Day 9: The Forever Bus and The Slow Food Movement

Tuesday, June 14th 2011

Our Mission: Visit Slow Food Headquarters.

We were off to a rough start...about an hour behind our scheduled 5am departure time, to be exact. But after 8 hours of sleeping, drooling, reading, complaining, and breathtaking views on the "Forever Bus," manned by our burly, yet gentle and steady driver, Claudio, we were in Bra.

For most foreigners, Bra is not your typical tourist destination, unless you are a food fanatic and promoter of local food systems like we are. A small town located in the northwestern Piedmont region of Italy, Bra is the birthplace of Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement.

Founded in 1989, Slow Food is an international “eco-gastronomic,” non-profit, grassroots organization that promotes good, clean, and fair food in terms of consumption and production.

• Food that is good for the person, the community and the land that it comes from.
• Food that is clean in the sense thatit is produced in harmony with the environment and is healthy for human consumption.
• Food that is fair in that it is sold for exactly what it is worth and it is accessible for consumers.

With over 100,000 members spanning across 160 countries, Slow Food has created a network of 2,000 food communities who are geared towards local, small-scale, and sustainable production of quality food.

Why local and small-scale?

Slow Food believes that fewer food–miles not only allow for fresher tasting food, but also allow for better knowledge and control of the food people eat along with ensuring the maintenance of traditional, environmentally sustainable production methods, and the preservation and protection of local landscapes.

Terra Madre

One of Slow Food’s largest initiatives is the Terra Madre network which provides a voice to small-scale farmers, breeders, fishers, and food-artisans by connecting them with academics, cooks, consumers, and youth groups with the aims of working to improve the food system while protecting the environment and communities.

During our time at Slow Food Headquarters, our group met with the lovely Carmen Wallace, a Slow Food representative who gave us an in-depth overview of Slow Food International. Afterward, we had a stimulating discussion with Cinzia Scaffidi, another Slow Food representative, who helped us understand the Slow Food Movement in the context of the themes covered in our course.

According to Cinzia, Slow Food promotes Food Sovereignty and agricultural reform, especially as a vehicle for food security and gender equality in the developing world. The industrialization of our food systems has led to a market-oriented system that caters to big enterprises, making it extremely difficult for small-scale farmers to access and compete in that market. This is exemplified in the recent "land grabbing" phenomenon of the last several decades, where large agricultural corporations are acquiring the best lands for production of food for profit (lands which they also pollute and deplete of precious nutrients). If food security is a concern of the poorest 1 billion people in the world, then they are not customers of the big agricultural industries, whose number one objective is to generate profit. They need access to land for cultivating their own foods, lest they depend on the big industry and the industrialized market.

As far as Food Sovereignty and gender equality are concerned, Cinzia discussed how women and young girls are known to indicate the well-being of a society as a whole. To explain, she used the analogy of roses in a vineyard:

In Italy, roses are planted at the front of each vineyard-line to serve as a warning system for parasites. When parasites are near, they will attack the roses first, and the farmers become aware of their presence. This way, they can take the necessary precautions to protect their crops.

Similarly, in the developing world, when families face chronic poverty and food insecurity, the first visible signs of this are among the women and young girls. They are the first to have their portions reduced, the first to be pulled out of school, and the last to see a doctor. Women, however invisible, are key players in agriculture, and more and more research is showing that food security and poverty eradication is achievable if we can empower women by giving them access to land and access to the market, so that they may feed their families.

Our meeting with Cinzia turned out to be quite rewarding and little discussions could be heard amongst some of us on the Forever Bus afterward, as we headed to Casa Scaparone, an agritourismo hotel we were expecting to stay at.

However, upon our arrival and to our surprise, we learned that, at the last moment, the hotel was not only unable to accommodate us, but was also abandoned and most likely haunted.

Although tensions were high (after a 14-hour day with all of us in extremely close quarters), our fearless leader Sabrina, supplemented by our prompt hotel-searching skills, found Hotel Madea, which was able to accommodate our party of 18. Although we were void of Chef Damiano’s delectable dinners, we managed to survive the night and began another day’s journey aboard the Forever Bus.