Terra Madre 2010 > community stories

‘Like birds with their wings clipped’
21 October 2010, Turin – SYDNEY indigenous hospitality school founder Aunty Beryl van-Oploo spoke this evening in Palaisozaki stadium in a language rarely heard outside Australia, and probably rarely heard by Australians. Using her Gamilaraay tongue, Aunty Beryl was one of five indigenous people chosen to participate in Terra Madre’s spectacular opening ceremony in front of 10,000 delegates, officials, earth organisation representatives and the media.

With the word ‘corroboree’ echoing again and again through the stadium as she referred to Terra Madre, Aunty Beryl described how, in Sydney’s Redfern, she founded the Yaama Dhiyaan hospitality and training school to give young people skills and employment opportunities while sharing with them Aboriginal knowledge and culture.

‘The young people who come to me are like birds with their wings clipped,’ Aunty Beryl said, her Gamilaraay being translated into English and simultaneously in seven other languages. ‘Once they graduate, they are proud of their culture, their knowledge and the leadership that allows them able to control their own destiny and to realise their dreams.’

‘We must make sure that the resources of the earth are guaranteed for future generations. We do not own the land. The land owns us.’

Indigenous Terra Madre

• Slow Food’s first indigenous peoples’ Terra Madre was held in the Arctic – hosted by the Sami people – in the northern Swedish community of Jokkomo, part of the Sapmi homeland, in June 2011.

‘Tupperware culture’
24 October 2010, Turin – SYDNEY organic grocer Peter Kenyon, fresh from the workshop Networks meet: Terra Madre indigenous peoples – wonders if Australia has learned anything from indigenous food culture in the 240 years since navigator James Cook claimed the east coast of the continent for the United Kingdom. He aired his challenging thoughts to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Slow Food Pilgrims’ project…

So how do you see the challenge for immigrant nations like Australia? Wow. We’re talking about Slow Food – it’s about food cultures and food heritage and food traditions that have developed over many hundreds, thousands of years. And in Australia, as an immigrant nation, we’ve brought (food) ideas to Australia from many other countries. The indigenous culture has its own food tradition, but can we buy that? Can we borrow it? Can we learn it? Is that possible? Does Slow Food have any relevance in Australia in an immigrant nation? How about the United States? In the United States, the people have got some of their own food traditions, corn and beans and things from the south, from Mexico; Canada has many of its own food traditions, with caribou and so on, but in Australia we’re the immigrant nation that has learned the least from its indigenous people, food and culture because of the great, disparate distance between our food cultures, hunter-gather cultures and our own immigrant nation. I just wonder where Slow Food fits into that. These questions…the wonderful thing here at Slow Food and Terra Madre is that they don’t proscribe anything, so these ideas can be explored and talked about. I don’t know if this is the time and place to talk about it, or in one of the forums, but I’m very excited in exploring these ideas.

Do you think the descendants of colonial Australia are at risk of being seen to appropriate indigenous culture, indigenous food culture? I think that’s happened in other countries but I don’t think it’s happened in Australia, because I think we’ve learned virtually nothing from indigenous culture. I don’t think we’ve learned how to live in Australia. When I was a child, mum, when she baked – and it wasn’t that she baked very often – had this tupperware thing that you rolled out to keep the bench clean. It was a plastic thing and it had all the dimensions on it, you did your work on it and then you wiped it down and you put in it a drawer and the bench stayed clean. And I think we almost live in Australia like we’ve sort of imported this culture and we’ve just rolled it out over the land with no connection, no roots down into the earth, and we just live on it. And I feel that in some way that we can almost wipe it down and just roll it up and walk away and we’ve learned nothing. We haven’t integrated, we haven’t learned anything, we’ve connected with nothing in the space, in the environment, in which we live.

– Peter Kenyon
Organic grocer, Sydney, New South Wales
Terra Madre food community delegate

Finnish fishers, Swedish farmers
24 Oct 2010 – WOW, I don’t know where to start. It has just been this incredible crazy mess of people, places and food and music and so much more. I’ve had some really fantastic workshops – I’ve learned a lot of about Africa, about who’s stealing the land, probably one of my favourite ones. Lots of fantastic information about food policies, how different countries are managing food policy, food safety issues, food security, how we’re protecting various types of foods that are so important to different cultures, learning from all of the people over at Salone del Gusto from different countries about their food production systems and their local economies – these things have been really important. And I think sitting at dinner, being able to stay in a place like the Olympic village up in the mountains (at Bardonnechia) has just been beautiful – being able to sit at a table with fisherpeople from Finland and Swedish pig farmers and American apple growers, and some great Australians – being able to sit at a table like that and have those conversations is just astounding. I know there’s just going to be so much more by the end of today.

