent point of departure for a discussion of the “gastronomic network,” so a brief history of its aims and a description of the event will be useful.
The basic idea was to bring together a large number of people from all over the world in a single place—important people, the so-called “intellectuals of the earth”: farmers, fishermen, nomads, craftsmen, and others engaged in the production or distribution of food that is good, clean, and fair. We drew on the worldwide network of contacts which has been created through the associative international experience of Slow Food, asking our contacts to indicate groups that would be suitable participants in an event of this kind. We called these groups “food communities” (this first step was the basis of the definitions of the various communities that were given in chapter 4); there were about 1,200 of them, and we made arrangements for their representatives, 4,888 people from 130 different countries, to travel to Turin. There, they would find hospitality and an organization that would involve them in discussions called Earth Workshops, which dealt with general themes such as women’s work or desertification, and other more specific ones based on the kind of commodity with which the participants were involved—for example wheat, rice, corn, or fruit. That was our way of linking diverse experiences and laying a constructive foundation for an event that would be able to provide a simple (and folkloristic) demonstration and exhibition of cultural diversity.
Each day’s work consisted of two general meetings and a series of Earth Workshops: a large amount of information was exchanged at the specialized meetings, but the two general assemblies were particularly moving and occasions of profound significance.
To take a step back, our basic idea was to bring together people who would never otherwise have had the chance to talk to each other, and to invite them to talk about their own simple, everyday (but vitally important) work. The travel expenses of the representatives of communities from the poorer countries, and in general of anyone who had obvious difficulty in traveling, were met by the committee that was formed for the occasion (comprising Slow Food, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Piedmontese Regional Authority, and the Turin City Council); hospitality was provided by civic and religious organizations and by the Piedmontese farming community (with an important contribution from Coldiretti), which opened its houses and farms to the representatives.
Paying travel expenses and providing hospitality and bureaucratic assistance was a completely new departure for such “global” events. It is usually only the rich and leisured or institutional and academic representatives who are able to move around the world to attend such events. But here we introduced respect for the right to travel (as a formative experience and as a means of cultural exchange), a sense of hospitality—which is becoming increasingly rare in the modern world but is fortunately still genuinely present in the farming world—and a sense of giving and absolute confidence in the participants’ abilities.
To be honest, it was difficult to foresee all the developments of the event, but the idea of creating a network between the “food communities” (at Terra Madre they were primarily “producing communities”) and the “gastronomic co-producers” linked by Slow Food was present from the beginning. Significantly, and symbolically, Terra Madre was held simultaneously with the Turin Salone del Gusto, which brought together other producers from all over the world, as well as, more importantly, 170,000 extremely well-informed visitors.
The Terra Madre event generated enthusiasm among the participants, who undoubtedly (the letters that we received after the event confirm this) felt part of that “community of destiny,” made up of shared values, which lies at the heart of these ideas. This feeling of belonging certainly continues to live within them now that they have returned to their communities—and now that they have discovered they are not alone. For Terra Madre did not end with the final general assembly; it did not close a circle, but created new perspectives, opened up a whole new world which is finally aware of what it represents.
1.2 The food community
Here, we should insert a methodological note on the meaning of the concept of the “food community” and the way it evolved through the planning and realization of Terra Madre and the desire to give continuity to the event.
The first step was to seek a definition for the individuals who were to be invited to Terra Madre: an eminently practical need. We decided to group them into units which could be represented by their leaders or by the people best able (perhaps for linguistic reasons) to communicate with other people like them. The information we were given indicated a wide variety of social groups: whole villages, clusters of families, small ethnic groups, associations of small producers, autonomous groups involved in alternative distribution, entire sectors that had formed around the new and precise concept of quality. The geographical definition was for the most part fairly narrow, in the sense that the communities belonged to a well-defined and restricted area, but larger geographical areas were also represented (in the case of associations, groups, or productive sectors), in some cases corresponding to an entire nation.
The result was a selection (our search, after the initial phase, was accompanied by spontaneous requests) of about 1,200 communities, represented in Turin by groups whose individual members were able to articulate as effectively as possible the various professions and sensibilities that combined to guarantee the success of a given product.64 “Food communities” was chosen because it expresses well the characteristics of these heterogeneous groups. All of them are communities—either physically identifiable, as in a village, or having shared values and interests, as in a community of destiny—and all of them are engaged, through the protection of seeds, harvesting, agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, processing, distribution, promotion, education, and other gastronomic activities, in ensuring that a particular food, generally produced on a small scale, reaches the person who will eat it. These communities rarely had a strong institutional identity. It should be stressed that we are outside the world of trade unions and political parties and movements: the producing communities of Terra Madre are made up of simple workers, who before the event felt rather alone in the world.
This, then, was the principle that guided the organizers of Terra Madre and that characterized the event itself: the assigning of food communities to interest groups according to the kind of food they produced, the techniques of production that they used, or the common problems that they faced.
The food communities, however, as well as being the thematic and organizational basis of the event, were also a means and an end: they soon emerged as potential units or nodes of a network. The main desire that they expressed during and after the event was that they should keep in touch with one another, in order to exchange ideas and provide mutual support. In reality, therefore, a network was formed the moment the communities were identified and invited to be part of the general project; that project certainly did not stop with the meeting, but still strives to provide tools and services that may lead to other analogous meetings, possibly even wider in scope.
For the aim is to lay the foundations for a coming together, a union with all other gastronomic subjects: beginning with the new co-producing consumers, such as those who are united under the aegis of the Slow Food movement (whose role in this project, it should be emphasized, is mainly that of providing a service), and including chefs, retailers, craftsmen, and small businessmen. The cement of the union must be gastronomic interest, animated by the awareness that everyone is experiencing the same community of destiny. It is likely that all these subjects will therefore have the same desire, the same sense of being part of a terrestrial citizenship driving them to behave according to principles that respect quality and all the diversities; most likely, they are also ready to interrelate with each other and with other external subjects (the “virtuous” networks that already exist).
1.3 The world network of gastronomes
Let us be clear about one thing: the plan is not to build a network to which we can then attach an ideological label (much less a trademark, new or existing), but to lay the foundations for a network perfectly able to increase in “intensity” and “extent,” and in which expansion is guaranteed in proportion to the diversity that it is able to absorb.
The democratic nature of the network is guaranteed by the equal status of all the subjects involved, who are all considered—because they consider themselves to be such—gastronomes in equal measure. They belong to different cultures and can have different roles within the world of food. Grouped together are various food communities which contain these kinds of components:
• nodes which correspond to the productive communities;
• groups of co-producers organized, for example, into gastronomic, ecological, and social associations, or linked together for educational purposes or in order to form buying groups;
• the cooks of the world, at all levels, from international celebrities to small street vendors in the remotest parts of the world, or people who cook for their family or community;
• the universities, the science departments that have gastronomic implications, the centers for research into traditional knowledge, and the people who continue those traditions;
• every single citizen who feels part of a “community of destiny” and wants to have influence on the future through food and everything that concerns it.
But democracy is also guaranteed by the sharing of the values that I have described, which are especially well suited to the project because they all have one thing in common: our definitions of “gastronomy” (agriculture, cuisine, et cetera), “quality,” “knowledge,” “education,” and even the various meanings of “community,” are all open to diversity and have a precise connotation of something local and particular, which is specific to certain geographic areas.
Therefore, like all networks, the worldwide network of gastronomes, as we will call it, is at the same time local and global, diverse and united, concerned with details and with the whole—with food at its center. It is virtuous, in other words it works for creation and not for destruction; it desires to increase the range of sharing and will not generate new divisions. It is a network that can link up with all the other virtuous networks, those which, focused on other specific needs but always open to diversity and to common values for man, tend to counterbalance the damage caused by Edgar Morin’s four engines (see this page), creating happiness and well-being.
As I write, I am conscious of the fact that the first members of this network (for example the food communities of Terra Madre, or the Slow Food movement) are only a small fraction of humankind. They make no revolutionary claims, and they are not in a hurry. But the political value of the examples conveyed by the network is important to the extent that it sustains itself, grows and establishes relations and alliances with other networks.
