Slow
Food Award Bologna 2000
Bologna,
Italy 24 October, 2000 “This
truly is a United Nations of Gastronomy,” said Carlo Petrini, the
dynamic and charismatic founder and president of the Slow Food Movement,
proudly and emotionally looking around the vast and crowded hall. Within
the echoing splendour of Bologna’s 17th-century Aula Magna di Santa
Lucia, an immense and intriguing collection of individuals was gathered
for the 1st Slow Food Award. There were fishermen, shepherds, fruit
and vegetable growers, beekeepers, dairy workers and cheesemakers, breeders,
as well as researchers, agronomists, biologists and academics. We members
of the jury numbered over 550: writers, journalists, celebrities, opinion
makers from 82 countries representing five continents.
The Guild of
Food Writers was well represented, including Rosemary Moon, Clarissa
Hyman, Deh-Ta Hsiung, Juliet Harbutt, Henrietta Green, Clare Connery,
Darina Allen, Catherine Brown, Sarah Freeman, Stephen Brook, Carla Capalbo,
Lesley Chamberlain, myself and possibly others (the event was so huge
that it was impossible to keep track of everyone).
When a delegation
from the People’s Republic of China came to the front of the hall
to unroll a banner, there was spontaneous applause from the floor as
we heard through our simultaneous translation headphones that the characters
signified ‘Slow Food’ in Chinese (Deh-Ta, sitting next to
me, peered at the banner closely then chuckled: “Actually, it reads
‘Slow Meal’,” he explained sotto voce.)
“This
shows how far Slow Food has come,” continued Petrini. “But
I would say to you all that in the year 2000 it is not possible to be
gastronomists without also being environmentally aware.”
Social
awareness lies at the heart of the Slow Food movement. From its humble
grassroots origins, a movement that began as an individual and collective
protest born when McDonald’s opened its first restaurant on the
Piazza di Spagna in Rome in the 80s, Slow Food has now grown into an
important international organisation whose aim, above all, is to celebrate,
champion and safeguard local and regional food traditions, products,
and indeed, in the broadest sense, cultures and ways of life.
Thus,
this 1st Slow Food Award was created specifically ‘to spotlight
and support people anywhere in the world who defend, promote or enhance
our heritage of animal and vegetable species, produce, knowledge or
flavour. Every year it will be awarded to people who distinguish themselves
for the work they do and whom Slow Food recognises as guardians and
leaders of taste and promulgators of its own values. More specifically,
the Slow Food Award will seek to discover and give visibility to projects
designed to conserve the food culture of the past for the future.’
1.
“We
could have brought together the best chefs in the world here today,”
said Petrini. (Indeed the singular lack of ‘foodie’ celebrities,
chefs and personalities working visibly in the world of consumer food
and wine on the shortlist had surprised many of us.) “But chefs,”
he continued, “must first begin with the finest ingredients and
products. I am proud that we have here instead people who are actually
producing those ingredients and products, those who are working to safeguard
biodiversity, as well as protect human values, culture and traditions.”
The
shortlist of 13 finalists thus represented a truly remarkable and inspirational,
if somewhat unexpected, collection of individuals.
Nancy
Jones, an Englishwoman, was honoured for starting a dairy in Mauritania
to process and sell fresh milk from the nomadic herds of camels, cows
and goats, this in a country where the selling of milk has traditionally
been considered taboo. She explained how just finding the wandering,
nomadic herdsmen can often be a considerable challenge in itself; later
we had the opportunity to taste an intriguing cheese made from camel’s
milk.
Nancy
Turner, by contrast, is an ethnobotanist and writer who works with native
Canadians in British Columbia — the People of the First Nations
— to understand their culture, and painstakingly record and catalogue
their indigenous food plants and medicines. By befriending and sometimes
living with tribal groups, she has worked to safeguard a rich store
of previously unwritten knowledge and lore that had traditionally been
passed down from generation to generation amongst the many tribes populating
Vancouver Island.
Arturo
Chacón Torres and Catalina Rosas Monge are biologists seeking
to preserve stocks of the rare and apparently delicious pez blanco (or
silverside), a highly prized fish that only survives in Mexico’s
highland Lake Pátzcuaro. Raúl Antonio Manuel, another
Mexican honoured on the shortlist, is charismatic leader of the Rancho
Grande, an indigenous community in the mountains of Oaxaca. Here Manuel
has revived the cultivation of high-quality vanilla as a means of safeguarding
a remote rural community and way of life.
