We spent a busy and exciting week at Slow Food International‘s Terra Madre and Salone del Gusto in Torino, Italy. Our Earth Workshop entitled “Sustainable Innovations in Fighting Hunger and Poverty” was held earlier today, featuring several of the Slow Food supported projects we’ve met on our travels, including Mangeons Local, Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC), Enaleni Farm, and Chigata Fettes et Development.
This week’s innovation saw organizations and farmers partnering to improve farming practices and create financial incentives to take better care of the soil for those living upstream and down.Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement spoke to a standing room only crowd of hundreds of food activists, farmers, chefs, food processors, and Slow “foodies” from the United States, who were gathered at a workshop as part of Terra Madre, Slow Food International’s annual conference.
The workshop brought together many of the Slow Food communities working in the U.S.—from school gardens that are supplying students with organic food to projects that are helping “bodegas” and corner stores in urban areas, carry more fresh, locally-grown produce.
Petrini said he was “impressed by the growth of the Slow Food movement in the U.S.,” calling it the “greatest peaceful army in the world.” He noted that the Kentucky farmer-poet, Wendell Berry, who famously said ‘eating is an agricultural act,’ “understood things much earlier than the rest of us.” Petrini said that the U.S. started as a country “based on the land and hopefully is going back to the land,” with the growing interest in organic and locally grown foods, not only in places like New York and California, but also in the Midwest and Southern U.S.
Petrini also called for farmers at the event to partner with farms in Africa, sharing ideas and innovations, as part of Slow Food International’s commitment to help start 1,000 gardens in Africa in 2011.
photo credit of first photo: Bernard Pollack
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