This reminds me of an image which an old Piedmontese emigrant (from my own hometown) described to me years ago. If he were still alive, he would be over a hundred today and, like many Piedmontese, he emigrated in his youth to Argentina. After telling me stories of Buenos Aires in 1908, where the aesthetic canons of the tango were developed, where in some districts people conversed in Piedmontese dialect, and where the migrant communities were based on feelings of solidarity that hardly exist anymore, he added that in the pampas he once saw an invasion of grasshoppers stop a train. The wheels of the train became oily through running over them and spun freely, losing their grip on the rails: insects succeeded in stopping the machine.
We, too, are a very small portion of the human race, like insignificant grasshoppers. The network of gastronomes numbers a couple hundred thousand people today, but it already has shared values which will steadily expand its range, as it links up with the other exponents of virtuous globalization. When we start to lose the feeling of being alone (as the participants in Terra Madre have found out for themselves) and we are able to work in the name of our community of destiny, no business, no change, no machine will be able to stop our quest for happiness. We are like those grasshoppers that stopped the train.
1.4 How it can work and why it must work
The worldwide network of gastronomes is thus based on ideas, but also has practical implications which enable it to be recognized and to function effectively. Those who wish to promote the network must see themselves as providers of services: that of supplying tools and of stimulating debates, exchanges, and the circulation of knowledge, products, and people.
It goes without saying that when we speak of a network, we must inevitably look to the new communication technologies and the technological resources available to cultures. The Internet is today the greatest tool of global communication and is well suited to the needs of the network of gastronomes: it establishes contact; it facilitates the exchange of information; it can hold files that are freely available to consult with no limitations of space or time; and it makes possible mobilization in real time and the managing of new systems of distribution.
Although it is not an absolute precondition, the computer must be provided as an essential tool, though we must try to avoid its obvious limitations—in particular, the possible difficulty of access in some parts of the world. This is a problem of computer literacy and of infrastructures, which can be solved, if only slowly. While it is true that at present the world is still divided into those who have access to the Internet and those who do not, it is also true that the number of people who have access to it is increasing very rapidly. Satellite and computer technologies will certainly make the Internet available to all, as it potentially already is; in many food communities, even in the most remote and isolated ones, communication via Internet is already a reality. It is not surprising, therefore, that when I visit a village of the Krahô people in Tocantins, central Brazil, I hear the people promise, on my departure, to keep in touch, and proudly offer me a piece of paper with their email address on it.
We must strive to provide resources and to make use of expert advice to devise a computer network that can support the network of gastronomes: a proper service. This may be the form that gives the network recognizability, and therefore identity.
This is an aspect of planning, because this is how the network must work; this is the aim of those who, inevitably, must administer it and guarantee the continuity of the whole. The operation of the network will later make possible the implementation of other projects that will proceed alongside the emergence of new alternative values: the concept of products being free in the financial sense; an economy detached from a dependence on money; the economic promotion (which does not mean the monetization) of nonmaterial goods and of specific abilities; innovative and sustainable rules for the distribution of products; an extensive right to mobility; mutual enrichment based on different human experiences; and new dignity for traditional forms of knowledge and for the life of farming communities.
The aim of the network is to make these alternative strands operative, to support them and finance them with specific resources. Each act of planning is part of the whole project of the network, and makes use of it. In the network, the experiences and skills of the participants are modulated in a functional manner, while the cultural diversity within it is exploited in a productive manner. In sum, a new creativity is proposed which looks to the past and to history (including the microhistory of each community, of each person) to demonstrate its modernity, and which looks to the present situation to bring into focus the problems of the earth and of the stomach, to guarantee a future which is different from that for which we seem destined.
This is not mere utopia, but political theorization, an intellectual effort to find ways of developing certain human forces which at present are mistreated and undervalued. The network can—and must—work, because it is a means of gradually correcting some macroscopic distortions of our food system and of introducing into the machinery regulating the workings of the world certain values that can be easily translated into everyday practice with the help of the system that we have in mind. The following sections will provide the first examples of this effort to link ideas with their realization and ideals with the functions that they can fulfill if they are included in the worldwide network of gastronomes—which fortunately has already expressed its potential, though only a few years have passed since the first edition of Terra Madre. The network of gastronomes must be able to guarantee the circulation within itself:
• of information, at all more or less virtual levels, by using computers and oral means of communication and by implementing educational strategies;
• of knowledge, old and new, gastronomic and otherwise;
• of products, so that they conform to the new idea of quality and are good for the palate and the mind, sustainable for the earth, and fair because every person’s dignity is guaranteed.
• of people, because they are the fulcrum of the network, and their mobility, their ability to have direct experiences, to meet other people and to learn from them things that cannot be learned from books are the main conditions that must be fulfilled if this network is to find strength, resources, knowledge, information, and products, and if all humankind is to unite around it.
{DIARY 15} SHORT CIRCUIT SAN FRANCISCO–BAJARDO
In early January, around the Epiphany holiday, it has become a personal tradition for me to spend a few days on the Côte d’Azur with Alberto Capatti and Vittorio Manganelli thinking about and planning the work for the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo and Colorno. In January 2004, on my way home from there, following the advice of Slow Food’s restaurant guide Guida delle Osterie d’Italia, we headed for Bajardo, a tiny village inland from Ventimiglia; we stopped at the Trattoria Armonia, where you feel as if you have gone back in time and rediscovered the ancient flavors of traditional Ligurian cuisine. The road from Ventimiglia is particularly bad, and to make matters worse, halfway along it we ran into a minor snowstorm; but the effort of the journey was amply repaid by the wonderful lunch we were served in this hamlet of a few inhabitants. The onward journey from there was equally eventful: it took us three hours to get home, in the midst of the snow, which continued to fall thickly all afternoon.
Only three days later, I had to fly to San Francisco to participate in the work of the American board of Slow Food, and during a pause in the proceedings I went to one of the most richly stocked record shops I have ever seen: Amoeba Music on Haight Street. My old passion for folk music directed me straight to the relevant shelves, and I came across records from the collection of traditional music recorded by Alan Lomax, the doyen of ethnomusicologists, during his trip to Italy in 1954. Lomax had traveled the world hunting for recordings of folk music, building up an immense archive which is partly preserved at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In the Italian collection, published by Rounder Records, I found a CD of music from Liguria, entitled Bajardo. I was astonished. Almost incredulous, I bought the CD and took it to my hotel. I listened to it immediately and learned from the sleeve notes and photographs that it had been recorded in the very village where I had eaten only a few days earlier. I immediately called the trattoria owner in Bajardo, but he knew nothing of this precious recording. I asked him to make inquiries, and sure enough the old people of the village remembered the names of those singers who fifty years earlier had performed for an American visitor. But none of them was still alive; how sad to learn that this memory is preserved in Washington, whereas in Italy the Ligurian Regional Council and the village of Bajardo itself had no idea that these recordings even existed. They were epic ballads, the kind so well described in the nineteenth century by Costantino Nigra, with precious performance techniques such as the Genoese trallallero, which is now almost extinct. The songs accompanied rites characteristic of social or festive gatherings that have survived only in the grooves of this record by Lomax, who in 1954, armed with a bag containing a bulky tape recorder, managed to persuade the inhabitants of Bajardo to perform them for him. Lomax was joined on that journey by Diego Carpitella, perhaps the greatest ethnomusicologist that Italy has produced. I could not help wondering whether this science, ethnology, will one day receive the recognition that it deserves.
For we are now in a situation which requires, more than ever before, an emergency ethnology, before too much of Italian history and the history of others is lost. That short circuit between San Francisco and Bajardo was what triggered this train of thought in me—which made me feel the need to document and preserve the characteristic expressions of all the food communities of the world. These expressions are intimately linked with gastronomic culture and, quite apart from their indisputable documentary value, they provide a solid basis both for a future historiography of the new gastronomy and for a better understanding of the food communities with which it interacts.
I think recording, cataloguing, and storing of such information are the duties of the members of the community: it is they who must make sure that they hand down, by any means possible, their songs, stories, rites, habits, and customs.
Indeed, the short circuit between San Francisco and Bajardo reawakened an old passion and the memory of a meeting that was a crucial element in my education and that today impels me to support with even more conviction the idea of this “emergency ethnology.”