– Maureen Chapman
Policy adviser, Armidale, New South Wales
Slow Food New England convivium leader
Terra Madre learning community delegate

The apple girl
24 Oct 2010 – I’M the apple girl at Terra Madre in Turin. It’s Sunday, coming to the end now of a full-on few days, and have been living it as intensively as possible, going to workshops, meeting as many people as I can, throwing out business cards like they’re going out of fashion (I’ve only just got business cards so I love doing that – ‘Hey, have my business card!’). I’ve just come from a workshop on sustainable packaging, probably the best one I’ve been to, really relevant for me, as we’re looking to do some different things with apples in Australia – got to beat those imports which are on their way, try to trick you into buying ours by putting them into something pretty. Last night, I went to the bar – all night! – and my roomie, Maureen, was along for the ride, which was great. It’s really hard to really process it all. I think on the plane on the way home I’ll be taking a deep breath and letting it all out and trying to work out exactly what all this (Terra Madre) means. But I think, for me, it has been about the incredible connections I’ve made all over the world. It has completely blown my mind – like David, the chef with a local food restaurant on Vancouver Island (in Canada). He, for example, has two amazing people for me to connect with – a cider lady who has been doing it for 10 years, doing some amazing stuff with apples, and a heritage apple guru who is ‘the man’ about town on Vancouver Island about apples. He runs an apple festival, he’s got over 200 varieties of apple – these are all the things I want to do in my lifetime with apples in Manjimup. Just massively inspiring, and I now have lots of tools to take home to help me to do my work. That’s part of it – and I could talk for hours!

– Lucinda Giblett
Orchardist, Manjimup, Western Australia
Slow Food Southern Forests’ convivium member and Terra Madre producer delegate

The best beef
26 Oct 2010 – OUR day continued and onto Moncalvo we went. In the middle of the beautiful medieval square my friend Lauro has a butcher shop. He is another of those extremely humble people who gets on with what he’s doing without any fuss. Lauro’s butcher shop sells mostly beef, but only beef of the breed Piedmontese – the local breed of cattle. His farm is able to supply 50 per cent of the beef he sells and the rest is sourced from nearby farms. He is able to tell you at any given time where the animal comes from, its sex and age. He knows because he visits the farms and has a close relationship with those who supply his shop. He also knows that his customers most likely know the farmers, and so any embellishment of the truth could put his reputation in jeopardy. How sad we have lost this transparency with our butcher shops.

It was indeed our lucky day. It’s ox season, so when I asked if we could taste some raw (uncooked) beef, we found presented in front of us a choice of beef and four-year-old ox – and I mean real, castrated ox, not the stuff that masquerades as such in Australia. What a treat! Matthew, quite used to working with wagyu in trendy Melbourne, was blown away by the flavour and texture. Amy, too, couldn’t quite believe it and Anthony didn’t really want to waste too much time with words. All of this deliciously washed down with a bottle of barbera made by Lauro’s brother. After our tasting we were accompanied to Lauro’s farm where we were introduced to his beautiful animals. Each of them is named individually and easy to meet at this time of the year as they are brought into a shed to avoid the below-freezing nights. I can’t help but wonder how our farmers in Australia find it so difficult to make a living and yet here, a small local farmer can have a shed full of four-year-old ox. It certainly must have something to do with the respect the consumer has for the work and the product that people like Lauro sell, and are therefore prepared to pay for it. Now that I think about it, you very rarely hear people saying that ‘this shop has the cheapest beef’. It is nearly always that ‘that shop has the best beef’. We have to move in the same direction. We owe it to our taste buds and we owe it to our farmers.

– Katrina Lane
Chef, Balingup, Western Australia
Slow Food Southern Forests’ convivium member
Terra Madre food community delegate who lived in Italy’s Piedmont region for several years

Culinary uniqueness
22 Nov 2010 – FOLLOWING Terra Madre, we spent a couple of days in Turin with Heather and Mike Biggs exploring the city centre. We dined one night in La Cappacin – ‘The Little Rabbit’ – an atmospheric old restaurant serving entirely Piedmontese produce. The owner-maitre’d was an agile 82-year-old, enthusiastically waiting at tables and entertaining customers. The feature of our succession of plates was a bowl of gently-warmed and meltingly soft cheese over which our host vigorously shaved lashings of beautifully fresh white truffle. The scent which had previously permeated the air of the entire restaurant was now thick before us, but what a sublime delight – the savour of autumn earth, just as fresh oysters taste of the sea. Absolutely memorable.

On to Florence for David and I, travelling by express-train. Casting fleeting glimpses upon old farmhouses squashed between a spaghetti of roads, an antique church left standing – ‘lone soldier’ in a field of warehouses, IKEA and Mobilia by the hectare, centuries of toiled land eaten away by creeping urbanisation. Our friend, Francesca, an Italian facilitator from Terra Madre 2004, took us to dine with some Scandicchi Slow Food members at their convivium’s restaurant in Archiolla castle. Restored with funding from the local council, occupants who would build and support the economy and well-being of the local community were sought for the castle. The local Slow Food convivium and an art group were selected. The business has been now operating since 2006 with three paid employees, with the remaining 60 or 70 per cent of work done by convivium volunteers. The restaurant uses whatever presidia products it can source, with preference then given to organic and other foods grown using Slow Food principles. Another shared feast, including wild mushroom soup, the omnipresent varieties of cured porchetta, Macedonian feta – which was a donation from a visiting Macedonian Terra Madre delegate – small white cannelloni-style beans (endangered: we were given a bag as parting gift which was confiscated by Australian Customs as ‘high risk’), a platter of mixed grilled chicken, rabbit and pork and also a bowl of something akin to tripe (…lambogello?) that was a little too rustic for our taste…

Archiolla is an inspiring success story and our night a good opportunity to discuss our perceptions of Terra Madre and also our own culinary uniqueness.

– Marion and David Trethewey
Angus beef producers and restaurateurs, Kangaroo Island, South Australia
Slow Food Fleurieu Peninsula members and Terra Madre delegates