Donald
Bixby and his wife Pat, meanwhile, founded the American Livestock Breeds
Conservancy, located in North Carolina, to protect genetic diversity
in livestock and poultry by helping to conserve and promote rare and
endangered breeds of farm animals. This has been achieved through the
establishment of semen banks in order to safeguard these rare animals
threatened with extinctionon.
Turning
to Europe, Italian Roberto Rubino has gone to one of the country’s
poorest and most remote regions, Basilicata, and there established a
dairy for the transformation of milk from transhumant flocks that graze
‘sotto il cielo’ — in freedom under the skies. Moreover,
the cheeses so made are being matured once more in formerly abandoned
but historic maturing rooms, often hewn out of natural caves, in ancient
villages throughout the region. The results — and I had a chance
to sample them at the Salone del Gusto — are quite simply cheeses
with immense flavour, individuality, character and complexity, produced
in a manner that allows for the maintenance of traditional ways of life
and production.
Transhumance
— the annual transport of animals between summer mountain pasturelands
and winter lowland valleys, once an important and enduring feature of
rural life throughout Europe — is also the work of Jesus Garzón,
from Madrid, who has revived this traditional activity in Spain and
found ways and means for young people to live the life of transhumant
shepherds, moving several thousands of sheep to the mountains of Cantabria
for the summer, and hundreds of miles back south to Estremadura for
the winter.
The
theme of biodiversity and protecting rare species is evident in the
work of Roger Corbaz, a phytopathologist from Switzerland, who has worked
tirelessly to protect traditional species of fruit and nut trees at
the Arboretum d’Aubonne. From Russia, meanwhile, Maria Mikhailovna
Girenko, is celebrated for her work as director of the Vavilov Institute
of Research. Even through the difficult years under Stalin and the terrible
trauma of the siege of St Petersburg, this Institute somehow managed
to safeguard a rare and important collection of Russian plants, vegetables
and seeds. In the years and decades after the war, Maria Mikhailovna
helped the Institute grow into the third largest germoplasm bank in
the world.
Veli
Gülas is another fascinating shortlist finalist, a carpenter-turned-beekeeper
from Turkey’s remote region of Anatolia, east of the Black Sea.
Here Veli works to raise the native Hemsin bee, which can only survive
in the handmade wooden hives that he constructs out of cylindrical beech
trunks (the Hemsin bees, apparently, cannot live in angular manmade
hives, so elsewhere throughout the country Cypriot bees have replaced
them; but their honey is inferior and less individual). Another activity
in Turkey that was given recognition is the Dal-ko Fishermen’s
Cooperative, which specialises in the preservation and commercialisation
of the salted roe of grey mullet, known as haviar, a traditional product,
carefully gathered, salted and sealed in bee’s wax.
Finally,
there were two shortlist finalists from Oceania. Alan and Susan Carle
are the creators of The Botanical Ark, a 12-hectare garden on the northeast
coast of Australia where they have planted hundreds of rare and endangered
species of fruit, herbs and medicinal plants that they have painstakingly
gathered from all over the world. In New Zealand, by contrast, Graham
Harris has researched Maori potato cultivation, not only as a means
of studying plants but in the social context of its overall relation
to Maori tradition and culture.
What
a remarkable and fascinating shortlist of finalists, made up of ordinary
people working extraordinarily hard in their own particular corners
of the world to defend foods, economies, traditions and cultures. The
nomination for each finalist was read out by a jury member from a different
country, and the power of the human voice — in languages including
Moroccan, Swedish, French, Greek, Chinese, German, Cuban Spanish, Chilean
Spanish, Italian, Japanese, English, and the Malawian language of Chichewa
— added a profound and concrete tonal resonance to this exceptional
and truly global gathering.
It
was our role, then, as a collective body of 550 jury members, to vote
for five special jury prize winners, an almost impossible task. But
in truth, there were no losers in this ceremony. All 13 shortlisted
finalists were winners in every sense, and received both cash prizes
as well as the promise of support from Slow Food in promoting their
activities. The special jury prize winners received a further cash prize
as well as the not inconsiderable international kudos of having been
so recognised. They were: Nancy Jones, Veli Gülas, Raúl
Antonio Manuel, Maria Mikhailovna Girenko, and Jesus Garzón.
Yet
as international jury members, our most important raison d'être,
it turned out, was not really as arbiters there to distinguish between
winners and losers, but rather, more importantly, to give collective
international recognition and validity both to this amazing event, as
well as to all the shortlist finalists themselves and their remarkable
and varied activities.
