Articles | An insider's guide to the Slow Food 'Salone'

Articles

An insider's guide to the Slow Food 'Salone'

Far from slow, and much more than a food salon, the biennial grand congress of the Slow Food movement has the stern old city of Turin abuzz, with world gastro-activists mingling with crowds of locals of all ages. The second biggest employer in its nearby HQ town of Bra, Slow is a heavyweight in Italy. Prince Charles sent a video message for the opening ceremony two weeks ago, and the Italian Foreign Minister a much longer one, booed by the crowd, for the closing.

This year's was the biggest Salone yet, forty-five thousand visitors on Sunday, the busiest day. The huge 1930s Lingotto centre, where FIAT engineers once raced prototypes on a roof-top track, was filled as usual with lane upon lane of stalls selling everything 'good, clean and fair,? as the Slow specification puts it.

Whole streets of oil or cheese producers, rare breeds of garlic, lentils, potatoes, seemingly every artisan goat farmer in the Northern hemisphere, and a few from the Southern. Wine and beer-makers by the regiment, and the indefatigable UK perry revivalist Tom Oliver playing David to their Goliaths. Among the hundreds of small producers, like liners in a sea of skiffs, the designer edifices of the plutocrats of Italian gastro-industry. San Daniele, Ferrari-red lacquer with ceilings and walls of plaster hams, Lavazza, the world's sixth largest coffee roaster, navy and cream with an upper deck of uniformed hostesses and waiters.

Ferran Adria, no less, oversees Lavazza's annual foray into avant-garde 'coffee design?. I missed the Damien Hirst of the Magimix but a PR girl showed me Lavazza's 2008 'coffee lenses?, a pair of jelly hemispheres in a contact lens case. A gimmick which clearly works, since I've just written about it. Apart from the producers, restaurant stands, workshops, theatres of taste, publishers, recyclers, environmentalists abound. Even Ermenegildo Zegna, the super-smart clothier, was there, promoting cashmere.

And then there's the Salone's programme of conferences. Slow founder/president Carlo Petrini was much in evidence, and on sparkling form. As for all the Left, it's a good time for the theoreticians of Slow, with the neo-liberal economy down the pan and anti-Berlusconi demonstrations in Italy. At a press conference, Carlin, as his devotees call him, lambasted careless consumption ' 'our fridges are like tombs?- and opined that the forthcoming Great Depression was an opportunity to return to virtuous ways. Interesting adjective, explained perhaps by the conference on the search for the sacred in food.

Is the Slow Movement about to mutate into a religion? If so, it could be a damn good one, full of whacky commandments, judging by the fascinating speech of Enzo Bianchi, Prior of the Community of Bose, in which he inveighed against the damage wrought by the sandwich (pre-portioned, fast, individualistic) upon the sacredness of sharing from a whole dish, preferably polenta cut with a wire. Bianchi was also good on the mindless swigging of soft drinks, which we all know is moronic, but I now realize may actually be evil.

Religious fervour lurked among the meetings of the national Slow Food organizations, too. Slow Food UK's was a reasonably decorous affair, with delegates declaring their passion for bread, orchards or compost in an orderly manner. It was interrupted by continual bursts of wild applause from the adjacent US meeting, listened to longingly by an American development consultant in the UK zone, who clearly thought the phlegmatic Brits could do with a boot up the compost heap. The UK meeting's speakers included a quartet of Ambassador Chefs, invited to Turin along with dozens more to confer upon a Slow Chef's Charter. They didn't appear to have produced one yet, but other more concrete actions were evident out in the Terra Madre pavilion.

Terra Madre is even more impressive than the Euro-centric Salone itself, an extraordinary massing of food producers from the Third World. Lodged with volunteer families throughout the region, they congregate daily at Lingotto in ethnic finery, some with stands, others laying out their wares on the ground. Cuban organoponico engineers confer with Indian solar cooker designers and Malian market traders sell dried fruit.

I sought out the pitch of Toudissa 'Honor? Malanda, Vice President of the Congo-Brazzaville section of the World Barbecue Association, who last Salone offered me a delicious paste of cassava and pork steam-barbecued in a likasa leaf. This time I missed the food but snapped up a natty red Congo tee-shirt, made in China, rather un-Slowly. Honor, meanwhile, got himself a big bale of second-hand chefs' uniforms brought over for him by Gareth Johns of Wales, one of the UK Ambassador Chefs, and evidently a very effective one.

But what to eat in all this? Ironically, finding time between appointments, lectures and unmissable encounters with Congolese barbecue chefs makes attending a full meal or tasting extremely difficult. When too famished to remain upright, I hit the Cibo da Strada district, shouldering through the throngs for a bite of street food. A triumph. Florentine tripe sandwiches: big khaki bundles of tripe and its anatomical neighbour lampredotto carried steaming from the kitchen, chopped nimbly and piled into panini, the bun tops dipped quickly in cooking liqueur. Bombette from Puglia, strips of pork wrapped around cheese, skewered and roasted briefly till the interior melts. The bombetta sellers danced to a ghetto blaster as they passed fistfuls of Euros and grub back and forth.

Salt cod fritters, calamari, panini filled with garlic-stewed broccoletti and superbly tasty split grilled pork mini-sausages. Most besieged was the stand of the Consorzio Focaccia col Formaggio of Recco, a small town near Genoa, where a gnarled old baker straight out of Fellini laboured, dragging from the bank of ovens tray after tray of crisp-exterior'd flat bread filled with bubbling white cheese, each one consumed within about 90 seconds. If only for the championing of fast food this good, one is beholden to the Slow Food movement.


Philip Sweeney is a writer and broadcaster and currently co-leader of the Bristol convivium of Slow Food.

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