In 1977, I would never have imagined that five years later my interest would have turned to gastronomic questions. Those were the years when my political and cultural commitment manifested itself in my work in the local cultural association and in the opening of a bookshop at Alba, in the province of Cuneo. It was during that period that I met Nuto Revelli, who had just written his great work, Il mondo dei vinti (The World of the Defeated), based on recordings and transcriptions of the oral memories of the farmers of the Cuneo area. This method, and Revelli’s sensibility, immediately won me over, especially as during those years my visits to the osterie of the Langhe often brought me into contact with the people who were the object of his research. This documentary approach so convinced me that on behalf of the Istituto Ernesto De Martino, I, too, started recording (without even knowing who Lomax was) traditional songs of the osteria. After all, these were my people, and if I think today about how much of this culture has disappeared with those last witnesses of it, I am filled with regret, for the work that I began could and should have been far more intensive. That really was a treasure which has now been lost.
But in 1990, I had the opportunity to make use of this experience in my Atlante delle Grandi Vigne di Langa (Atlas of the Great Vineyards of Langhe), which was a response to the need to catalogue and describe the great crus of Barolo and Barbaresco. The only way of defining the geography of the great wines of southern Piedmont was to draw on the knowledge of the country people and, naturally, on the few specialized studies on the subject: Monografia sulla viticoltura ed enologia nella provincia di Cuneo (A Monograph on Viticulture and Enology in the Province of Cuneo) by the agronomist Lorenzo Fantini, published in the late nineteenth century; the study Sulla delimitazione delle zone a vini tipici (On the Delimitation of the Growing Areas of Typical Wines) by Ferdinando Vignolo Lutati, published in the 1920s; and Carta del Barolo (A Map of Barolo) by Renato Ratti, which dates from the 1970s.
To these basic sources, I added more than five hundred hours of recordings made among the oldest winegrowers and their wives. The extraordinary thing is that in addition to the work on the delimitation of the crus (for which the country people’s memories of the use made of the grapes of this or that vineyard were indispensable), there emerged a series of testimonies which aptly described the local economy and the winegrowing culture of the early twentieth century. Of all the books published by Slow Food, the Atlante is undoubtedly closest to my heart, for even today when I look at the photographed faces and re-read the stories, I realize that those testimonies evoke the former life of country communities which are so different today.
And it was all thanks to the inspiration that Revelli gave me through his incredible work: those words conveyed all the life, the gastronomy, the economy, the culture, the social life of those times—hard times, when the people, amid great privations, were active subjects who contributed to the transformation of the land. I am glad that the Atlante has preserved for future generations the difficult life of the land of my birth, a life summed up by a woman of Serralunga d’Alba as follows:
The sharecroppers’ life was hard; the landowners never divided the crops into equal halves, but always gave us a little less. We had no security, and if the landowner sold out, you could find yourself out on the road. On St. Martin’s Day you moved to another farm; it was a wretched life.
If there is one thing I feel at this moment, it is a strong desire that Revelli’s method should become standard, institutionalized practice. The contribution of the new recording technologies is immense, and the oral history of simple people, their microhistory, has as yet been little explored. When at Terra Madre I saw the faces of the participants and heard their stories, I became even more convinced that the mission of cataloguing was vitally important and that it should be implemented, as I have already said, in the first place by the communities themselves.
Indeed—partly to set an example, and partly because the idea really fascinates me—I immediately set to work in my own town, Bra, where some colleagues and I founded a little historical institute whose purpose is to preserve the memory of Bra and of its inhabitants. The institute continues the small amount of research that has been done on the town’s past, and makes video recordings of a large number of elderly people describing their lives and their relationship with the town. The results are published periodically in a journal (Bra, o della Felicità, a title devised by the Piedmontese writer Gina Lagorio, a refined intellectual of whom I shall always have a fond memory), and we are building up an archive of the recordings and of all the other material that is being uncovered through the efforts of the local people involved in the initiative. I began in my own backyard, as I hope others will do, and I dream of a worldwide network that will work to create this kind of archive, which with complete systematization will constitute a treasure of inestimable value for future generations and for the new gastronomic science.
2. BRINGING ABOUT CULTURAL CHANGE: A HOLISTIC VISION OF THE WORLD OF GASTRONOMES
The main channel of the network of gastronomes is of course that of gastronomy, of food production in the widest possible sense. But if we take into account the arguments outlined above and of the aim of guaranteeing the circulation of knowledge within the network, two other factors immediately come into play: on the one hand, the need to link the gastronomic disciplines in a exchange between the traditional forms of knowledge and modern science, the “dialogue between realms”; and on the other hand, the need, when the network expands and becomes part of a system with other networks, to open our vision to a far wider sphere than the gastronomic channel, which is complex enough in itself (see chapter 4).
These factors are not incompatible with the general project of the network; in fact, I am convinced that they are structural and that they can constitute an element of strength and novelty, as well as modernity.
For the “dialogue between realms” finds in the network its greatest potential manifestation: the network includes both the traditional producing communities, with their cultures and their techniques, and, for example, the universities that deal with food production and agriculture, without excluding subjects like anthropology, ethnography, and history.
The same may be said of chefs—the main direct links between production and consumption at the local level—who, thanks to the network, find themselves in the same virtual place as people who, for example, study the modern technologies of nutrition or food processing.
The network of the gastronomes is therefore able to establish an exchange between different realms of knowledge, thus generating new identities, new progress, sustainable innovation, and sufficient communication between the different specializations, which are at present too self-contained or not sufficiently respected by “official” culture.
This dialogue between realms has already been thoroughly defined and discussed by agroecological theory (see chapter 2 and Diary 10), which is based not only on biodiversity but on an active recovery of the traditional forms of knowledge of country people. There is even a gastronomic school, more reflective than some of the others, which understands very well that it must include the study of both the history of peasant nutrition and artisanal culinary traditions, which are the greatest expression of all that constitutes gastronomy.
This dialectical capacity, which can carry out a fruitful task of conservation and enable different forms of knowledge to meet on equal terms in dignity and authoritativeness, must start from a profound cultural change, from an epistemological shift, from a different approach to knowledge.
This change finds its driving ideal in the network, if the latter is initiated, as it logically should be, on the level of respect for all diversities and for the lived experience of peoples, groups, communities, and people who enter the system. As the network expands and intensifies, this change inevitably differentiates the cultural areas of interest and accepts them as active elements of the system itself. To put it more clearly, this is a widening of the vision of the network, a greater consciousness of the complexity that surrounds food, a natural and cultural element, and therefore always placed in a context.
What is needed is what I would call a “holistic” cultural vision for the network of gastronomes: a vision which, in order to redeem gastronomy from the folkloristic sphere to which it has been relegated, holds in equal regard the other aspects of the popular cultures, especially that which is commonly described as “folklore.”
Redefining gastronomy is also an effort to redeem its scientific dignity. Just like the science which we examine in this book, other forms of traditional culture have been relegated to the folkloristic sphere, such as dance, song, oral traditions, architecture, craftwork, and certain productive practices (such as the making of tools). What is the folkloristic sphere? That which pertains to folklore, a manifestation of identity which is redolent of the past, often carrying echoes of hard times; the folkloristic no longer belongs to the people, because the traditions live on only in pageants, parades, and similar reenactments coinciding with festive occasions—such as village fairs—and are no longer everyday practice.
It would be preferable to make these manifestations of cultural identity part of folklore, rather than folkloristic. By this, I mean that they must belong to the people again, that they must have the chance to survive, or at least to be well known. In those instances where habits and customs have already profoundly changed, active conservation must take place, and wherever the practices are still very present in everyday life, there must be a fruitful relationship of exchange.
The cultural annihilation that has affected the rural world in the last fifty years, and which continues to be perpetrated as the model of agroindustry spreads to new areas of the planet, doesn’t just concern food and the environment; the destruction has likewise affected a series of modes of being, ways of communicating and of self-representation that are typical of, and fundamental to, the identity of country people. These modes of being constitute the cultural skeleton of the rural population and contain other forms of knowledge, different from the scientific ones, but no less important.
The idea of a network of gastronomes that neglects to ensure that such manifestations of cultural identity are saved and studied, made alive and functional, their characteristic elements surviving in every detail, would be a contradiction in terms. These manifestations give traditional culture its local specificity, and, like biodiversity and agricultural practices, it is not possible to imagine them detached from the system of food production. It is right that these elements of popular culture should remain an integral part of agricultural systems at the complex local level. They are a structural element of them.
Another task of the network of gastronomes must therefore be that of extending its interests beyond food, seeing productive systems as a unified whole and protecting all diversity with profound respect.
