Terra Madre Day 2009
Celebrating Terra Madre Day on December 10 2009 helped to make people aware of the importance of eating locally and around the world proclaimed the right of all communities to have access to good, clean and fair food.
'By taking this opportunity with passion and inclusiveness, we can achieve one of the largest collective occasions celebrating food diversity and good, clean and fair food production ever achieved on a global scale. A global revolution can only grow from local roots, and together our community actions will help build opposition to the misguided approach of agribusiness. We invite you to let loose your creativity and make December 10 a memorable day, encouraging and supporting sustainable food in your corner of the world.'
Carlo Petrini, Slow Food President
Terra Madre Day was celebrated in a variety of ways including: hosting a celebratory meal, an excursion to producers, a farm visit, a film and cultural event, a local campaign, food and taste education activities, or a local Terra Madre gathering – bringing together producers, cooks, researchers and young people.
SF Ludlow was first to register their event The Green Cafe Terre Madre Social.Other UK events included
SF Saltire Ayrshire - Christmas Puddings & Dessert Wines Tasting
SF Cumbria - Rambling Damsons
SF Fife - Chocolate & Cheer
SF NE Ireland - Slow Food in the Canteen
SF Edinburgh - Farmers' Market Cooking Demo
SF Cornwall - Nurturing a Slow Taste - Festiggia Venti Anni
SF Glasgow - Pot Luck Dinner
SF Glasgow - Bread Making for All
SF Berkshire & Wiltshire - Terra Madre Dinners
SF Daylesford - The Gloucester Cattle Story
SF Linlithgow - Linlithgow Farmers' Market
SF Ludlow - The Green Cafe Terre Madre Social
SF Dyfi Valley -The Learning Lunch
SF Lincolnshire - Go Nowhere Cook In
SF London - Pisces RFR
SF London - Piemonte in Pimlico
SF Jersey - Pot Luck Dinner
SF Berwick-Upon-Tweed - 10 Mile Meal
SF Worcester - Slow Food Hot Buffet Supper
SF North Yorkshire & SF West Yorkshire - Festive Eat-In Dinner
SF Brighton & Lewes - Local Breeds - Local Taste
Well done everyone!
Terra Madre (Mother Earth) is the Slow Food global network of food communities, each committed to producing quality food in a responsible, sustainable way. SFUK manages and supports the UK Terra Madre network of stakeholders and works with our international office and members groups to bring selected stakeholders, typically producers, food educators and activists, to the Terra Madre conference.
The Terra Madre network, which integrates new members every day, is made up of all those who wish to act to preserve, encourage, and support sustainable food production methods. These methods are based on attention to territory and those distinctive qualities that have permitted the land to retain its fertility over centuries of use. This vision is in direct opposition to pursuing a globalized marketplace, with the ongoing, systematic goal of increasing profit and productivity. Such methods have substantial externalities for which we, the guardians and inhabitants of this planet, pay the price. And the damage begins with small producers, lacking the means to create markets even within their own regions, who become crushed by subsidy systems that render their working conditions unfair.
Day after day, the Terra Madre family grows, strengthens, organizes, and defends local cultures and products, and makes real the Slow Food concept of Good, Clean, and Fair quality. Good refers to the quality of food products and of their taste; Clean, to a production process that respects the natural environment ; and Fair, in which there is dignity and appropriate economic return for the people who produce, including respect from those who consume.
The first members of the network were the food communities themselves, joined later by cooks and academic researchers. Food communities are those people involved in the production, transformation, and distribution of a particular food, who are closely linked to a geographic area either historically, socially, or culturally. Food community members are small producers who make high-quality products in a sustainable way. They share the problems generated by intensive agricultural methods, wasteful of natural resources, and by a mass-market food industry focused on standardization. These problems put the very existence of small producers at risk.
Cooks also play an essential role. They are the interpreters of a territory, who can add value to it through their own creativity. The Terra Madre cooks understood that pleasure must not be separated from responsibility to producers, without whom none of their work would be possible. In this way, they reinforce the food communities, through dialogue and collaboration with producers, and fight against the abandonment of cultural tradition and standardization of food. And it is in their restaurants that this philosophy reaches consumers.
The Terra Madre network comprises 250 universities and research centers, including 450 individual academics throughout the world. All are committed, within their own fields and using the tools available to them, to further the preservation and growth of sustainable food production—through both public education and food-worker training. The academic population that shares the values of Terra Madre seeks to cultivate a reciprocal relationship with producers by making available necessary scientific knowledge and promoting exchanges within local communities, but also by listening to those communities and learning from their first-hand experience and the solutions they have developed.
