Bringing la dolce vita to the dorm room

Six members of the student group Slow Food Princeton traveled to Italy during Fall Break to take part in two food-related gatherings. Terra Madre, a conference held every two years in conjunction with the Slow Food movement, featured workshops, roundtables and speakers focused on the production and success of "good, clean and fair food," Slow Food International's motto. The travelers - Joseph Vellone '10, Elena Dillard '11, Yuanbo Liu '10, Ruthie Schwab '09, Henry Barmeier '10 and Kathryn Andersen '08 - were also able to take part in Salone del Gusto, a festival of food and presentations from Italian and other international vendors.

More than 1,000 other youth delegates joined the six Princetonians, who applied through Slow Food International to attend the conference and festival. "Princeton seemed to be better represented than any other school," said Vellone, the president of Slow Food Princeton, explaining that he saw this prominence as a testament to the University's commitment to sustainable food.

Slow Food Princeton, founded in 2007, promotes awareness and consumption of local, sustainable, fairly produced and organic foods, according to its website.

Beyond the discussions at Terra Madre, the students attended lectures by culinary luminaries like Carlos Petrini, the Italian who founded the Slow Food movement, and Alice Waters, a well-known American chef and leader in encouraging youth to support local and seasonal foods. They also spoke to Terra Madre producers and, of course, sampled their foods. A government official from the Piedmont region of northern Italy spoke about a doctrine requiring sustainable food production in the area.

The students noted that in general, food sustainability is more highly prioritized in that area than in the United States. "All the red tape we come up against here [in making policy] is basically the opposite there," Dillard said.

"Overall, the atmosphere there is much more conducive to the Slow Food movement, whereas here, there are so many more barriers," Liu added.

The concurrent Salone del Gusto food festival featured five tasting pavilions categorized by region. All of the important Italian labels as well as vendors from more than 50 countries were represented. "They had everything from a specific type of celery, to a saffron from Morocco and dates from an oasis in Egypt," Liu said.

One highlight, the students said, was a workshop run by Ferran Adria, a Spanish chef known for keeping his restaurants open six months a year and spending the other six months perfecting his recipes.

For Vellone, a memorable private honey tasting featuring honeys from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Vermont allowed him to detect subtle differences between the honeys. "The honey from Venice was both salty and grainy," he explained, "but the honey from Africa was smoky because people had started fires in the plants where the bees took their pollen."

The food connoisseurs stood out as much as their delectable food samples. Vellone gave the example of a man from the Basque region of Spain who specializes in andouille sausage. He told them about the meat-making process and the type of pig, which possesses a unique enzyme because of the type of grass it eats. "When you preserve a tradition like this, you're conserving a culture," Vellone said.

The group also got to examine food issues from a distance. "The hallmark of Slow Food is exploring every aspect of food and how to make it more sustainable," Dillard said, "and that means approaching the problem from a variety of standpoints - sociological, psychological, environmental and production-oriented, to name a few."

The group attended a lecture on the environmental degradation of mass-scale production, for example, and learned about the difficulties of producing on a large scale without compromising quality. To encourage regional and seasonal eating, Dillard said, "we need to get to point where we understand that even if we want strawberries year-round, we may just need to live without them for a few months" so that strawberries can be produced without pesticides or other manipulation.

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The Princeton delegation also had the opportunity to discuss sustainability issues with the students from Europe and other parts of the world at the conference. "Europe is so far ahead of us; they're working on things that we can't even really imagine implementing here yet," Dillard said. At Heathrow Airport in London, for example, customers must pay extra at shops if they want a plastic bag.

Liu said she believes this stark difference stems from conflicting cultural attitudes toward both the environment and food. "Americans have a messed-up relationship with food," she said, referencing obesity and eating disorders. According to the World Health Organization, 32.2 percent of U.S. adults are obese, while the American Psychiatric Association reports that about 2 percent of Americans in adolescence and early adulthood have eating disorders. "It's like a fear of food instead of a culture integrated with food," Liu said.

The Slow Food trip participants noted that other countries seem to have higher standards than the United States for what is considered high-quality, healthy food. In France, for instance, beverages cannot be called "juices" if they contain any extra sugar.

These higher standards, the participants noted, were perhaps fostered by the area's pride in and positive outlook on what they eat. Dillard pointed out that many people are attached to their culture's unique cuisine and that immigrants' diets are often the last thing to change upon moving to a new country. In the United States, however, this mentality is different, she noted. "We're a diverse populace," she said, "so we don't have an ethnic food. We can't represent our nation on a plate."

Back at Princeton, the students are eager to put what they learned at Terra Madre and Salone del Gusto to work. "We have a lot of new ideas for raising awareness and hosting tastings," Vellone said. Emphasizing that these tastings focus on "taste education" and not just on giving away free food, Vellone added that "a big part of Slow Food is appreciating food through taste, and we hope that leads to a concern of where the food comes from and how sustainable it is."

According to its website, Slow Food Princeton has previously held events such as cheese making, cheese tasting, honey tasting with locally grown honeys and combs, and a lecture by the owner of Small World Coffee on fair-trade coffee. Upcoming events include a gelato-making session with Bent Spoon employees using butternut squash from Forbes College's organic garden and bread-making workshops run by the Momo brothers, who own several local restaurants. These events are popular among students, Vellone said. "It's hard to accommodate everyone who wants to go but we try our best."

Ultimately, the Slow Foodies said they hope that, though we are closer to Trenton than Turin, Princetonians will learn to appreciate good food and understand the importance of where it all comes from. As Vellone put it, "The food tastes so much better when you know the story behind it."