The project, already mentioned in chapter 4, must be to give priority to the urgency of preserving songs, dances, oral traditions, and all the other expressions of identity. The first step toward making it possible for these forms of expression to remain functional to the systems of production that they characterize is to make sure they do not disappear.
The network should also undertake the task of beginning the process of cataloguing all these forms of knowledge: by filming them, transcribing them, and recording them, rather in the manner of the Smithsonian Institution or the Istituto Ernesto De Martino of Sesto Fiorentino, which has worked on Italian traditional music. Today, storage techniques are perfectly adequate for this purpose and also allow more immediate access to their content. We can only imagine what it will mean in a few decades to have such a global storage system at our disposal. If every community undertook to hand down films, interviews with elders, and audio recordings, there would be a corpus of material whose potential in terms of content of traditional knowledge would be enormous.
In conclusion, it will be useful to summarize the reasons why—in addition to the obvious need to preserve traditional knowledge—we must plan the systematic documentation and storage of these characteristic forms of expression, and not only of those relating to food:
• They contain popular knowledge, which has not yet been sufficiently brought into dialogue with the other spheres of knowledge, and this must be saved before it becomes unusable.
• They are the characteristic representation of the communities; they are a reason for pride, but also a key to understanding for anyone from outside who wishes to enter into contact with those communities. Learning them is a form of respect, but also a way of communicating.
• Since they are an integral part of the community’s production system, they must inevitably influence it in some way and can help us study it in more detail. They are part of the context, which, as we have seen, is never irrelevant as far as food production is concerned.
• They will be able to guarantee an adequate historiography of the producer communities and of the people in the network, highlighting over the course of the years the most fruitful models of exchange and the solutions to common and analogous problems. At the same time, they will reinforce the “identity” of such forms of knowledge, by which I mean the tangle of roots (see chapter 2) which constantly generates and fuels them. At the moment, this kind of historiography (including the historiography of food) does not have enough material to perform its task effectively (because such material generally derives from the poorer classes, which have few means of self-representation).
2.2 The universities and agroecology
A systematic cataloguing of the forms of knowledge, techniques, folklore, and all the other forms of expression of the food-producing communities is not an end in itself, even though it does constitute a heritage of inestimable value.
Agroecological theory claims to be a science strongly influenced by the traditional knowledge of country people. These forms of knowledge are accorded the status of a science, with the same dignity as all other sciences, because they are the specific result of centuries of development carried out by simple empiricism and by the instinct of adaptation to the environment. The traditional forms of knowledge fit perfectly into the environmental context, and the context (biodiversity, climate, geomorphology) in turn makes it possible to understand fully their motivations and usefulness. It goes without saying that without a context these forms of knowledge lose strength, meaning, and the possibility of application. From the perspective of conservation, traditional forms of knowledge are a precious resource, and their maintenance, study, and reorganization help to create the conditions for sustainable development.
But if we accept the importance of the environmental context, we must accept the importance of the social context, too. These same forms of knowledge that make it possible to cultivate and produce are equally connected in a system of rites, beliefs, cosmology, habits, and customs, as well as in oral, artistic, and technological forms of expression. So it is clear that in order to operate in the network, to keep it active, we must take into account those forms of knowledge that concern the social life of the communities. The entire context in which they exist must be saved in order to continue a harmonious line of development; instead, this harmony has been brusquely interrupted by the introduction of unsustainable techniques, which are too invasive and disrespectful of what exists.
Therefore, alongside the work of cataloguing, the overall project must involve the development of the catalogue, the maintenance of its operation, the study of its functional value to the productive system, and of its educational implications.
In view of the far-sightedness with which traditional agroecology is imbued, it will perhaps be advisable to link those who are engaged in cataloguing traditional knowledge (the communities themselves, one hopes) with those who are engaged in agroecology and development, so that the latter can both benefit from the catalogue and contribute to it, highlighting the links between folklore and small-scale agricultural activity, in the name of that holistic vision, of that cultural change which is the second project of the network.
The most effective way to start off this virtuous process is, in my view, to rejuvenate the academic culture in these areas, identifying the scholars most sensitive to it and including them in the network. I would like to see the creation of entire university departments dedicated to traditional agroecology, where the anthropological and ethnographic studies—with the support of the great multimedia catalogue of the network—are an integral part of the educational and research process.
Planning in this case therefore strongly involves the academic world and the scholars of these disciplines, who must be urged not to become closed within their own specializations, but to open up to other disciplines in order to further investigate the existing complexity. It is up to the scholars to reinterpret, to redefine, the values of the traditional cultures, which both in the West and in the developing countries are undergoing attacks and threats of every kind and disappearing at an unimaginable speed. Just think how many languages, how many dialects are dying out or have died out during the last few years: this is just one of the many indexes of a disappearance of identity, and it makes one fear the cultural homogenization toward which we are hurtling with such speed in Morin’s unsustainable “four-engined spaceship” (which I spoke about on this page).
2.3 A “holistic” network of knowledge
Broadening our cultural and operative vision, making it virtually “holistic,” entails in the first place the defense of diversity and complexity, linking them in a network, making them functional to the project of enabling the earth to regain, through the systems of food production, the right rhythm.
Cataloguing the traditional forms of knowledge is an act of conservation and respect; embarking on the multidisciplinary study of them (from agriculture to song) represents an effort to regard problems from the widest and most all-embracing point of view possible. As gastronomic science teaches us, it takes many lenses to understand systems with so many different inputs. One has to superimpose them, find analogies, connections between different “realms,” in a kind of interpretative schema which helps decipher the complexity by bringing about a meeting between the two axes on which modern science and traditional knowledge stand, as well as various levels of particularity and generality (local/global, specialist/holistic).
All this, linked up in a network, generates a complexity which is undoubtedly difficult to administer, but let us remember that the network does not in fact need to be administered. All one has to do is to guarantee its functioning so that it will be understood as clearly as possible, thus facilitating the direction of any action that people may wish to take.
Since this complexity is in fact the network itself, in this way, by thriving on diversity on various levels, it cannot fail to guarantee its own sustainable functioning. The holistic vision of traditional and gastronomic culture is in this sense an integral part of a very ambitious project.
{DIARY 16} CHIAPAS, ROCKEFELLER, AND THE SMALL FARMERS OF PUGLIA
In many years of meetings with the food communities, I have constantly found myself coming up against inconsistencies in the market which cause enormous problems for farmers, whether in the Western world or in the developing countries. I have seen how the two extremes of what is commonly called the food chain are constantly penalized: on the one hand, the farmers, on the other, the consumers—producers and co-producers who have to cope with situations which border on the paradoxical.
For example, in 2001 in Mexico, the impoverished farmers of the Los Altos area in Chiapas were faced with a series of terrible problems connected with the production of their indigenous varieties of corn.
Corn originated in Mexico. The Maya believed that mankind had developed from a corn cob, and even today in the region of Montezuma there are hundreds of varieties of this product. What is astonishing, however, is that almost 40 percent of the corn that is consumed in Mexico is imported from the United States. What’s more, numerous native Mexican varieties have been patented in the United States, becoming in effect an American agroindustrial product.
It was almost natural that the farmers of Los Altos—without knowing how to read and write, and without ever having participated in the worldwide debate on globalization—should begin to wonder why they could find only the white variety of corn at the market, and U.S.-made white corn flour, even though they themselves usually grew red, black, or yellow corn. They couldn’t understand, either, why the coyotes (the commercial intermediaries) paid them 1.5 pesos a kilo for the surplus from their harvest, and yet when they needed corn because the harvest had been poor, the coyotes demanded 6 pesos—for a different and inferior variety.
It was necessary to intervene in some way, so it was decided to form a Presidium with the Los Altos farmers to safeguard their four main native varieties and to remedy the unfair distortions of the market. The meetings seemed interminable, with translations from Italian into Spanish and then into their indigenous language, tzotzil. Their community decision-making process is as directly democratic as one could possibly imagine; everyone can and must participate. In the end, they accepted a small initial amount of financial support to help them change their system and run it, thus protecting their own varieties, but above all so that they could earn more and spend less.
