Salone del Gusto 2006

I came to Italy this year to participate both in Slow Food’s Terra Made and Salone del Gusto.  Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Salone del Gusto is a international fair held in Torino every 2 years to celebrate the diversity and quality of food, an eco-gastronomic response to the standardization and globalization of our food system.

Well, ok, I have to confess.  Mostly I came to eat. And speak Italian.  And to travel around Italy for a week with friends afterwards.  But it was because of the Salone del Gusto that I came here.  I've been wanting to come for years, ever since I first heard about this amazing global food fair.

Salone del Gusto runs for 4 days and attracts tens of thousands of people, including large groups of schoolkids. The event is held in the Lingotto, the former Fiat factory turned convention center.  It’s a food lover’s dream come true.  Imagine an entire convention center filled with table after table displaying the food of farmers and producers from all over Italy and the rest of the world.

The Mercato (marketplace) occupies most of the Salone.  More or less divided by type of food, there are lanes devoted to cheese, oil, meats, grains, etc.  As you walk down the Via dei Formaggi (Cheese Lane), for example, you pass booth after booth of cheeses from all over Italy.  Most offer samples to taste and I was tempted to stop at every booth and try everything.  But I quickly realized I couldn’t spend four days doing this.

So I tried to be more of a food tourist, concentrating on taking pictures, recording impressions and asking questions.  If I saw a favorite food (parmigiano reggiano) or one that I found particularly intriguing (goat prosciutto), then I would bite.  Otherwise, I tried to take it easy on my palate and stomach.  (Besides, I had another week of eating in Italy to look forward—more  posts on that to follow).

In addition to the marketplace in the main hall, there is a separate area devoted to demonstrations and taste workshops. I did manage to get into one tasting workshop—Champagne Terroirs.  Even though I had no ticket, I hung out by the door for nearly an hour and, thanks to a handful of no-shows and the kindness of the workshop staff, I was able to secure a seat.  But with 150,000 people attending the conference and the average workshop holding about 30 people, I wouldn’t recommend this strategy for anything you really want to attend.

Most of the workshops sell out months in advance, the staff told me.  Often they are filled as soon as they are announced and registration opens online. I don’t doubt it, especially for the popular Theater of Taste workshops, where chefs demonstrate and share their cooking with the audience.  I didn’t even bother trying to get near the Ferran Adrià workshop—I can only imagine the mob scene there. (If you are planning on attending the next Salone del Gusto in 2008 considered yourself warned—register early!)

Perhaps the closest equivalent to Salone del Gusto we have in the U.S. is the annual Fancy Food Show.  But unlike that event, which is primarily commercial and seems focused on food that is cleverly packaged, gimmicky and trendy, the Salone focuses on traditional, artisanal and endangered food products.  Cheeses, salamis, oils, condiments, fruits and vegetables that have been grown and made the same way for centuries.

Of course, there is a commercial aspect to the Salone.  Many of the products are for sale.  You can buy carnaroli rice or stone-ground polenta to take home with you.  It’s a great way for these producers to reach a wider market.   But unlike most food fairs, Salone also focuses on the ethical and social consequences of food production and distribution, as well as the obvious economic ones.

There are official sponsors of the Salone (Lavazza coffee, De Cecco pasta) and you have to walk past their big, fancy booths to get to the rest of the mercato, but I figure they are the ones that pay the bills and make the rest of the conference possible.  Besides, if you have to have a corporate sponsor, better San Daniele prosciutto (they were giving samples and there was always a line) than Coca-Cola or McDonalds.

(And, yes, all those hams are real!)

The best part of the Salone are the aisles devoted to Presidia foods.  A Presidium is a way of identifying producers of a particular food (Siwa dates from Libya/Egypt, Chinantla Vanilla from Mexico, Reindeer Suovas from Sweden, wild rice from Minnesota), bringing them together as an association to exchange information and encouraging them to work together to cooperatively market their product.  You can see a list of the U.S. presidia foods here.

(The International Presidia area contained some the most colorful, interesting, and photogenic booths in the conference, especially the Tibetan Yak Cheese booth with a rather pre-occupied looking monk.)

The idea of the Presidia is to preserve gastronomic heritage by encouraging and revitalizing local micro-economies.  Well-known foods such as balsamic vinegar and parmigiano reggiano already employ this strategy.  These products have been recognized as distinctive and their quality and methods of production are well known.  Imagine those same standards and recognition for potatoes from the Andes or Argan oil from Morocco.

You may think, well, ok, but what are the consequences of this?  Won’t the marketing of these rare foods just lead to a glorification of fancy, gourmet food that is out of reach for the average person?  Does the world really need more caviar? 

I fear that, too.  And in fact, I had one such experience on this trip, which I will write about in another post (my visit to Alba).  But the alternative is to live in a world of commodity foods, where nothing is distinctive and the only criterion is cost, not taste or health.  Cheap, at any cost.

And those are precisely the sorts of questions which led Slow Food to create Terra Madre, the world meeting of food communities. 

Next:  Terra Madre and Slow Food Nation

Comments

[Kirk]

Hi Angie - It does indeed look like "a food lovers dream"! Great photos as always.

[Tana]

A beautiful and thoughtful post.

(Psssst, I wrote up a short report of the La Milpa farm dinner on my blog.)

Ciao!

[Angie]

Hey, Tana:

It was great seeing you at the dinner. Hope you finally got something to eat--I opted for eating over taking photos. I'm glad you were there to document it.

See Tana's post on La Milpa here:
http://smallfarms.typepad.com/small_farms/2006/11/la_milpa_organi.html#comments