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EDUCATION
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Journey to the Origins of Taste
More than 1,800 farmers, artisan producers, cooks, academics, and students stepped into a sensorial world to discover more about taste qualities during Terra Madre, making their way through Journey to the Origins of Taste - a series of interactive sensory activities included in the program for the first time this year.
While the slow approach to taste education has been introduced to consumers for some time, it is equally important for farmers and producers, allowing them to better understanding their own product’s unique traits. By understanding sensorial characteristics of food, they are better placed to understand how to improve production, to find market opportunities, and thus to protect biodiversity and our quality of life.
The journey began with a video which introduced tasting concepts and the basic sensory vocabulary for describing food products. Next, a range of tasting games at various themed stations –taste, smell, sight, touch, multi-sensorial - designed to stimulate the senses beyond our usual experience, challenged participants to practice and describe their own perceptions.
Amy Wood Hayes, who runs a school garden program in the USA and is a taste educator herself, found some activities quite difficult and was reminded that she too needs to keep in practice and challenge her own sensory capabilities. “The best way to encourage children to cook, is to have them involved in a school garden where you can also introduce ingredients that are useful in sensory education - for instance, we grow a bitter melon to encourage children to taste and appreciate this quality.”
The sensory journey ended with a chocolate and apple tasting in a quiet room, led by an audio guide through headphones. The lessons learnt in the first two sections were recapped by contrasting and evaluating three varieties of apple and dark chocolate, nominating which sample was the most crunchy, sweet, juicy, acidic, bitter or had the most intense aroma.
Journey to the Origins of Taste was open to delegates from Friday to Sunday, on the balcony of the Terra Madre venue. Each of the three stages of the activity were translated into all eight official languages of the event: the video, a workbook to guide participants through the sensory discovery activities and the pre-recorded oral guide for the final tasting.
For more information, please contact: education@slowfood.com
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Learning Communities at Terra Madre
Among the rich program of Earth Workshop held this year at Terra Madre, a special seminar was dedicated to learning communities - a concept which has developed over recent years through the increasing number of educational projects developed by local Slow Food groups around the world.
Learning communities are about creating opportunities to teach and learn in a two-way dialogue and aim to stimulate real and much needed cultural change through food education. Using a wide variety of approaches, Terra Madre food communities have been busy carrying out programs and activities since the last meeting in 2006, and several of these presented their projects at the conference.
Carmelita Trentini, spoke about how her local school garden project in Pegoniaga near to Mantova in northern Italy, has been very successful in establishing a learning community in a small rural community. “Our experience has shown us that there are three key ingredients to building a learning community,” she said. “It is crucial to have knowledge exchange between the elderly and the young, there should be good community representation in the project working group, and collaboration with other organizations, such as the local Slow Food branch.”
Fabian Jauss spoke about a new community at Alice Hospital in Darmstadt, which brings together patients, local producers and hospital staff in the pursuits of introducing ‘healing food’ for patients. “The cooks have a very good understanding of the good, clean and fair philosophy and they are very enthusiastic about their work – they are part of the healing process and take the responsibility seriously,” said Jauss.
In a project in Ontario at Stratford Northwestern Secondary School, what began as a student-run school restaurant and has grown to become a full-fledged learning community. Culinary teacher Paul Finklestein, attending Terra Madre with six of his ex-students, described how the community has grown from the group of dedicated teenagers who run the program to encompass a wide section of the community: preschool children with whom they have a school garden mentoring project, local farmers, butchers and producers who provide ingredients and visit the classes, local chefs who guest-teach, graduate students who return as mentors and students’ parents and grandparents.
Other examples presented included a mobile food education van developed by Slow Food Munich in Germany, the Mangeons Local project in Senegal, the Slow Food on Campus network in the USA and a high school cooking program in Belarus. All of the these projects are among the 28 examples included the new publication Slow Learning: A World Report on Food and Taste Education Activities.
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Healthy Canteens, Healthy Communities
Terra Madre food communities and cooks have been speaking up about the need to radically overhaul our public catering systems during the current Terra Madre world meeting, presenting some of their innovative projects to offer nutritious, tasty and sustainably produced food in simple daily menus and provide sensory education.
Improving food quality in schools, hospitals and company canteens has been taken up by both the Terra Madre meeting and Salone del Gusto as a key issue this year – in theory and in practice – with “good, clean and fair” canteens and a series of workshops dedicated to discussions on how to improve public catering.
Culinary teacher Paul Finklestein shared his unique project at a Canadian high school of 1,200 students at the Healthy Canteens Earth Workshop on Saturday. This school now features two canteens: the traditional dining hall and a new alternative where students work with Paul to prepare up to 300 meals each day based on fresh, seasonal ingredients, locally sourced.