The financial support, through training courses with local agronomists, served to reconstruct the milpa (a small, family-based, mixed-crop farming unit to which agroecological theory attaches great importance). The milpa is ideal for family self-sufficiency and for environmental conservation, but is strongly opposed by the coyotes, who favor the monoculture. Authorization was given for genetic research on behalf of the local farmers in order to give them exclusive rights to the genetic heritage of native corn, thus eliminating the danger of piracy which they so much feared, having already suffered from it in the past. But more than anything else, a simple but brilliant solution was found to their commercial problems: the production chain between the communities was closed, eliminating the intermediaries and reconstructing an internal market thanks to a collective brand and an official price—stable for everyone—of about 4 pesos. Anyone who had an excess to sell would earn 4 instead of 1.5 pesos, and anyone who had to buy corn to eat because the harvest had failed would spend 4 pesos instead of 6.
From this simple example, one can understand how the shortening of a food-and-agriculture chain can bring benefits both to the initial seller and to the final buyer (the farmers and the co-producers), but unfortunately we are far from arriving at a fruitful replanning of the trading and distribution systems. And the problem also afflicts the rich areas of the world.
In July 2005, in Italy, while the question of the farmers of Puglia who were underpaid for the production of tomatoes and grapes was being expressed with passion, and in some cases with violence (the protests were later calmed by the decision to pay a political, subsidized price and send grape juice to developing countries as humanitarian aid), I had the privilege to meet David Rockefeller, who at the venerable age of ninety is the last living child of the magnate John D. Rockefeller, Jr. He is a remarkable character: his physical condition is exceptional for a man of his age, but above all he shows an intellectual curiosity that would put many forty year olds to shame. I met him in his New York office, after having visited his model farm, Stone Barns, about a hundred kilometers to the north, in the valley of the Hudson River. The history of the farm dates from the late nineteenth century, when the head of the family, David’s grandfather, John D. senior, wanted a country estate to farm dairy cows, because he wanted to drink fresh milk every morning. Since that time, when young David used to spend his summers in the country, the farm might have gone bankrupt had it not been for the initiative of David’s late wife, Peggy, a great enthusiast of the agricultural life and the countryside, who completely revived Stone Barns. In 1996, as a tribute to his wife, David decided to give the family farm a new lease on life and made it into an example of sustainable farming and high-quality produce, in contrast to the prevailing emphasis in the American rural sector, which leaves much to be desired in this respect.
Today, it is delightful to visit the handsome buildings of Stone Barns and the surrounding fields, the half-acre greenhouse which produces excellent organic vegetables all year round, and the cattle sheds set in a relaxed environment. It is not just a philanthropic venture, however, but has been planned to be fully profitable while respecting all the criteria of sustainability. Everything is recycled, and so much compost is produced that it cannot all be used on the farm, and so they must sell it. The variety of produce is great, ranging from all sorts of vegetables to the main traditional stock breeds. The farm also carries out an intense educational program, with New York schools coming to visit almost in a continual cycle.
I was struck by the fact that in order to make perfectly profitable this effort to produce food in a manner that was good, clean, and fair, they had resorted to autonomous distribution systems. For the fruit of this work—which employs many young farm workers with great ideas for the future—is either sold through a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture, see this page–this page) to seventy member families or at farmers’ markets in nearby towns. Most of the produce, however, goes to the two restaurants affiliated with the farm, both called Blue Hill: one is on the farm itself and the other in Manhattan. In total, the two Blue Hills serve 1,500 meals a day, always using fresh produce which can be reliably traced to its source, and prepared under the guidance of the talented young chef Dan Barber.
The project works wonderfully well—it is a prototype that should be replicated elsewhere. This association between farm, restaurant, the public, and young farm workers, with its focus on sustainability and quality, is an extremely modern production model, which is profitable and completely multifunctional. It shows that this approach can work, and there is a real alternative to traditional agribusiness on an industrial scale, with its unsustainable model of selling and distributing food.
I think of the absurdity of farmers demonstrating in Puglia because their standardized, low-quality produce wasn’t bought by a mass-distribution system already flooded by overproduction in other areas (some of it perhaps from abroad, where the vegetables and fruit ripen earlier and are cheap). When angry protests broke out because a whole year’s profits were in danger of being lost, the government was forced to pay the farmers subsidies, thereby distorting the market, while the surplus was sent to poor countries in the form of humanitarian aid, undermining those countries’ fragile markets and their already problematic and meager production. Instead, what we must do is redefine the distribution systems, shorten the chains, and take our example from model firms like Stone Barns or from small projects of local direct trade, as in Chiapas.
If they were to emphasize quality and variety—rather than quantity, as demanded by the industrial food distribution system—and at the same time develop alternative and local markets, for whom added values such as quality, purity, and justice would be worth the price of a product, I am sure that the farmers of Puglia could avoid situations such as that of the summer of 2005 and could finally have a real chance to improve their lot.
3. CREATING A FAIR AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM
One of the present drawbacks of the agricultural system, both at the global and at the local level, is that of the distribution systems. The last fifty years have seen not only the industrialization and consequent centralization of agriculture (read, specialization by geographical areas) and mass exodus from rural areas, but also the perfecting and improvement of food conservation techniques. Today, a particular food can easily travel from one side of the globe to the other, and in many cases this is actually indispensable, if one thinks of products of mass consumption such as tea, coffee, or cocoa, which are consumed globally but can be grown only in certain areas, or of the provision of food for those large sections of the world population (about half of it) who live in urban areas where food is more difficult to produce. However, with transport and preservation so easy and widespread in the food industry, farmers in many areas have had to abandon crops in the face of a flood of outside competition. Natural selection has been replaced with industrial methods that are homogenizing and damaging to biodiversity. The volume of transportation in the industry has soared, although the distance traveled by a food item is almost never reflected in its final price, and this overall increase in transportation has had a devastating impact on the environment.
Moreover, the forming of a global distribution system, dominated by a few big operators who draw strength from their financial structure and supranational operations (although there are plenty of smaller operators, too), has filled the production chain with innumerable intermediaries, thus helping to increase even further the distance between producer and consumer.
Our proposed counterbalance to this distance is, of course, the network of gastronomes and the figure of the co-producer. But the problems posed by this long chain of intermediaries go beyond that of the distance (physical or cultural) between the two ends of the chain. Rather, the graver concern lies in matters of economics, ecology, and social justice.
Take the case of the coyote (the first intermediary for Latin American farmers who live far from the centers of population but who produce crops for the mass market): the coyote exploits the work of the farmers, who are often deep in debt and suffer from the fluctuating performance of their monoculture crop on the world market. And then there is the Italian example, where farmers faced derisory prices on the wholesale market for goods that netted exceptionally high prices on the retail market. Such distribution practices can be shamefully unjust, as when producers are suddenly excluded from the channels of distribution because of a fluctuation in the price of coffee or cocoa on the world stock market, or they can be almost comic—though no less significant—as in the case of the “Dutch” tulip bulbs in the greenhouses of Costigliole d’Asti (see Diary 1).
The problem of the reorganization of food distribution is therefore of crucial importance; it is one of the essential tasks if we are to give back to the agricultural system the characteristics of the good, clean, and fair, which are being demanded by the gastronomes, producers, and co-producers of the whole world.
Once again, it is not a question of completely rejecting the present system or of repudiating the figure of the trader or the role of trade. Rather, it is a question of exploiting the system’s potential, as in the “dialogue between realms,” though in awareness of the limitations with which it is confronted and introducing the new concept of sustainable quality as an essential prerequisite to any operation.
3.1 Giving new meaning to trade
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, in his Physiologie du goût, maintained that “gastronomy belongs to trade, because of its search for the means of buying at the best possible price that which it consumes and of selling at the highest possible profit that which it puts on sale.” It is true that these are the principles that govern trade: buying and selling at prices that allow the biggest possible profit. A trader is successful to the extent that he succeeds in carrying out the transaction to his greatest advantage. In light of what has been said so far, however, I believe that this rule needs to be reconsidered today: the utilitarian and individualistic spirit of the trader, which has profited him for centuries, must be corrected in a more altruistic direction, or at least in a communitarian direction. And this, it should be noted, must be done in the interest of the traders themselves, who are not excluded from the “community of destiny” that concerns us all without distinction.
In the food sector, the refinement of the techniques for “buying at the best possible price” and selling at the highest possible profit has led to a complete domination by trade. The increasingly centralized systems of distribution are no longer respectful of the dignity of the producing communities and of the co-producing consumers. Even the trader’s role loses all dignity, reducing the value of food to its mere monetary value, devoid of the many connotations for which I am arguing in this book.