Indeed,
for many of those who had been singled out, this was the first public
recognition they’d ever received, after years, in some cases a
lifetime, of anonymous dedicated toil, not for financial reward, not
even with the lofty goal of making a better world, but simply to safeguard
and protect their tiny corner of it. As Petrini had written in the preface
to the Slow Food Award book, “This award is an acknowledgement
of all the years, months and days they have spent lovingly tending to
the animal and vegetal species of this planet of ours, taking care of
each and every one of us, of the variety, quantity and quality of all
that reaches our tables, of what will remain in our memories and in
the memories of generations to come. These are men and women who have
cultivated a dream with uncommon energy and dedication...These people
are crazy, we thought. And what a good thing they are.” 2.
Veli
Gülas, the Anatolian beekeeper who had never been outside his country
before travelling to Bologna for the awards ceremony, summed the occasion
up with a directly simple and uplifting statement. Speaking hesitantly
through a translator, he said, “I produce my honey in the most
natural way as a natural product. They told me I was doing mankind a
service.” He shrugged, seemingly in genuine bewilderment, but then
added forcefully and with real conviction. “I intend to keep producing
my honey this way.”
We
made our way from the Aula Magna di Santa Lucia, uplifted and galvanised
by these remarkable individuals, by this remarkable event, and by Carlo
Petrini’s clarion words that sounded as a call to arms, yet worded
as a gentle plea, asking no more from each and every one of us save
that we writers and journalists continue to seek out, celebrate, give
recognition and voice to those artisan producers, researchers, defenders
of the local, the unique, the individual throughout the world who are
working on behalf of us all to maintain biodiversity in a world ever
threatened by the homogeneity that globalisation inevitably brings.
That
such fine produce and products both exist and can survive and thrive
even in commercial international markets was further emphasised in the
following days, when Slow Food, in conjunction with regional and provincial
governments, took all the participants — members of the jury, Slow
Food members and organisers, and award winners alike — on a series
of intelligently planned visits throughout the provinces of Emilia-Romagna,
witnessing, tasting, learning about such magnificent and world famous
regional products as Parmigiano Reggiano, prosciutto di Parma, and aceto
balsamico tradizionale di Modena, as well as less well known, even offbeat
yet exceptional and wholly individual rarities such as formaggio di
fossa (sheep’s milk cheeses aged in hermetically sealed tufa pits),
or the rare and magnificent culatello di Zibello (an exceptionally sweet,
highly valued raw ham cured in the humid lowlands of the Po Valley).
I
myself went out on a remarkable fishing trip in the Adriatic to witness
trawlermen catching a rich haul of alici — fresh anchovies —
and afterwards enjoyed the most exceptional shellfish and seafood meal
cooked on board by the fishermen themselves. We then went into the hinterland
above Rimini to visit medieval walled villages and discover some exceptional
and genuine local foods, including outstanding extra virgin olive oils,
fine cured meats, handmade pasta such as strangozzi and passatelli,
and great local cheeses.
From
Bologna, the whole great entourage moved on to Turin, to the Slow Food
sponsored Salone del Gusto, an immense food and drink exhibition in
that great northern city, that serves as an international showcase for
artisan food producers mainly from Italy and also from throughout the
world. Again, the event serves to celebrate the local, the artisan made,
and to give exposure to products that are rarely made in sufficient
quantity to be mass commercialised, but which are exceptional and wholly
worthy of our attention, not simply because they are traditional and
at risk, but, as the mass popularity and success of the Salone demonstrates,
because such products are both individual and because they taste better:
the huge numbers attending the Salone clearly indicates that intelligent
consumers appreciate this.
The
celebration and defence of biodiversity is a noble aim and Slow Food
is a noble organisation. We applaud Petrini and his colleagues: for
their vision, for their initiatives, for their audacity in conceiving
the Slow Food Award, and for their skill in not only making it work
so brilliantly but also so enjoyably for us all.
Ultimately,
the Slow Food Award was not just a celebration of the biodiversity of
produce, products and foodstuffs: it was a celebration of the biodiversity
of the human race. It was indeed a privilege to be there.
1.
From Slow Food Award Regulations, as published on Slow Food web site:
http://www.slowfood.com/activities/award/award02.html
2.
From the Preface to "Slow Food Award Bologna 2000 for the Defence
of the Biodiversity", 2000, Slow Food Editore srl, p. 9
Copyright
© Marc Millon 2000
