Carlo Petrini is the founder of Slow Food, the international movement that supports the pleasure of food, local cuisine and sustainable agriculture. Time Magazine not long ago awarded him with a recognition that sanctioned his person as one of those most capable of saving the planet. For these reasons - and for many others - each of his writings can only be a remarkable and important source for everything concerning the food universe. Last effort, in chronological order, is his book Terra Madre - How not to be eaten by food.
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Carlo Petrini is the founder of Slow Food, the international movement that supports the pleasure of food, local cuisines and asustainable agriculture. Time Magazine not long ago awarded him with a recognition that sanctioned his person as one of those most capable of saving the planet. For these reasons - and for many others - each of his writings can only be a remarkable and important source for everything concerningfood universe. His last effort, in chronological order, is his book "Terra Madre - How not to be eaten by food".
This volume first of all represents the beginning of a partnership between the same Slow Food and the publishing house Giunti Editore which officially published it on 10 December, a day that is not accidental since it is both the twentieth anniversary of Slow Food and, above all, the day on which the Earth Mother Day.
The book has an easy language, uses a simple vocabulary that makes it appreciable and interesting even to non-experts or experts in the sector. Petrini reaffirms the theories of him, already encountered in his previous work "Good, clean and fair", updating and analyzing them in contexts such as the world crisis. Furthermore, he poses a serious problem that will reveal itself the main theme of his work: world model of thinking and development.
This model, according to the author, it has completely failed, not being able to find innovative solutions, except in the global system itself that it has created. Pondering and offering a wide range of hypotheses, solutions and knowledge, the founder of Slow Food offers an interesting solution capable of stemming a globalism which, if it continues to be so frenetic and incessant, will seriously risk going to affect the daily life of man. For Petrini, the crisis must start with food.
Il food has been distorted and we have been able to turn it into a mere consumer product by depriving it of its core values. We have so emptied it of meaning that, in the current state of things, we consider it any commodity, highly unsustainable in all its phases, from cultivation to the act of eating. Quoting the words contained in the book itself, we understand perfectly where we need to start again: "agriculture and food will be the key to getting our lives back".
Terra Madre is intended to be a sort of manifesto, or rather, a manual to get out of a crisis that is by no means exclusively financial but also customary. Citizens of the world are wasteful: "We are 6,3 billion people on the planet, but we produce food for 12 billion living people and one billion suffer from malnutrition" and you don't need to be a skilled accountant or mathematician to understand that something is definitely not right in these accounts .
This book wants to teach us, without any presumption, that with small and easy examinations of conscience perhaps we can change something even starting from ourselves. We have gone from a starvation society, with our old men who even abhorred the idea of throwing away the crumbs left on the tables, to a waste company. We no longer have value of food and we give more and more, only and exclusively, value to the price. And paradoxically - according to the author - we pay too little for food and for this reason we squander, fill the cart beyond belief and make our refrigerators become the graves of our food.
A useful book, capable of teaching us how not to waste food and to sensitize us by making us reach a food maturity that most of the time we tend to lose along the way. The drift we have arrived at is deplorable essentially in one thirst for wealth and progress that most of the time makes us grotesquely slaves to a one-sided system that takes the name of consumerism and - as Petrini writes - “in the world of industrial-global food this ideology has reached its peak: we are consumer products […] used without ever achieving true well-being. Food eats us, we become the complement object of the sentence, we lose any possibility of being active. "
Alessandro Ribaldi