But most of all, this conception of trade in effect excludes from the circuit the highest-quality producers, who find themselves outcasts with no market at all for their wares or, in the more fortunate cases, a market described as “niche”—that is to say, an elitist, exclusive outlet incapable of generating real wealth and development. Reevaluating trade also means rejecting that continual refrain that the gastronome is always having to cope with: “Quality is expensive, it costs too much, it is not democratic.” Reevaluating trade means in the first place involving the traders themselves in the recovery of the nobility of their art, so as to place it in some degree at the service of the community and the network, participating in the project for a new distribution system.
The traders would have to recognize the rights of the producing communities and of the co-producers. As it stands, all those who are conscious gastronomes, united in their efforts to achieve a better system and a virtuous network, are excluded from the system—whereas in fact they can and must continue to play a crucial role. For his part, the trader must be able to turn himself into a vehicle of information, as well as of products and money. He must guarantee the transparency of the chain, limiting himself in his speculation and applying the principles of “quality” himself. Within this new gastronomic distribution network, the trader must share the values of the network so as not to be considered stubbornly extraneous to it and repaid in the same coin that he is currently giving to the communities and the co-producers: exclusion. At present, the commercial network too often stifles information about food; as well as tilting the food economy in its favor, it does not communicate with the subjects with which it has to deal, taking care to keep them well apart. But the trader is a channel along which information about food must travel. I am thinking of what used to happen at the village store or during bargaining at the local market: the trader described the product, provided information about its provenance, its characteristics, and the original human and productive factors. From here, it is only a short step to the defense of these little shops or other forms of direct trade, face to face. This, too, will be a task for the network.
We must provide a basis for the traders themselves to begin to think about a new way of trading, a healthy way to guarantee dignity to all, where “the best possible price” and “the highest possible profit” take on new meanings; where it is not just money that counts, but social justice, respect for the environment, and, of course, respect for those who produce and for those who eat and put their trust in them. Trade must be a noble art at the service of the community, and the process will be complete when the rights to equity and fairness are also shared by those who trade, in the sense that they, too, will be able to appeal to them in the same way as the producing communities and the co-producers do.
If the network of gastronomes can respond to these needs and can involve and educate those who practice a new kind of trade (they are, after all, indispensable), its expansion will immediately cross the path of those who are already experimenting with alternative forms of trade (such as fair trade) and other networks which do not yet feel that they are “gastronomic” but which have made important experiments in new forms of commercialization.
The gastronome who joins in the network, therefore, accepts Brillat-Savarin’s definition of trade but is immediately able to make his own distinctions and qualifications. These will be the basis for a food distribution system that is able to exchange knowledge and values between its various components.
3.2 Limiting intermediation
While giving due consideration to the value of trade, its role, and the rules that it must impose on itself to give and acquire dignity, in the planning of new networks what emerges clearly is that intermediation must be limited as much as possible. That is obvious both if we are to succeed in accomplishing the cultural and political project of creating numerous “new gastronomes,” and if we are to eliminate the economic injustices which cause many other problems (it is a far from ridiculous theory, for example, that the main cause of the problem of hunger in the world is the global system of food distribution).
Limiting intermediation means in the first place shortening the chain along which a product passes from the field to the table. A new start must be grounded on a healthy localism for all those kinds of food which can be grown, raised, and processed near their areas of consumption. Where is the sense in making vegetables, fruit, and meat travel across continents if they can be (and they almost always can) produced locally? Local food has the advantages of freshness, of a greater preservation of flavor in its journey to the table (many “export” varieties have been selected to meet criteria of preservation and resistance to travel, neglecting crucial gastronomic factors such as goodness and taste), and respect for certain criteria of sustainability. For example, with small local productions, the use of chemicals can be very limited, the produce does not travel and therefore does not pollute, and rural areas are kept alive with a native and variegated production (urban purchasing groups are an excellent way of connecting the city to the living countryside).
One of the first advantages of this localism is a significant reduction in speculative intermediation, for if the product has a shorter distance to travel, it is almost obvious that it will pass through fewer hands (and fewer increments to the final price).
I find it paradoxical that near my hometown there is a supermarket located in the middle of what is commonly known as Italy’s “garden state”: here, many excellent varieties of fruit and vegetables are grown which can be bought directly from the producers or at the weekly markets in town, but many of my fellow townspeople prefer the absurd practice of going to the above-mentioned supermarket and buying, perhaps imported from Chile, the same kind of vegetable which they could find almost on their own doorstep. They pay a higher price and get less enjoyment (for those vegetables cannot compete in taste with a freshly picked product and a good native variety) buying a product which has further polluted its land of origin and the whole earth by its intercontinental journey. What is more, in the making of that product it is likely that somebody’s work has been exploited, and that biodiversity has been sacrificed to set up industrial monocultures suitable for export. I cannot see much sense in all this.
The task of the network of gastronomes must therefore be to encourage the circulation of goods and products inside the network, in the most sustainable manner possible, respecting the dignity and gratification of those who produce, and emphasizing a concern for quality among all participants. A network of this kind will have the aim of limiting any intermediate commercial shipments that are unnecessary or unsustainable, as well as guaranteeing control of prices to keep them equitable both for sellers and buyers.
In this way, real control over the chain is given back to the producers and the co-producers, to the food communities, who will ensure that the necessary information is circulated together with the products. Thus, we will be able to avoid the situation, so common at the moment, where information and profits are concentrated in the hands of a few subjects. For in this scenario, the traders, simply by distributing the food, have more power and control than those who work in the fields and those who consume, both of whom end up completely cut off from the chain.
The simple rule to follow in order to circulate products in the network is to make food travel as short a distance as possible. By applying a principle of local adaptation, one can begin with the satisfaction of local demand and then gradually expand when quantity, quality, and the prices of products allow it—without renouncing trade and always respecting the limit of sustainability, or that common sense which I mentioned in chapter 3.
3.3 Putting new elements of evaluation into the commercial circuit
Often the long journey traveled by a product makes it possible for it to be consumed even out of season. This, in my opinion, is not acceptable, because it does not conform to the criterion of naturalness; it certainly increases the number of intermediations a product goes through, not to mention lengthening and centralizing the commercial food chain. Unfortunately, to argue that this kind of trade should not exist is rather utopian, given the potential of the products and the tendency (temptation) toward diversification of his own table that every gastronome has. Here, too, I would recommend common sense, a fair evaluation of the process, and, if I may say so, a sensitivity toward restraint which is part of that honest sobriety I will discuss later and which must be one of the characteristics of the good gastronome.
But the concept of the traveling product is not to be rejected absolutely. In many cases, journeys are necessary; in others, they are simply tolerable because (as in the case of transport by sea) they are not very pollutant and they might even, if the commercial system is equitable, provide important economic opportunities for the producing communities.
From the point of view of transport, a possible idea (as far as the network is concerned at first, but extendable to the whole distribution sector through incentives, taxation, and restrictive laws) would be to introduce a concept similar to that calculated by the researchers Tim Lang and Jules Pretty: food miles (see chapter 3). These comprise the calculation of the environmental costs and of all other “negative externalities” related to the commercial journey that a product faces. They are an important index of sustainability and, to make a practical suggestion, the network of gastronomes could start to indicate them on the label (not only the place of production, but the various means of transport used) and to monetize (for example with a supplementary price) any environmental cost that may be involved.
I am convinced that this form of economic redistribution, this way of conveying useful information, would be a “natural” factor inciting the network system and the general system toward a healthier and fairer localism. By quantifying the number of intermediations and revalorizing trade with new responsibilities, food miles would make prices more transparent—and the buying of an unsustainable product would be a far more considered act than it is today. The system would be redistributed over a production chain that has expanded from the local to the global, satisfying in the first place the needs of the local population and then, if possible (bearing in mind the quantities, the characteristics of the product, and sustainability), those of other communities not easily able to obtain the products in question.
Such a system would provide an incentive to development based on self-sufficiency in the poorer areas of the world and would adjust in a sustainable way—but perhaps it is better to say in a gastronomic way, considering all aspects of quality—the balance of consumption in the richer areas.
