SLOW Food international president and founder Carlo Petrini has encouraged Australians to join with producers and co-producers – consumers – to build a fraternity of food. The charismatic former radio journalist, who has led Slow Food for 20 years, was speaking in the Western Australian capital, Perth, and Sydney, Australia’s largest city, during a week-long visit in October.
‘You will know the three great values of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity,’ Petrini said during a presentation at the Sydney Opera House. ‘Fraternity (brotherhood) is like the poor sister, just like Cinderella. We in the world, over generations, have said a lot of words about liberty. Great battles have been fought and many people have died for equality. But we have never really considered fraternity, which is the most important of them all. 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.’
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- Carlo Petrini’s Sydney Opera House presentation full transcript
Perth, Western Australia: Wed 14 Oct 2009
Carlo Petrini made Western Australia the first stop of his Australian tour, launching a collaborative food garden project, presenting a lecture to a packed audience at the University of Western Australia, meeting parliamentarians and Slow Food Western Australian convivia members and attending a Slow Food Perth reception in the heart of the city. At Lathlain primary school in Perth’s eastern suburbs, Petrini talked with children about understanding the earth and food plants and animals sustained by it. He was speaking at the launch of a project – Food with latitude – led jointly by Slow Food Perth and the children’s environment awareness organisation, Millennium Kids. Its aim is to enable children, through food knowledge, to ‘orbit in two worlds’ – as Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson describes it – and come to know and respect the foods of their own culture and those of indigenous cultures. Petrini later met rural parliamentarian and Slow Food supporter Max Trenorden MLC, Member for the Agricultural Region, before addressing a standing room-only lecture at the University of Western Australia. The lecture venue was moved at the last minute to accommodate the 250 students, academics and Slow Food members who attended. The lecture was hosted by faculty of natural and agricultural sciences’ Professor Willy Erskine. Petrini later attended a Slow Food Perth reception at the Old Brewery where he received a traditional welcome to Perth from Noongar elder Mingli Wanjurri McGlade, and where Agriculture and Food Minister Terry Redman launched the Slow Food Western Australia small food awards. See Matt O’Donohue’s complete photostream from the reception.