Terra Madre Global Meeting
The Terra Madre forum is a bi-annual conference held in Turin, Italy. Terra Madre acts as a forum for discussion and the introduction of innovative concepts in the fields of biodiversity, gastronomy, globalisation, food security and education. It is the keystone event of our third thematic area, food communities, and representative of our work in developing countries. Held concurrently with Salone del Gusto in Torino from October 23 to 27, the third edition of the biennial international meeting of the Terra Madre Network brought together food communities, cooks, academics and youth delegates for four days to work towards increasing small-scale, traditional, and sustainable food production.
Click here to see the program of the event.
Click here for the list of Food Communities 2008.
Click here for the Terra Madre 2008 Press Kit.
HRH The Prince of Wales
HRH The Prince of Wales recorded the following message for the Terra Madre 2008 audience:
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
it hardly seems possible that it is four years since I was with you in Turin, but I still remember that remarkable day when you gave me the warmest of welcomes. It made me feel immediately among friends with a shared passion for good food, for family farming and rural communities. Needless to say, I am particularly sorry I can’t be with you again today and I hope dear Carlo Petrini will forgive me, but I am delighted to be able to send you this distant message.
The whole question of food production and food shortages is, of course, very much in the news at the moment, and there are plenty of people arguing that the only way to feed the world’s growing population will be through ever greater intensification of agriculture and with the widespread adoption of GM crops. However, I do not believe the arguments stack up, particularly when climate change is added to the equation. Intensive agriculture turns oil into food, which is not something we can afford to go on doing, and most current GM crops are actually yielding less, not more, than their conventional equivalents.
Rather than pushing ever harder to overcome nature’s limits and introducing wholly new sources of potential environmental damage, I think we need to be aware that transgenic contamination is now widely acknowledged to be unavoidable, hence there can be no co-existence of GM and non-GM agriculture. I happen to think that we should be concentrating our efforts on improving the sustainable techniques that work in harmony with nature.
We should also, dare I say it, be looking harder at the projections of the number of people the world will need to feed in the future, and asking ourselves whether they are as inevitable as they seem.
Population growth is, I know, a fraught and difficult subject, but surely one that must be addressed.
The hard fact is that in one African country, for instance, around £480 million will be spent this year on HIV AIDS, whereas expenditure on family planning and reproductive health will be just £7.7 million. The expenditure on HIV AIDS is crucial and so desperately needed, but how much human suffering could be alleviated by increasing awareness of family planning issues?
We surely have to ask: when will our world’s population stabilize and what are the consequences … and at what level … and what are the consequences for our planet’s ability to sustain it?
As the imperative of addressing climate change becomes ever more pressing, it may provide a further reason to re-examine the whole issue of population growth. Of course, every individual in the developed world needs to find ways to reduce their carbon footprint, which is many times greater than those in the developing world. But every human being contributes to climate change, not least through agriculture. In exploring the links between rapid population growth and accelerating climate change, it must surely be important not to ignore, for instance, the issue of the huge increase in water consumption, water which is in increasingly short supply as a result of deforestation and the decline in arable land. We also need to find new ways to obtain more from sustainable agricultural systems. This was a conclusion from the recent United Nations Report on Agriculture, Knowledge, Science and Technology. The report identifies many of the problems with global agriculture and talks sensibly about what is needed. This includes systems, and I quote, ‘… that enhance sustainability, while maintaining productivity in ways that protect the natural resource base and ecological provisioning of agricultural systems’.
There is also a reference to another issue close to my heart, and I suspect to many of yours, where the report declares that, ‘traditional and local knowledge constitutes an extensive realm of accumulated practical knowledge and knowledge-generating capacity that is needed if sustainability and development goals are to be reached’. These are some of the wisest words I have heard in recent years and each and every one of you, if I may say so, ladies and gentlemen, is a testament to their truth.
All this may, of course, seem far removed from the everyday concerns of small-scale food producers, farmers, cooks and academics, but it is crucial, if I may say so, for your voices to be heard in these global debates.
The solution to global food shortages rests largely with the truly sustainable farmer and I am enormously encouraged that so many more people are now recognising the benefits of working with nature and harnessing positive forces through healthy soil, healthy crops and healthy animals in order to provide healthy food.
I have so many fond memories of my last visit to Terra Madre. I only wish I could be there to tour the marketplace and join your discussions as you learn from each other about how better to produce, market and cook sustainable food. That is certainly what I am trying hard to do through some of my own ventures, both in the United Kingdom and, for instance, India. However, I fear this will have to wait for another time.
Let me just end by paying a warm and affectionate tribute to one of my great heroes, Carlo Petrini, and to salute each and every one of you who, with Carlo in the lead, are doing so much to challenge the massed forces of the industrialisation of agriculture and the homogenisation of food.
I can only conclude by expressing nothing but my greatest admiration for all you stand for. You are the guarantors of our long-term food security, based upon your dedicated care of the natural environment.
I send you many blessings.
Recorded at St James’s Palace, London
On 9th September 2008
For Terra Madre
