SlowFood-CE: Culture, Heritage, Identity and Food
“I need to know the history of what I eat, not only the price. I need to know where it comes form, the hands that farmed and produced it … the day food has lost its true value and its history, there will be no hope for the future.” Carlo Petrini, Slow Food President. The intangible cultural heritage of food is an enormous yet underestimated resource, gastronomy treasures the entire history of a territory and embodies how different cultures have merged over the centuries. It is largely used to promote tourism but hardly ever treated as a resource that can leverage environmental sustainability and social integration. Our objective is to improve the capacities of local actors to valorise the intangible heritage of food in a vision that integrates economic, environmental and social sustainability, increasing as a result their knowledge of the richness of the gastronomic heritage and the skills needed to valorise it creatively. Cities are a perfect laboratory where such a change can be successfully achieved: small enough to strongly influence the entrepreneurial and social scene but also large enough to serve as gateways to international markets. The project is founded on the “new-gastronomy” concept that Slow Food as a movement promotes, A multidisciplinary approach to food that recognizes the strong connections between plate, planet, and people. The project intends to build a transferable model capable to valorise traditional foods with their producers, the breeds and seeds, the traditional processing techniques, the folklore, the cultural landscape, the natural resources nurturing and connecting urban dwellers and rural communities, enhancing the common assets of food heritage in CE and leading to a new alliance among 5 CE heritage cities for the benefit of local administrators, civil society, small business in the food, hospitality and creative sector and citizens at large.