Fast forward to slow food

TRADITIONAL FOOD:The Slow Food movement continues to influence consumers all over the world to value fresh, local produce. MICHAEL KELLYwent to its annual festival in Turin with a small but fervent Irish contingent

THE ENORMOUS Lingotto building in Turin was once the largest car factory in the world, home to Fiat and a workplace for more than 6,000 people. Opened in 1923, the building stretches to almost half a kilometre, complete with the rooftop test track that appeared in the original Italian Jobmovie. After the factory closed in the early 1980s, it was transformed into a convention centre and now houses the biennial Terra Madre ("mother earth") slow food exhibition.

In 1989, the food writer Carlo Petrini was horrified by plans for McDonald’s to open beside the Spanish Steps in Rome; he subsequently established the Slow Food movement in Alba to save local food traditions, protect biodiversity and act as an antidote to the fast-food culture. As the movement spread – it now boasts more than 100,000 members in 132 countries, including Ireland – Turin became its focal point.

Last month’s festival attracted more than 5,000 producers, cooks, academics and commentators to discuss ways to promote local and sustainable food production that is “good, clean and fair”. With up to 100 workshops and talks (covering everything from biodynamics to genetically modified food and sustainable fishing), country delegations got together to discuss their own individual food-related issues .

There were more than 50 representatives at a lively Irish gathering, including Darina Allen, Green party TD Trevor Sargent, Bord Bia CEO Aidan Cotter and Taste Council chairman Evan Doyle, among others. At the festival’s Salone del Gusto, cheeses, cured meats, breads, sweets, vegetables, fruits, grains and honeys from more than 200 groups were there for the tasting. We spent the best part of four days at the exhibition and there was much we didn’t manage to taste.

One Austrian producer has revived a 15th-century technique for preserving Styria cabbage that was abandoned in the 1970s. It preserves cabbages for up to three years without salt, by putting them in a four-metre-deep fermentation pit covered with wool and straw. As brand names go, “pit cabbage” needs a bit of work, but the taste was sublime.

We tasted 30-year-old Polish mead, produced by a giant called Maciej Jaros using a traditional recipe handed down by his mother. There were Pamir mulberries, which grow at an altitude of 2,400 metres in the mountains of Tajikistan on bushes that can be up to a century old.

The Takana is a smokey-tasting brassica from Japan, which has a distinctive knot at the base of the leaf. It seemed to have disappeared in the 1960s until a farmer came across a plant in the wild in 2002 and decided to champion its cause.

The grazing went on and on: plums and Luk garlic from Croatia; aged chorizo from Euskal Txerria pigs, which almost disappeared from Spain; reed salt from Kenya; Saint Flour lentils from France; delicious smoked cheese spindles (known as oscypek) from the Tatra mountains in Poland; and sausage from a tubby, woolly little Hungarian pig called the Mangalica.

From Ireland there was raw-milk cheese, which is mentioned in ancient texts from the eighth century and almost became extinct but for the efforts of a few committed artisan cheesemakers. The Irish contingent included eight artisan producers, including Gudrun Shinnick from Fermoy Natural Cheeses, who says that Irish cheese is valued in Italy for its yellow colour, which results from the grass diet of our cows.

Terra Madre is a united nations of food that is overwhelming in its scale and optimistic in its remit. The key message is that all over the world ancient and traditional foods are at risk of being lost forever in a system obsessed with homogeneity and profit. Slow food is saving these foods from obsolescence. It deserves our support.

slowfoodireland.com