3.4 How can the project work? Nodes, communities, chefs, gastronomes, and a stock of products
A project of alternative distribution as I have described it in the preceding sections must rely on the network: it is an essential working project for the new gastronomes. Few intermediaries, a new kind of trade, a preference for consumption at a local level, the introduction of informative elements such as food miles: all of this would find a very fertile terrain in which to spread, at the same time exchanging influences with already existing networks, such as fair trade, that seek to practice systems of sustainable distribution.
But for a project, principles are not enough: one must also think about what to do in practical terms. It is difficult to rely on existing distribution systems, though it is true that some are indeed more sensitive to the themes of sustainability and local consumption. I think we must do our best to become active subjects of this distribution: using all possible channels, starting with the basic nodes of the network—the communities—which maybe both productive and distributive units, and carrying out a direct exchange with other communities in the network. From this point of view, too, we will need a service structure whose purpose is to make transport as easy and sustainable as possible, making use of traders who renounce simple utilitarianism and themselves become bearers of shared values and controllers of the process.
It is not only the producing communities, the traders, and the co-producers who must work together: all the other subjects can make their contributions. Starting with the chefs, for example, the people who are most active in the direct search for good (and one presumes, clean and fair) products, who often have preferential channels of communication with the communities and the individual producers. Their experience can be a driving force and an excellent point of departure for reflection on distribution systems. If they put themselves at the service of the network, the network could only gain. Moreover, the promotional value of the use of such products in their restaurants is unrivalled, especially as it is generally accompanied by correct information about provenance and mode of use. On the part of the chefs who enter the network of new gastronomes, a precise commitment to the adoption of products of food communities near and far (respecting the criteria of sustainability) is another vital step, given their prominence and the new functions that they are assuming on the global gastronomic scene. We must free chefs from the burden and the game-playing of the media circus, of the competition for points in the guidebooks, whose hierarchy of stars pays little attention to the role of the food system, despite its relevance for the future of the restaurant business. It is in the chefs’ interest to take on this responsibility, and they should draw full advantage from their gesture, aware of their role as custodians of culinary knowledge and of the best uses of good, clean, and fair products.
The co-producers themselves, formerly mere “consumers,” are also called upon to make a significant contribution, now that they know how best to orient their choices, how to be aware in selecting products, and how they might help fulfill their desire to bring producers nearer in all senses. In this way, the co-producer becomes precisely that: he studies alternative systems, seeks the nearest quality products, promotes the work of the communities, even ones remote from him but needing support. The co-producing gastronome, with his commitment to education, to the preservation of knowledge and forms of production, with his search for quality and his sense of community, is another fundamental element in this virtuous distribution network.
The network of new gastronomes, basing itself on an exchange of experience and information, can find the best way to make products circulate. Equipping the food-producing units and communities for selling is a fundamental step, for it will be necessary to activate all possible channels for direct trading of products. An idea that might make this work a little easier would be to publish (preferably online) a directory containing the characteristics of the products, their location, the names and contact details of the producers, guidance for sustainable purchasing, and the prices.
The directory could be organized like a normal hypertext database, with many possible search methods (according to criteria of geography, sustainability, need for support on the part of the community, possibility of buying groups, as well as all the other basic search methods, such as by producer name). Fields of the database would include all the values and information most suited to the new forms of distribution that we hope to introduce.
In this way, the producing and co-producing communities would be close to each other at a virtual level (potential food communities in cyberspace), able to contact each other directly or through a commercial channel that for once does not completely bypass them. They could create new alliances and new chains, in which intermediation—not speculative but working in the interests of common growth—would be guaranteed by the producing communities themselves or by traders respectful of the rights of all.
To redesign food distribution in this way would, moreover, be to adjust its balance in an equitable direction, dealing even with very serious problems, such as malnutrition, in a more constructive manner—for example through the revival of agricultural systems where they have disappeared. Giving the poorest communities the incentive to join the network and implement a new agriculture (ecological and small-scale), whose purpose is to satisfy the community’s most immediate subsistence needs, is perhaps better than salving one’s conscience by sending them free food aid. Such charitable handouts are often only a way of solving the problem of what to do with the surpluses of subsidized agriculture in the rich areas; as such, they represent a forced introduction into the poor areas, outside the laws of the market, of products without a price, thereby undermining the existing resources of the local markets and all desire to construct a real model of sustainable development.
Instead, in emergency cases such as malnutrition or natural disaster, it would be the network that would activate itself, responding to the needs of the communities connected with it, while remaining careful at the same time not to introduce excessive distortions into the system, always conforming to values of free giving and without any immediate obligation to receive anything in exchange. Such, in essence, are the values that should eventually characterize the whole network, reversing the utilitarian logic that currently dominates our markets and all the systems of production. Put simply: better a high level of Gross Domestic Happiness than a high level of Gross Domestic Product.
When I was a child, it was the custom in my family to invite members of the local community who lived in poverty to lunch at religious holidays. The practice was so natural to my mother that it never occurred to me to wonder about the reason for these curious acts of hospitality.
In fact, I think my mother had adopted the habit from the peasant world into which she was born: it was a spirit of generosity to others which, as I later learned from friends of mine who were experts on rural Italian society, was the norm. In the Piedmontese countryside, it was common practice to leave an empty place at the patriarchal table, ready for any eventuality and reserved for a guest.
These “guests” were wayfarers, people who roamed the countryside living on their wits—beggars, destitutes, people who had fallen on hard times for health or financial reasons. The empty place was also next to the man of the house; it didn’t matter whether the “guests” were shabbily dressed or even bad-smelling. In all this, it is true that there is much of Christian culture, which is deeply rooted in the Italian countryside—it was important to show that you could be a good Samaritan—but I think there is actually something more, something profoundly ingrained in the country life.
I had confirmation of this when I interviewed the poet Wendell Berry for a dialogue published in the cultural pages of La Stampa, and we turned to the subject of the economy of rural communities. He explained to me that in order to make a local economy work well, one must first think about subsistence and then, if there is any surplus, “use it for charitable work or trade.” This seemed to me a rather idealistic idea, but Berry persisted:
In the past, before agriculture was so industrialized, before we had all these tools to reduce the workload, we did our duty in our families and exchanged work with our neighbors. The rule was that no one stopped working until everyone else had finished their harvest. I knew people who were proud of having worked in all the farms of the area without ever receiving a penny. This is not capitalism; at most it can be seen as a strange form of investment: investing in the body of the community.65
Indeed, when I worked on my collections of interviews for the Atlante delle grandi vigne di Langa, the words of the old country people always expressed this aspect of rural society, which was sincerely imbued with a sense of generosity and readiness to give freely, without expecting anything in exchange. I remember in particular one woman, a small trader, who told me: “We used to help each other; I remember there was a family of twelve people and the mother was sick: so we, the women of the other families, did her washing and then we all cooked lunch together.”66
That place at the table at Christmas and Easter was a legacy of that culture, in which people were always ready for mutual help with food and work. I am increasingly convinced that these forms of generosity were not merely dictated by a sort of peasant morality, that they were not just a sort of religious precept that one had to obey, but that they were an integral part of the economy of those communities.
Generosity as an economic form: it was a way of coping with social positions of poverty, with forms of hardship, and it had a precise meaning. As Berry said, it was a form of investment. Nowadays, the order of values is the exact opposite. I don’t want to sing the praises of the old days (for, apart from anything else, poverty was much more common in those days), but I do think that if I look at the present situation with the same pragmatism with which, in recent years, I evaluated those extra places at my table as economic acts, I would be firmly convinced that there is still a great need for such acts—for new and old forms of rustic generosity.
4.CREATING A NEW SYSTEM OF VALUES FOR THE NETWORK OF GASTRONOMES
One of the fundamental characteristics of the network of gastronomes is its humanity. This humanity can be capitalized in a practical sense, in the first place by promoting the free circulation of people within the network, restoring to travel its irreplaceable educational function as a means of actually bringing into contact with one another people who belong to different communities and who therefore represent different identities. The creative force of diversity is achieved through contact, not only virtual (however indispensable that is in our case), but also physical, which requires among other things a continual exercise of the senses and the intellect in order to make fruitful exchanges.
