By Helen Dombalis, Policy and Strategic Partnerships Director
Helen Dombalis, center, recently traveled to Turin, Italy to present at workshop titled "Challenges Facing the Sustainability of School Gardens."
Today is Terra Madre Day, a day to reflect on the global Slow Food movement and to share inspiration from one of the world’s most important cultural forums. Hosted by Slow Food International, Terra Madre and Salone del Gusto bring nearly a quarter-million people (yes, you read that right!) to Turin, Italy every-other year in October to celebrate and preserve food cultures around the globe. Among them are 3,000 delegates traveling from more than 100 countries—all of them connecting, learning and renewing their commitments to improving the global food system so that it works for everyone. As my fellow 2014 delegate Jim Embry of Sustainable Communities Network in Kentucky put it, “Terra Madre is where you go to recharge your batteries.”
I am honored and privileged to have been among the 247 U.S. delegates in attendance this year. On the plane from JFK to Milan, I sat with an American-born chef running a restaurant in Mexico and an orchardist from California. I met cookbook authors, fishers and visionaries. I answered questions from a Grecian olive oil producer about getting started with farm to school and, in a workshop titled “Challenges Facing the Sustainability of School Gardens,” I told attendees how state policies in the United States are advancing the school garden movement. Although I was one of the only delegates with “policy” in my job title, I realized that I was among a big family of people with policy at their core, advocates for what Slow Food calls good, clean and fair food.
Helen listens to a presentation at Slow Food International's Terra Madre conference in Turin, Italy.
Here are a few of the ideas that really impacted me:
Good food brings people together. As I found, you can sit at a table with seven people who speak different languages and laugh harder than you’ve laughed in a long time over the shared joy of a lemon and almond cookie. Or appreciate your family history through traditions like dad’s grilled barbeque chicken with corn and lima beans, and mom’s sour cream cornbread. As I walked towards the Ugandan booth where small, ripe bananas were displayed, a flood of happy memories came to me: I’d eaten so many of those bananas during my summer in Uganda in 2007. Now my work helps to ensure that kids across the United States have access to experiential education, like school gardens, so they can have memorable, community-building food experiences of their own.
Clean food preserves natural resources. From tasting organic chocolate to listening in on Slow Fish conversations about the state of the world’s oceans, the concept of clean food was ever-present at the gathering. The Ark of Taste - a signature of this year’s gathering - reminded attendees that loss of biodiversity of foods is real.
Fair food advances food access. Slow Food International’s 10,000 Food Gardens in Africa initiative is a great example as it aims to increase the number of school, home and community gardens on the continent. Launched two years ago, the program has grown to include 2,000 documented gardens, and the goal is to reach 10,000 by Terra Madre 2016. With 35,000 people already involved in African garden projects, it’s exciting to think of how many more garden advocates will be activated with a quintupling of that number.
As Edie Mukiibi, VP of Slow Food International, said at a presentation about the African garden initiative, "the biggest yield of school gardens is not the food but the knowledge, motivation, hope” that gardens bring to children and families. That’s a belief we share here at the National Farm to School Network (NFSN). The benefits of farm to school are many, and kids, farmers and communities all win.
Get involved. Slow Food USA and the NFSN share many of the same values, and one of the primary areas where our work overlaps is around school gardens. Check out this guest post Slow Food USA contributed to our blog to announce the launch of their National School Garden Project in October. Their resources include a comprehensive school garden guide. Also check out NFSN’s own school garden fact sheet and explore other garden resources using the search functions on our resources pages. And if you haven’t already, please join the National Farm to School Network as we grow our partnership with Slow Food in the years ahead.