“This is a cross-generational tool of change,” Paul said. “By students learning to cook, we hope that their parents will also be reconnected with good food and that their grandparents will be motivated to bring back traditions.” The students, two of whom are youth delegates at Terra Madre, are also growing food at the school and have formed a culinary club which fundraises for trips across the country and internationally to explore other food regions.
The importance of ‘healing’ and good food was highlighted in the examples provided by Alice Hospital in Darmstadt, Germany and Asti Hospital in Italy. Both hospitals have transformed their catering departments to source from a large number of local producers rather than a handful of bigger suppliers, and have made taste and nutritional qualities key criteria in their menu planning. Price remains a key concern for these kitchens, which have to provide hundreds of meals per day, but the hospital in Asti has found the price rise to be moderate, and will be monitoring hospital services to see if improving the food quality reduces the number of days spent in care.
Two of the Asti Hospital’s staff are working in the Salone del Gusto’s “Dream Canteen,” a meal area where visitors can eat lunch and dinner each day as well as learn about Slow Food’s vision of better, fairer and greener collective dining approaches. Dream Canteen workshops are taking place each day, involving canteen committees, local authority public caterers, cooks and journalists in discussions and tastings of sample dishes.
The Terra Madre dining hall, providing lunch for 5,000 delegates each day, is based upon the same principles, designed to promote local food products and reduce CO2 emissions.
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The School Gardens Network
The land, vegetable gardens, canteens and the future: These were the topics discussed on Saturday at the School Gardens Network conference - one of a series of discussions held jointly between Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre. Valeria Cometti, in charge of Slow Food’s education projects, opened the event: “Today we want to go on a journey around places of the world where, riding the wave of Slow Food’s principles, new generations are being taught gastronomic culture. The project to establish vegetable gardens in schools, launched in the United States and evolved in Italy under the name Orto in condotta, is our most important.”
“Teaching children to take care over what they eat is a sign of love for humanity, not elitism as some people claim,” said Alice Waters, Slow Food vice-president. Representing Slow Food Kenya, Samuel Karanja Muhunyu provided an African point of view, saying that a mistaken educational system was contributing to the destruction of agriculture in his continent. “We are trying to involve young people, passing on traditional knowledge and so giving them a chance for the future, but government bureaucracy is obstructing us. They don’t care about education. It’s a real problem, but we’re not going to give up.”
A similar tenacity was shown by a young American, Melina Shannon. She works for Yale University’s Sustainable Food Project, where a vegetable garden run by the students has been created, as well as a cafeteria serving good, organic food. “If there had been projects like this at Yale when President Bush was studying there, and he had learned how to grow rucola like we have, maybe the world would be different now,” said Melina with an ironic smile.
Then it was back to Italy with Luisa Fazzini, a teacher at the Istituto Gabriella Murari in Valeggio sul Mincio. She described the smiles of children working in the kindergarten’s garden, and the middle-school pupils’ journey along the River Mincio, modeled on the University of Gastronomic Sciences’s journey along the River Po.
Next a culinary arts teacher from a Canadian high school, Paul Finklestein, gave his testimony about the gardens, greenhouses, cooking classes and student-run cafeteria he is helping to set up in accordance with Slow principles. “We want people, who up to now have perhaps only known frozen or fast foods, to appreciate and get passionate about fresh, healthy food.”
The need to bring young people back in touch with the land was repeated by Slow Food Austria’s Manfred Fleiser. “At the end of one of the cooking courses we organized for children, we took them for a day to a farm, and a farmer showed them how to milk cows. One of them was shocked and swore he would never drink milk again. He’d always thought it was made in the supermarket. Tell me, is this the future we want?”
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These are the educational activities held during Terra Madre 2008:
Terra Madre featured Earth Workshops dedicated to educational issues:
- Healthy canteens (October 25, 10.00am Room E): Cafeterias as a place for meeting and cooperation between Terra Madre networks and others involved in collective catering.
- Learning communities (October 26 10.00 Room B): Educational experiences in creating an agro-ecological culture. Comparison and presentation of international educational projects.
Terra Madre delegates could also visit To the Origins of Taste, a sensory trail describing basic aspects of the sensory properties of various foods (Friday October 24 and Saturday October 25, 10.00am-5.00pm Sunday October 26, 10.00am-4.00pm balcony Terra Madre pavilion).
The trail was organized in three parts:
- Video room: a video with animations and commentary illustrates how the sense organs work and gives advice on how to train and use them more effectively.
- Sensory trail: six stations where visitors can begin to train their senses (taste, sight, smell, touch, hearing).
- Tasting room: designed to enable people to refine their sensory abilities.
At the Salone del Gusto you could attend the conference The school garden network (October 26, 3.00pm Sala Cittàslow) which talked about examples of sensory education and school gardens in Italy and around the world. Click here to see the complete program of Conferences at Terra Madre and the Salone del Gusto.
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