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Food for Thought

By Andrew Finkel

(TIME.com Europe) -- One of the most useful set of implements to preserve rare habitats and endangered species may well be a knife and fork.

That, at any rate is the insight of a growing band of gourmet activists who now equate the quality of the environment with that of their next meal.

As its name suggests, the Slow Food movement is the sworn enemy of assembly-line eating and the Styrofoam-encased lump.

Modern legend has it that it was founded when food writer Carlo Petrini took umbrage at the opening of a branch of McDonald's in Rome's Piazza di Spagna.

The movement's logo is a snail, and nearly 15 years later it has crept from its home in Bra, Italy, to 34 other countries.

Slow Food is all about restoring the conviviality of mealtimes to its rightful place in society. Yet many of its members, '60s radicals loosening their belts in middle age, are not prepared to let the matter rest there.

Slow Food is not just about eating -- although goodness knows it does plenty of that. It recently staged a five day foodfest, its Salon of Taste, in the exhibition centre of Turin.

Every inch of what used to be the Fiat car factory was crowded with cheeses from artisan producers, wines, and truffle-scented chocolate.

There was a man from the nearby town of Silvano d'Orba displaying an award- winning grappa made in his mother's copper still as well as a beer microbrewer from Kalamazoo.

There were crowds of young people too in the aisles, trying cured meats and sampling first-press olive oils.

There were endless seminars on yogurt, foie gras, vintage port and candied fruit.

A special section in the hall was reserved for the Arc of Taste -- a collection of products under threat from the flood of standardisation and the economics of a modern agro-food industry, which, Slow Food says, produces cheap food at a high environmental cost.

Carlo Petrini denies that Slow Food is about satisfying the cravings of a food élite. "You can be rich and eat badly ... and you don't have to eat luxury foods every day," he said. Europeans spend notoriously little on food -- less than 15 percent of their income, whereas their grandparents would have spent nearly half.

The movement is now on the offensive, following the food chain out of the kitchen and back to the countryside and small producers who are the natural stewards of biodiversity.

Complacency means the loss of natural variety and the irretrievable destruction of aromas and taste.

In Europe, half the breeds of domestic livestock became extinct during the course of the Twentieth Century.

One species of plant disappears every six hours. In the seven years between editions of Slow Food's anthology of Italian cheeses -- Fromaggi d'Italia -- a hundred cheese varieties became unavailable on the market. Less than 30 varieties of plant feed 95% of the world's population.

Only last week Americans celebrated Thanksgiving with a turkey dinner -- a cruellish irony, according to Donald Bixby, director of the North Carolina-based American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, dedicated to preserving rare and endangered farm animals.

Almost all the 45 million birds consumed were over-bred creatures, vulnerable to blight and incapable of normal biological reproduction or even surviving outdoors. Yet there are many neglected varieties of turkey "beautiful and good to eat," he said.

Bixby was one of 13 laureates summoned by Slow Food at the time of the Salon of Taste to a ceremony in Bologna.

Also invited was a jury composed of some 400 foodies -- writers, cooks and food activists from around the globe.

Their job was to whittle that list down to five special awards, a sort of Nobel Prize for nosh. They were choosing not from a list of top chefs but a short-list of visionaries and down-right eccentrics who have dedicated themselves to looking after the earth's edible variety.

Among those honoured was Marija Nikhailovna Girenko, director emeritus of an agricultural research institute in St Petersburg whose members starved to death during the Nazi siege of that city rather than raid the gene bank which today contains 341,000 types of seed.

Another winner was Raul Antonio Manual, representing a co-operative in southern Mexico that produces vanilla -- a high-value crop that, unlike maize, requires tending the forests carefully rather than cutting them down.

Wine is an obvious case where educated consumers create a demand for variety, traditional methods, and local production.

There are parallels elsewhere. Jesus Garzon Heyde, another prizewinner, is a Spanish grandee who squandered his considerable birthright on making shepherding a viable modern profession.

The object is to support rural communities, the products they produce and the land on which they depend.

One of the more popular winners was a Turkish beekeeper, Veli Gures, who makes his honey in a way that Pooh Bear might approve --in the trunks of trees in a remote forest above the Black Sea.

His indigenous bees, unlike their imported disease-bearing cousins, have long probosces that enable them to gather nectar and of course fertilise mountain flowers. It is chestnut which has a bitterness and some say medicinal property which makes his honey different from most.

Gures, who had never been out of Turkey, walked more than a day from his village to the nearest town to get a passport. His pleasure at the award was tempered by his neighbours' fears that so much publicity would make the honey they loved too expensive.

Another award went to a commercial development project in Mauritania that had less to do with inflating a market than creating one in the first place. Nancy Jones, who founded a dairy in her adopted homeland, creates a livelihood for nomadic herders of cows and camels.

Milking a dromedary -- a highly intelligent and not always good-natured beast -- is, she confesses, "a process of negotiation." It is almost as difficult as finding their nomadic owners.

A variety of vehicles, land cruisers, donkey carts and the odd ambulance scour the countryside each morning for the wandering producers. Even more difficult than getting the milk to market has been persuading herders to sell a product that by custom they would rather see curdle than exchange for gain.

"When something becomes a historical necessity, a crank has to come up and do it," Jones said of her project. It is clearly an opinion which Slow Food shares about their holding back the flood of standardisation and gastronomic catastrophe -- even if it means moving at a snail's pace.