Editorial from the October 2009 Slow Food & Terra Madre Newsletter

In seeking, eating and promoting food that is good and sustainable, and which can revive large and small processes of social justice, we cannot disregard the communities who understand how to put food at the center of their lives. The community dimension makes real the convivial spirit in its broadest definition. A fruitful alliance between co-producer and producer can only come about from this perspective.

To create this alliance and make it sustainable, we need to pay attention to the local aspect, exploring our surroundings, favoring seasonal foods, getting to know the people of the place where we live, preserving and passing on the memory and the story of our “local adaptation.” These are the starting points, or rather, the restarting points: places, territories.

Terra Madre Day will be one of the many sparks able to launch a new humanism in the world, an option that is no longer just a choice, but a necessity. Perhaps this project sounds overly ambitious, but in reality it is within everyone’s reach, because it starts from the rediscovery of simple things and does not involve sacrifices or shame, but begins from pleasure and develops with pleasure.

The Terra Madre food communities remind me of the parish churches during the fall of the Roman Empire. In its last three centuries of decline and decadence, the senators continued to pass laws in Rome, while spaces of autonomy took shape in the parishes, the people elected their own priest, and forms of grassroots government came into being. This is the image that I like to think about when I think about Terra Madre Day: food communities as post-modern parishes. While the consumerist empire falls victim to its own misdeeds, to the impulse to grow without limits, eating ourselves and the Earth, in the food communities they pay no attention to its diktaks and instead practice the austere anarchy of Terra Madre.

Their approach feeds on the pleasure of putting food at the center of our lives: the pleasure of a life full of stimuli, flavors, stories, conviviality.

I am sure that every Terra Madre Day initiative will communicate this pleasure to the world. It will be a new way of tackling crises, a new way of constructing a future that is better, cleaner and fairer.

Carlo Petrini
President of Slow Food International