UPPERCRUST PEOPLE: CARLO PETRINI

Don Juan of the Slow Food World

Eating together and drinking together at the end of the day is a kind of sign of friendship or communion, and when that doesn't exist, it's a sadder, less cohesive society.

We go to our fridges and open them. But fridges are like tombs - places where food goes to die. And when it dies it goes straight into the bin. Our freezers are the same. Yet we feel we must have full freezers. All of us are joining in with this perverse culture.

It was on some remote hillside situated between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, surrounded by hundreds of 'international' goats that I was seated with an aloof and most unique goat cheese maker, discussing cheese and, not surprisingly, Carlo Petrini and the Slow Food movement. So well-known and respected is the pioneer of this movement that he has his fan following all across the world.

Here I was now, barely a couple of years later, seated across Petrini himself by the pool-side of Sun-n-Sand Hotel in Mumbai discussing his life, absorbing his views. All this through an interpreter because Petrini doesn't really speak English, though he understands it fairly well. Guess he is 'organic' even to that extent. After all, each of us thinks and expresses our self best in the language in which our 'mama' communicated with us, quaintly called 'mother tongue.' Italian is Carlo Petrini's native language.

Petrini was born on June 22, 1949 at Bra near Turin in Italy. The man has such laid-back elegance; he truly personifies what he stands for. He smiles as he talks, eyes alive and communicating, his gestures enthusiastic. He is happy to be in India and looks forward to starting a chapter in our country, of a movement he crusaded for, over 20 long years ago. In 1986, Petrini founded an association called Slow Food in Barolo, a town in the wine country of the Piedmont region. The organization grew out of a protest against the opening of a McDonald's, the fast food giants, near the Spanish Steps in Rome, where Carlo and his band of supporters brandished bowls of Penne as tools and weapons to express their distress. The group soon dedicated itself to the protection of traditional foods and agricultural biodiversity. "The movement was almost like a game at first; we didn't know it would explode like it did," he recalls. In 1989, in Paris, Slow Food became international. Affiliates continue to spring up, and today Slow Food has over 83,000 members in 122 countries. Needless to say, Carlo has never eaten at a McDonald though he did go to one "out of curiosity."

In his view, pleasure is the primary ingredient of food. When he declares that we should all "surely, slowly, fully and without excess enjoy the pleasures of the senses," he is heir to the hedonist philosophers of ancient Greece.

The Slow Food movement incorporates a series of objectives within its mission. These are: to form and sustain seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties; develop 'ecoregions', where local culinary traditions and foods are celebrated; preserve and promote local and traditional food products, along with their lore and preparation; organize small-scale processing (including facilities for slaughtering and short run products) and celebrations of local cuisine within regions (for example, the Feast of Fields held in some cities in Canada); promote "taste education"; educate consumers and citizens about the risks of fast food, the drawbacks of commercial agribusiness and factory farms and the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few genomes or varieties; develop various political programs to preserve family farms; lobby for the inclusion of organic farming concerns within agricultural policy, lobby against government funding of genetic engineering, against the use of pesticides; teach gardening skills to students and prisoners; encourage ethical buying in local marketplaces.

Thanks to all his efforts, Petrini commands a following few others can match in Italy. Once every two years, foodies and farmers flock to Turin from all over the world to attend an event that was launched by this one-time journalist who used to write restaurant reviews for Italy's communist dailies, back in 1996. Salone del Gusto, the Slow Food movement's biennial jamboree, is now one of the world's leading food fairs attracting more than 180,000 people over its five days. Since 2004 it has been joined by Terra Madre, a conference for a global network of small-scale farmers wedded to the slow food principles that aim to buck the ever-present threats of homogeneity, globalisation and methods of food production that are not environmentally sustainable.

Petrini also founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences, a school intended to bridge the gap between agriculture and gastronomy. It has two campuses in Northern Italy. The main campus is home to the three year undergraduate program and is located in Bra. The other campus is in Colorno, a small town outside of Parma in the Emilia-Romagna region and hosts the Italian and English language masters programmes. It was founded in 2004, as the first university devoted to the principles of the slow food movement, and it remains affiliated with the Slow Food movement.

In his book, Slow Food: A Case for Taste, Petrini underlines the importance of eating as a social event. But many people in today's world eat on the run, and many families don't sit down together at the dinner table anymore. What does he feel about that?

"Conviviality is one of the most fundamental aspects of eating together, and I'm hard pressed to think of something sadder than eating alone, without that social rite. Breaking bread is enrichment, and it's very important to keep alive the social aspects. When people don't eat together, they lose that element of the event. They lose an important aspect of the eating process. Eating together and drinking together at the end of the day is a kind of sign of friendship or communion, and when that doesn't exist, it's a sadder, less cohesive society," says the founder father of the Slow Food movement.

Talking about agribusiness, Petrini thinks application of industry to agriculture has caused massive damage. He doesn't think there is any virtue in it. Agribusinesses work for their own interests. "What you'd need to do in India or any third world country is to defend biodiversity, teach farmers to protect it. Presidia, one of our projects, helps small communities organize small projects. For example, there is a small community of women in Morocco who make oil from a plant called argon. It tastes a lot like almonds. We are encouraging the women to keep producing this oil. We have 500 such projects around the world."

"Slow Food has formed a foundation for biodiversity that helps sustain Presidia around the world, and they can be sustained in many ways. Some need help in marketing, and we help them create a network of sales. Others need structures to be built. Others involve the imparting of knowledge of old farmers to young farmers. Every Presidium has its own story, its own needs."

Carlo Petrini's organic way of thinking can best be summed up by an extract of a very interesting recent interview to a European newspaper, where he says, "We are now waiting for a new school of economic thought. But these new schools can only emerge, like plants, if you prepare the ground. There has to be a new humanism if this ground is really to be ploughed: a change in values and a change in the idea of what money means and what richness is. There hasn't been a true sense of reciprocity for a long time. It has been a life of egoism. You were seen as good because you were rich and had a good car. A new humanism has to push that out of the way. Rather than constant consumption it might be better to recycle and to give."

"In the past 50 years food has lost its value, this is what has to change. Back then it was sacred and respected. Waste is the fundamental characteristic of the consumer society. Everyday in Italy 4,000 tonnes of food are thrown away. Quality food has become a status symbol. The perception is that organic is for rich people and is a niche product. But I hate niches. That's where you put corpses. Poor people always end up with poorer quality food and yet there's this 4,000 tonnes of food being thrown out every day. But we are told to keep consuming. And who is the central character in all this? The Wizard of Oz? No, it's all of us. We go to our fridges and open them. But fridges are like tombs - places where food goes to die. And when it dies it goes straight into the bin. Our freezers are the same. Yet we feel we must have full freezers. All of us are joining in with this perverse culture. This historic moment has given us time for this kind of thinking. As long as quality is seen as a luxury, everything is a disaster. Quality should be a right for everyone. We should be producing less so there is less wastage." I have never heard truer words spoken. In conclusion I may add that Petrini is not averse to modernity, but says modernity is worth nothing if its price is forgetting the past. "Modern technology allows me to assure the best working conditions for the personnel in my kitchens. It allows me to guarantee the exact time and temperature for cooking the dishes. That's progress. But when it means banalizing the taste of products, that's a step back, and, cook that I am, I rebel," he signs off.