Good, Clean, Fair.

During our first week of class we had the pleasure of meeting with Carlo Petrini who welcomed us to UNISG and shared some of his thoughts about the state of our food system and the journey we are taking toward a solution.  I thought I would share some of the highlights with you.

“A revolution comes from joy, not from sadness. You need passion, joy to get things done.”

“Gastronomy without knowledge is ignorant. Knowledge without gastronomy is sad.”

In 1997 I went to Chicago and opened a farmers market. At that time there were 150 farmers markets in the US, at best. In 2000 there were over 500… And now, over 14,000.  Every day. “There is a revolution happening, but no one talks about it.  It changes the lives of so many people – people who were in IT jobs are now making goat cheese!”

In 2008 I closed the Terra Madre conference with an invitation to students to start school gardens. In 2009 Michelle Obama started a vegetable garden at the White House –  the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden – and urged kids to plant gardens too. Thus began a national conversation around the health and wellbeing of our nation—a conversation that evolved into her Let’s Move! initiative. “A revolution begins with small things, a vegetable garden, a farmers market…you need to raise consciousness, awareness, knowledge.”

What are the problems our food system is facing?

1. soil fertility is down. “The word for manure in Italian comes from the same root as the word for joy. How can shit bring us joy? Human and animals eat food, digest it, transform it and make manure. The earth follows a reverse process, starting with manure and ending with food. Gastronomy has a philosophy.”

2. water will become scarce.  78% of our water is used for agriculture, often in a non-rational way.

3. loss of biodiversity/lost animal breeds.  Our food system prefers only the strongest species and breeds. Carlo illustrated this point with a few stories that I will summarize. One, about potatoes…  When the Spanish conquistadors conquered Peru the Incas were growing over 200 varieties of potato.  They were brought back to europe, and were grown in the Basque region of Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries, then in England.  But it took over four decades for the potato to really catch on. A heavy reliance on just one or two high-yielding types of potato greatly reduced the genetic variety that ordinarily prevents the decimation of an entire crop by disease, and thus the Irish, who had come to depend on the potato as a major food source, became vulnerable to famine. And in the 1840s the entire crop was practically wiped out by disease.  Over 1 million people died of starvation and disease. Another million left Ireland, mostly for the United States and Canada.

The next story was about peppers. One of the traditional crops from Piedmont region of Italy are peppers. Carlo started to notice that the peppers he was eating locally were bland and poor tasting. He asked where are these peppers from? Who grows them? He was told the peppers were all being imported from Holland now, that the Dutch peppers were cheaper, and more uniform in shape.  He then asked, so what is growing in all of those greenhouses in Asti where they used to grow the peppers?  “Tulips”.  He told us that there is no market for tulips in Asti; they are shipped back to the Dutch. It is economy of scale vs. taste, nutrition, history, tradition.

4.  Farmers are poor, under-appreciated, and underpaid.  “We have to pay more for food.  People spend more money now on cars, clothes, shoes….it is a disaster to spend less on food. Cheap prices result in corner cutting… we have to pay more. Anything I eat, after a few minutes becomes Carlo Petrini. But Armani underwear is always on the outside.”

5. Food waste!

“But a trend is growing… it is interdisciplinary in approach.  Chefs can be farmers or cheese makers, or the other way around. New professions are cropping up in food production, where to sell, how to sell, how to set prices, how to organize collectives… new ways of advertising, food writing. It’s a new frontier. People care how their food is produced, where the animals are from and how they are raised. It is no longer just a need to consume … people want to be citizens not just consumers.”

So, how do we create a new food system? What will it look like?  “Our power is based in our dollars. How we spend our money. We need to be coproducers versus consumers. Buy from local farms. Use your money to choose. Buy organic, not beautiful! 30% of all organic food ends up in compost because a carrot is not pretty or an apple has a bruise. 30%! This all adds to the cost of organic food.”

His closing remarks to us … “You started the journey. You may not know where this journey will take you. But I can tell you one thing, you will leave here more confused than you are now. You may never know how immense the study of gastronomy is or where you fit.  But isn’t it exciting to explore an infinite science?! There will never be no new things to explore … always new frontiers. Important, You are here. You have begun.”