Carlo Petrini, founder and international president of Slow Food, visited Sydney last week, as part of his first Australian tour.
Petrini had some busy days in our city, meeting convivia members and Terra Madre delegates, visiting the local Italian community in Haberfield where residents are battling plans for a Mc Donald’s on Parramatta Road and making an appearance at the Bush Tucker Picnic in the Royal Botanic Gardens. At the end of his visit, he delivered a lecture at the Opera House, where he spoke passionately about his revolutionary food vision.

Interviewed by Sydney International Food Festival director Joanna Savill, Petrini told the audience that “today we are experiencing an incredible and extraordinary paradox: the food is eating us. Nowadays massive food production is the principal responsible for the planet’s destruction”. We are losing soil fertility for the chemicals used in our land, he said. We are wasting water: more than 70% of it is used in agriculture and intensive-cattle rising. We are losing our bio-diversity: “because we must produce food in a more intense way, only the strongest breeds win and survive. In this way, in the past 100 years we have lost 80% of the world’s biodiversity”.

These were the reason which led to the creation of Terra Madre, Petrini said. “Terra Madre is a wonderful network made up of farmers, fishermen, nomads, chefs, young and old people, academics and filmmakers who really care about a new food culture and safeguarding the environment. It’s a meeting based on brotherhood, so that people can meet and exchange ideas. “
The revolutionary idea of Petrini is that producers and eaters should build a “fraternity (brotherhood) of food”, “because fraternity allows us to respect people who have different ideas from ours, people of a different culture, skin, or religion. With fraternity we can respect them. And fraternity helps us to listen to other people. Then with fraternity we also have equality and liberty. That is why Slow Food has called (its movement) Terra Madre, because if the earth is our mother, then we are all brothers and sisters. And even if we speak different languages we can still understand each other”. Full transcript.