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We are delighted to support the work of Slow Food®
and passionately believe in their objectives, sharing their values
of heritage, diversity and protection.
Founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986, Slow
Food is an international association that promotes food and wine
culture, but also defends food and agricultural biodiversity worldwide.
It opposes the standardisation of taste, defends the need for
consumer information, protects cultural identities tied to food
and gastronomic traditions, safeguards foods and cultivation and
processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic
and wild animal and vegetable species.
Slow Food now has 83,000 members worldwide and
offices (in order of creation) in Italy, Germany, Switzerland,
the USA, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The network of
Slow Food members is organized into local groups called Convivia
which organise courses, tastings, dinners and food and wine tourism,
as well as promoting campaigns launched by the international association
at a local level. There are a number of Convivia based across
the United Kingdom, most of which are very active.
Slow Food also organises national and international
events to further its cause. Examples are the Salone del Gusto,
the world's largest quality food and wine fair, held very two
years at the Lingotto Exhibition Center in Turin, Cheese, a biennial
cheese fair held in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, and Slowfish,
an annual exhibition in Genoa devoted to sustainable fishing.
In 2003 Slow Food created the Slow Food Foundation
for Biodiversity, an independent non-profit entity with the mission
to organize and fund projects that defend our world's heritage
of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions. The Foundation
supports Slow Food's projects that pursue this mission, such as
the Ark of Taste and the Presidia. The Foundation exists thanks
to the Slow Food movement but also through generous support from
public and private donors.
The Ark of Taste, designed and launched by the
International Slow Food Movement, was founded to discover, catalogue
and safeguard small quality food products and defend biodiversity.
The Presidia are organizational units used to promote the products,
guarantee their economic and commercial future and, at the same
time, protect the land from degradation and create new job opportunities.
Slow Food's most recent and innovative initiative
was Terra Madre, World Meeting of Food Communities, held in Turin
in October 2004, a forum for all those who seek to grow, raise,
catch, create, distribute and promote food in ways that respect
the environment, defend human dignity and protect the health of
consumers.
Alongside activities for the very young, Slow
Food also organizes two major adult education projects: the Master
of Food, a study syllabus in the wine and food sector split into
20 theme courses, and the University of Gastromic Sciences in
Pollenzo, the world's first academy of 'eno-gastronomy', with
campuses in Pollenzo, near Bra, and Colorno, near Parma.
To go to the Slow Food website click
here.
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