Individualism, egoism, and the economic advantages gained through politics or through forms of old or new colonialism are difficult to uproot from the minds of those who practice these “anti-values” as a strategy of domination and as their only form of the search for happiness. I believe that meeting, traveling, and having direct and profound contact with other cultures is the best way to spread a new common way of thinking. But in order for people to get to know each other, it is necessary that they have, in addition to being able to actually meet, a predisposition to welcome, to discover, to share, to feel the joy of life. Is it utopian to think of a world where hospitality is a shared value as it was in the countryside years ago, when even the poorest family always had a place reserved for a wayfarer or a beggar? Apart from the fact that I am convinced that he who sows utopia will reap reality, I am certainly convinced that a predisposition for giving freely can be very realistic if one begins to think that this predisposition, like other values, has an economic meaning, even if that meaning is not monetizable. What I mean is this: who gets rich in this world? How valuable is the traditional knowledge of the producing communities that are disappearing? How valuable are the acts of conservation operated by those who, simply by their work, succeed in producing in a sustainable way, in preserving the good, clean, and fair that exists in the world? How valuable is a present, a bed to sleep in, an invitation to a table, a sharing of one’s own identity, and an openness to those of others?
Just as I have proposed that we put on the balance sheet the environmental costs, which are so difficult to quantify, I want analogously to propose the project of a network which gives economic weight to the important values that it carries within it—not translating them into money, nor trying to make a profit from them, but inserting them in a logic of exchange, or rather in a logic of giving freely where there is no utilitarian exchange, but a mutual giving of knowledge, hospitality, opportunities, tastes, visions of the world, and educational elements. It is a question of giving without asking, but in the certainty that one will receive something in exchange because we are all on the same level, with the same dignity and the same predisposition to make others grow, in an awareness of the limits, and with a commitment not to exceed them merely to enrich oneself with money and lose in humanity.
4.1 The value of travel
No system of transmitting knowledge within the network can ever replace direct contact. As gastronomic science teaches us, the exercise of one’s own sensoriality, trying, tasting, contact with producers and with chefs, is the best way of learning how to interpret reality. To achieve this form of learning, it is necessary to move, to meet people, to experience other territories and other tables. If we apply this conviction to the network, it is vital to guarantee the circulation within it of people, from one side of the globe to the other, without distinction and without restriction. The right to travel becomes fundamental, a premise on which to base cultural growth and the self-nourishment of the network of gastronomes.
The value of Terra Madre, apart from all other considerations, was partly that of travel, of giving the chance to travel to people (the “intellectuals of the earth”) who had never been able to leave their own villages, their own territories, their own regions, to see a section of the world, in a place where they were welcomed by other country dwellers and people engaged in food production and where they would meet five thousand other men and women who worked on the same front as they. In fact, the idea is more revolutionary than it might seem. How many people of the rich West travel in order to solve the problems of those who are in difficulty? And how much does this cost? I am not referring only to a missionary logic, but also to someone who has fewer proselytizing aims and perhaps at most has a sacred respect for the environmental and cultural systems in which he goes to operate.
The educational value of travel has no equal in a world—that of food production based on traditional knowledge—where knowledge is handed down in a direct manner supported by empirical demonstration, trial, and work itself. The image of thousands of representatives of the food communities traveling the world and receiving hospitality from other communities may worry those who have an interest in maintaining the present situation. The diffusion of knowledge achieved in this way could be dramatic; it could open the minds of intelligent people who today are bowed down by the sheer effort of surviving and of producing, without any gratification, our food. People who feel alone and abandoned, left culpably devoid of any opportunity to enrich themselves from the cultural point of view, suddenly offered the chance to come into contact with a network that shares their efforts and ideas. These are people who are tempted to abandon their invaluable work: but I saw new hope in the eyes of those who participated in Terra Madre, and this has been confirmed by the news I received once they returned to their communities. And this hope would have been born even without the discussions during Terra Madre. All it took was travel, the chance to meet other people, and pride in feeling important with their own knowledge and products. The anxiety to make themselves known, which was the most common feeling among the participants during the event, was the clearest proof of this. These people have much to say and much to give; we must provide them with the opportunity to do so.
At the planning level, it is not a question of inventing methods of exchange, cultural formats, or particular theories; all we need to do is make it possible for these people to travel, to help them to do so. They will do the rest. We must, in the perspective of a “dialogue between realms,” in the conviction of the value of traditional knowledge and of the humanity which these people convey, encourage a faith in them and in their potential, and especially the potential of the younger generation.
The most deserving of the young people (according to criteria such as a passion for their work, their aspirations and plans, and even their idealism) should be able to dedicate a year of their lives to discovering other agricultural or productive realities and to carrying their experience and culture around the world. Instead of spending a year doing such activities as military service, the young of the food communities should be able to travel around the world to communities richer than their own, to poorer communities, to places where analogous forms of cultivation and production are practiced, and to the universities that teach agroecology.
The network of gastronomes could identify possible sources of finance for the journeys, and for their part, the communities, the chefs, and the universities could provide hospitality free of charge for a certain period to these young intellectuals of the earth. It will be necessary, of course, to draw up some rules, but the main principle is that of giving freely, of exchange without obligation, of being aware that these people are the conveyors of experiences that are valuable and that this value is the only price that is asked of them in exchange for their formative journeys.
Guaranteeing the right to travel (almost a duty for the young food producers and the gastronomes of the whole world) is another task for the network of gastronomes, weaving a system of values that will give to all the right of earthly citizenship, the right to be an active part of our “community of destiny.”
The network of gastronomes will inevitably clash with individualism, the distances between cultures, and the distances between economies. The principle of guaranteeing within it the circulation of information, knowledge, products, and people is one that unites people—in particular, those who can’t even dream of having these new experiences within the system of values that economic globalization is imposing. We must give economic value to other human values, in order to reconcile individual advantage with that of the group.
The gift and giving freely: to rediscover the value of the gift and of giving freely in a world like ours is to breathe life into the system of new earthly citizenship that responsible gastronomes desire. To make available one’s own house, one’s own food, one’s own culture is to open oneself to the world and to welcome it, in the awareness that one profits by this. The profit is not merely economic; it also consists of the certainty of increasing one’s knowledge, one’s intellectual wealth, and one’s potential for development.
Free hospitality nourishes the system of unrestricted travel and reintroduces an element of exchange that links together the diversities in a creative force. The exchange does not claim to be equal; the giving does not demand anything in return and does not create any obligations, but is based on confidence in those who share one’s own community of destiny—on the confidence that the destiny of a product or of economic resources has as much value as what one gets back in knowledge, diversity or, much more simply, in friendship.
What is the value of knowledge? It is incalculable, but its worth becomes tangible in a network that is open to exchange, that puts its resources into circulation. Knowledge is an inalienable right of all people, and it is nourished when this right is shared among people. Knowledge is an opportunity that grows and spreads in the complexity of the world. Everyone must be able to participate; there must be no second-class or third-class knowledge; every kind of knowledge has the same value, and can become currency.
What is the value of saving, of sobriety? Wastage in the world has reached critical levels. It is unfair, and uneconomical—and not least because that which is wasted, if it were reused, would be an as yet unexploited resource. If consciences do not change in this regard, we will face increasing difficulties. We cannot ask everything of politics, we must begin to behave differently, starting with our own little everyday acts. What is saved must not become part of a logic of accumulation; what is saved can be given. Everyone must take on this responsibility, everyone can make their contribution. And in the vision of a network in which everyone is guaranteed the right to mobility and knowledge, the principle of sobriety becomes essential if resources are to be shared.
Gastronomy itself, before we forgot its more complex and important meanings, before it became a folkloristic exercise and was characterized by abundance and elitist wealth, endeavored to be an honest science practiced with moderation and sobriety. Still fundamental in this respect is the book by Bartolomeo Scappi, alias Il Platina, De honesta voluptate (On Honest Pleasure), where, alongside rules for eating well, there is an honest voluptuousness: this voluptuousness enhances pleasure, in responsible consumption, in the awareness that excess is always wrong, because it takes away richness and well-being from something or somebody, starting with ourselves. And excess is all the more wrong today, with the serious imbalances that weigh upon our staggering earth, imbalances which cause suffering to millions of farmers who work to produce food and to billions of people who are not able to eat as they could. Following a principle of sobriety is therefore the final (or principal) rule for the new gastronome, who joins a network for the common good: the gastronome who desires that his search for culinary pleasure, his atavistic need, should not deprive anyone else of the same pleasure—that of consuming a good, clean, and fair product, of which we may legitimately feel we are co-producers.