Terra Madre 2004
Written for Sierra magazine in 2004.
If this is madness, let’s have more of it,” said Carlo Petrini, founder and director of Slow Food, the Italian gastronomic organization. He was addressing a plenary session of Terra Madre 2004, a four-day conference in Turin, Italy, to which his group had invited 5,000 small food producers from 131 countries. As the meeting progressed, attendees in colorful national costumes shuttled between sessions on saving traditional agriculture and the improvised market they had set up, spreading blankets on the floor of the cavernous conference center. Pottery, shawls, and necklaces made of seeds and feathers competed for attention with agricultural products, including Ecuadorean corn, Azerbaijani sheep cheese, Siberian herbal tea, Italian buckwheat, Afghani raisins, and algae from Lake Chad (dried into bricks, it’s broken up and added to soups).
What was truly madcap about the conference was not its street-fair atmosphere, but the fact that Slow Food was taking on nothing less than the globalization of food production and the resulting loss of biodiversity caused by agribusinesses and their vast plant and animal monocultures. The conference would create a rival global network of hitherto isolated farmers, fisherfolk, and the like, who are the repositories of the world’s cultural and physical diversity. Along the way, Slow Food projects would breathe new life into a threatened cultures, fix damaged stretches of the environment, and encourage all of us to pile our plates with a wider variety of foodstuffs.
Grandiose? You bet. But Slow Food itself was a wild idea that worked. Since it was founded during the 1980s, 80,000-plus people in 100 countries have joined its eating clubs, or convivia, and signed on to the idea that consuming the sort of beautiful food that nonna takes all day to create will preserve rural landscapes and a saner way of life. You can save the world by savoring it.


Grandiose? You bet. But Slow Food itself was a wild idea that worked. Since it was founded during the 1980s, 80,000-plus people in 100 countries have joined its eating clubs, or convivia, and signed on to the idea that consuming the sort of beautiful food that nonna takes all day to create will preserve rural landscapes and a saner way of life. You can save the world by savoring it.

At the opening and closing plenary sessions, the biggest rounds of applause were for condemnations of genetically modified organisms and the growing global addiction to cheap, nutrition-poor food purveyed by corporate farms. The fiery environmentalist and women’s-rights advocate Vandana Shiva excoriated agribusiness for waging “a war upon the earth.” Britain’s Prince Charles warned that the destruction of rural landscapes and undercutting of local food producers was pushing people worldwide into ever-enlarging slums. “One has to use the T-word,” he royally intoned. “This is about encouraging terrorism.”


Inspiration was in large supply at Terra Madre. Linda Jones, a Catawba ethnobotany instructor at Sitting Bull College, on the Standing Rock reservation, in South Dakota, mused: “When I saw a cheesemaker from a tiny village on a Norwegian fjord and a Yanomami Indian from South America exchanging ideas on how to protect their foods from corporate destruction, my faith that we will succeed was renewed.”
The guardians of cultural and biological diversity are now back in their communities, at work in Mother Earth’s fields, forests, rivers, and oceans, empowered by new allies and information. If they can maintain the connections and put the ideas into practice, they may be able to defend more than just their small tracts. Perhaps they’ll weave a protective web over all of Terra Madre.
Text and photographs c. Stephanie Woodard.