Sowing the Seeds Of Gastro-Activism

Eye on Italy:
Salone del Gusto 

FREDERIKA RANDALL / Wall Street Journal 2nov00

The Mela Roscetta di Montereale is a runty, scrawny little apple not much bigger than a walnut that grows on a very few messy, unpruned trees high up under the peak of the Gran Sasso in Abruzzo. I was taking tiny bites of one the other day as I pried my way through the mobs ogling rare hams, cheeses and wines at the vast, amazingly crowded Salone del Gusto food fair in Turin. More than bites, they were heavenly sips, really, for the high-altitude mela roscetta — mine came from a minuscule stock harvested by the park cooperative staff manning the stand of the Gran Sasso National Park — is so intense that it's like a little globe of nectar from the Garden of Eden. It's a close encounter with the Platonic form of Apple itself.

Having broached the Tree of Knowledge with that mela roscetta, I soon found I needed my wits about me at the Salone del Gusto, because the five-day "taste fair" of quality foods organized by the gastro-activists of Slow Food demanded at least as much thought as it did palate. In the 14 years since the Piedmont-based association Slow Food got off the ground with a protest against McDonald's, it has picked up 70,000 members in 45 countries and moved from Big Mac bashing to an ambitious agenda President Carlo Petrini calls "eco-gastronomy."

That meant that between a sliver of camel's-milk cheese and a slice of goat prosciutto, the organizers wanted us to think critically about genetic modification and industrial farming, to explore the merits of biodiversity and environmentally friendly agriculture, and to support local producers from upstate New York and central France to the Andes and the Urals. So this was a food fair promoting a big, serious bundle of issues — even if it wasn't clear how far that sank in with most of the 130,000 visitors who each paid 30,000 lire (about $13) to wander through the Salone.

Nancy Jones (left) and Maria Mikhailovna Girenko: Slow Food boosters

To get the message, those visitors first had to wade past the chilly spaces commanded by the big industrial sponsors (Barilla, Fiat), then thread their way among the siren calls of 500 small producers selling seductive things like glossy mozzarella di bufala from the plains of Paestum; tawny, autumnal ice wine from the eastern hills of Slovenia; lemon, flower-scented almond sweets from Catanzaro, Calabria; or Sardinian beef butchered from the rare red Sardo Modicana ox. Those who didn't shipwreck on too many glasses of wine and rich samples joined one of the 254 food workshops led by experts ranging from California's Alice Waters to Barcelona chef Ferran Adria.

Or they simply roamed the Praesidia section of the fair and learned about 91 endangered Italian foods, most of them based on indigenous plant and animal species, that Slow Food is trying to protect with its Ark Project. It's impossible not to love the Ark species, be they the apricots of Vesuvius that trace their lineage back to the fourth century; the late-bearing peaches of Leonforte, Sicily (an amazing pale-orange-colored fruit with a drop-dead peach smell); the "mora Romagnola" pig that still roams free in Emilia Romagna; or the "violino di capra della Valchiavenna," a Stradivarius-shaped goat prosciutto, seasoned with juniper and smoked over oak wood.

That camel cheese I mentioned hails from Nouakchott, Mauritania, where Nancy Jones, a fireball in a green headscarf who was born in England and transported by marriage to West Africa in 1970, set up a dairy to provide a market for camel-herding nomads. Ms. Jones was one of 13 finalists among more than 200 candidates for the first international Slow Food Awards, given out as the Salone opened. Another was Spaniard Jesus Garcon, who revived an ancient transhumance route for sheep that runs from Extremadura to Cantabria (the long trek by grazing animals improves the mountain ecology by spreading a variety of plant, and eventually animal, species).

Then there was Maria Mikhailovna Girenko of the Vavilov Institute of Pushkin, Russia, near St. Petersburg, who in a lifetime of work helped build up a plant-species bank of 341,000 genotypes. That precious hoard of biodiversity made it unscathed through Hitler's siege, but is now threatened by funding shortages. Roberto Rubino, director of the Experimental Zootechnical Station of Bella, near the southern Italian city of Potenza, was another prize finalist. It's his idea that many local and "marginal" agricultural practices in less-developed parts of the world today need to be looked at with a fresh eye. In his home region of Basilicata, grazing animals traditionally produced one-third the milk of the fat cows on the plains of Northern Europe. But that "poor" milk produced by free-range, indigenous breeds not only makes better cheese, it seems to have a different chemical profile than milk from barn-fed animals. Might it also be healthier for consumers? He and other researchers are trying to find out.

Meanwhile the rare, delicately flavored Caciocavallo Podolico cheese of Basilicata is becoming one of those sought-after high-quality food products seen as the basis of what somebody here called "new economy agriculture": small-scale, organic, targeted and high-profit. But for it to pay off in poorer parts of Southern Europe (and elsewhere), a lot of rules have to change. Milk quotas, hygiene rules on raw milk, denomination of origin designations — all favor the larger producers and the wealthier regions of the North, critics say.

Then there's the question of gene modification. Last week the European Parliament voted to allow "vegetative vine multiplication," a first step toward genetically modified grapes. The decision met with howls from the Salone. Producing a "Barolo" from doctored vines grown in Finland would be like trying to pass off a fake Caravaggio, said Italian Minister for Cultural and Environmental Heritage Giovanna Melandri. Oenological fakes are far easier to sell, however.

An even tougher problem is to not just guarantee that the Old Masters of the table are genuine, but to guarantee food quality all down the line. The species, the soil, the rainwater and the air all matter, say the folks from Slow Food. I must say, that apple was pretty persuasive.