With Taste Salon and Terra Madre, two annual events of the Slow Food movement organised this year together at Torino, biodiversity was playing in a specific register.
Born in Italy, the Slow Food movement movement is known to work for the restoration of local varieties and culinary specialties. With an epicurean ethos, the goal of Slow Food and its founder, Carlo Petrini, is in fact multiple: to preserve local varieties involved in biodiversity, to contribute to food sovereignty by fighting against bad and fast-food as well as the influence of agribusiness.
Participating for the first time at this event, we observed how successful it has become in just ten years. In terms of taste, here is a personal list of tasted specialties: honey from Ethiopia, the cliffs of Nilgiri Hills (India), and the melipones bees of the Satere Mawe (Brazil); delicate teas from Yunnan and Japan; delicious wild fruit marmalades from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, wild almonds from Kyrgyzstan with different tastes, not to mention countless specialties from Italy.
Conferences addressed all subjects imaginable, from food sovereignty, to an innovative labeling system (the narrative narrative) developed by the President of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity.
In short, biodiversity is far from being an ascetic issue!