All things slow

With the Salone du Gusto beginning next week, my mind has turned to all things slow.

Salone due Gusto is a four day global food village held every two years in Turin Italy. It is the stuff of dreams for any gastronome. Over four days, devotees of all things slow can savour, taste and contemplate their way through taste workshops, lectures and master classes celebrating food philosophies, tastes and ideas.

The salone is a highlight of the Slow Food calendar, a movement that started as a small gathering of friends and is now a global concern addressing issues of sustainability, regional cuisine and food traditions, education and biodiversity.

The highlight of the Salone du Gusto is the commercial produce market. A culinary journey that takes you from the Scottish larder to the sushi trains of Japan. Pavilion 1 is an international market place held in conjunction with branches of the Slow Food Movement. The ‘Buon Paese’ in Pavillion 2 is a taste journey through Italy. You can wander down lanes of oils, cheeses, sweets, cured meats, sweets and spirits as you would through a hillside Medieval town. Pavilion 3 is devoted to Slow Food Presidia and will feature 300 stalls selling products from across the globe from yak milk cheese made by monks from the Tibetan highlands to cured goat meat from Cyprus.In 2004, over 600 exhibitors from 80 countries participated in this event.

The theme of this year’s salone is "good, clean and fair" taken from Petrini’s book on the principles of a new gastronomy. In this Petrini’s response to the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Project, he sets the challenge of responsible gastronomy recognising the impact of eating upon the environment, agriculture and biodiversity. Good describes the sensory experience of food – tastes, memories, feelings. Clean is respecting ecosystems and the environment. Fair is about social justice.

For Petrini, gastronomy is not simply the appreciation of food and our cultural heritage but taking responsibility for food production and its impact upon ecosystems, biodiversity and the environment.

This year as the Salone du Gusto celebrates its tenth year it will be closely linked to Terra Madre, a meeting of international food communities, and the Ark of Taste, a catalogue of foods and produce under threat of extinction. Over 750 products currently form part of the Ark.