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  Local authenticity and hospitality: why the Slow Food Movement been a success for local craftsmen of cuisine?

Cinzia SCAFFIDI - Director of the "Slow Food" Study Center, Italy

 

The Slow Food Movement was founded in Italy in 1986 as an association concerned with traditional food, good wine and minor tourism.
In 1989 it developed into an international Movement, and since then membership has steadily grown.
Today Slow Food has 70,000 members, half in Italy and the rest in more than 40 countries around the world.
It is organized into Convivia. There are around 350 in Italy which allows very widespread diffusion of the Movement’s activities, as well as very wide-ranging feedback. The guides we publish, for example, are popular because the information they provide comes from true and direct experience in local areas.
We have also witnessed, in the last few years, the steady growth in complexity of the Movement and of the questions it addresses.
It began as a Movement for the “defence of the right to pleasure” and we started to consider all the implications of this concept.
Of course, pleasure means eating good and well-identified food, whose origins and processing are known to us. It also means having a glass of fine quality wine or beer or whatever the traditional drink may be in the place we are in. Pleasure also means visiting areas whose rural landscapes can tell us about their history, their customs, linked to the climate, religion, and events of the people living there.

But pleasure is much more than that. More importantly, pleasure must be considered as everybody’s pleasure, and food served at the table is just the tip of the iceberg.
This consideration triggered the Slow Food’s evolution from an eno-gastronomical Movement to an eco-gastronomical one.
Food comes from the land and when we eat we must be aware that this has been made possible by those who produced the food: farmers, producers, cooks.
This kind of vertical extension of the interest of Slow Food joined with a horizontal (geographical) one: born as an Italian Movement and raised as a European one, strongly west-oriented (the USA nowadays have one of the strongest national Convivia), Slow Food began to reach out to the so-called “developing countries”: Eastern Europe, India, Africa, Latin America.
Because the pleasure of food must be shared, nobody can enjoy their food without thinking that this is a universal right and that every kind of food, even the simplest, has a story to tell: the story of a place, a population, an identity.
We are here today to talk about ”hospitality and local authenticity” and these 2 key words are very important in Slow Food universe.
In 1989 the Manifesto of the International Slow Food Movement already pointed out that:

“For this reason, we must choose the defence of calm material pleasure against the universal madness of the Fast Life. Against that majority who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we offer the vaccine of an adequate portion of guaranteed sensual pleasure to be practised in slow, prolonged enjoyment. This begins at the table with Slow Food, rediscovering the rich variety and aromas of local cuisines as opposed to the flattening effect of Fast Food.
Although Fast Life has modified our lifestyle in the name of productivity and threatens the environment and landscape, today Slow Food has an avant-garde response.
True culture is here, in the development of taste and not in its impoverishment, and this is the starting point for progress, with international exchanges of experiences, knowledge, projects.”

These words blunt the boundaries between the concept of conviviality and that of hospitality, with a linguistic factor: in many Latin languages the word “ospite” means both “guest” and “host”. We need to begin by talking about this equality of meaning:
the visitor has the same rights and duties as the host. It is important to remember this in the context of high quality tourism. More generally, it is important to talk about interdependence, another key term for the Slow Food Movement.
The idea of a successful man challenging the world single-handedly and winning, borrowed from cartoons, is actually false. In real life, whenever someone fulfils a public or private objective, at every moment of their life, they owe something to someone else. Interdependence does not just concern man, but also animals, nature, renewable resources.

All these considerations must be part of the definition of a tourist system par excellence.
The first step is to identify the concepts of quality to which we refer. Our objective must be to achieve a level of quality linked to:
- identity
- tradition
- local culture
and therefore based on the unique nature of an area’s features on the one hand, and on the other, on its sustainability for local communities.

Thus the objective is to make sure the SOCIOECONOMIC SYSTEM grows in a context of sustainable high quality development.

The concepts of sustainability and competitivity seem contradictory on first sight, and go together with the concepts of hospitality and innovation: but what may seem like a contradiction is actually only COMPLEXITY. We must EMBRACE COMPLEXITY because only a complex system can guarantee flexibility and duration.

Going back to quality, let’s see:

1. what it consists of:
- services
- raw materials, products
- culture
where services and products are however the results of culture

2. who it is offered to, which means defining and getting to know the interlocutor in order to communicate with him.
- tourist
- environmentalist
- person travelling for work
We need to know the level of awareness we are dealing with. A listener is selected by the message itself, not only by the means of expression.

3. the costs. The question of costs leads to the question of sustainable development. Costs are implied in producing quality and making use of it and these costs are COLLECTIVE. Take for example agricultural production: high quality production must be linked to small-scale choices, and this benefits the producer, the tourist, the market and OTHERS, those who neither live in the area nor will ever visit it, but live on the same planet and still have to pay the costs of all our actions. Any saving in resources and energy is a saving for everyone, and any cost is sustained by everyone. Going back to the matter in hand, hotels must enter this mindset without delay. They can no longer behave as if the “I offer a service, the client pays for it” circuit finished there. I offer a service that uses a series of resources belonging to EVERYONE; the client pays for part of this but the rest will be paid for by everyone else, sooner or later. So hotels must start thinking about low impact on the local area, just like any other productive industry.

This factor is also important when applied to communication: when we communicate
on a LOCAL level we cannot fail to be aware of the GLOBAL level. We receive the
whole world and we should not be talking about ourselves alone but about the whole
world.

4. How to achieve and maintain it:

It is possible to invent a PACT that operators in the tourist industry must make with:
- the local area
- the client
- the producers
which concerns both quality production and communication of quality.
Rules can be drafted (and respected) to be communicated to the client creating SHARED OBJECTIVES.
Quality CAN NO LONGER STOP AT the relationship between those offering it and those paying for it. Quality must be collective and global.

So here are the three principles identified earlier - Identity, Culture and Tradition – in a more clearly defined presentation:
- they cannot be communicated if we do not POSSESS and APPLY them.
- They are not simply a question of awareness. They must be EXPERIENCED by those who communicate them and by those receiving the communication.
- They have no PLACE or TIME. They must be the OFFER: the person offering them must know this and the person receiving them must be made able to RECOGNISE THEM.

Now if the three mainstays of the system are IDENTITY, CULTURE and TRADITION, let’s link them to one another and to the concept of SUSTAINABILITY.

IDENTITY
The identity of a local area consists, amongst other things, of:
- places and therefore landscapes and products
- history and therefore objects, languages, legends, customs
- objects and therefore traditional skills and crafts
But an area’s identity also partly consists of the identity of OTHERS, of progressive contamination and overlapping: it is important to know and recognise these factors as a contribution to the construction of identity, not as alien elements to be denied or denigrated. (Eg. The role played by Sardinian immigrants in the creation of “Tuscan pecorino” cheese should not be kept quiet or seen as a reason for discord – “Tuscan pecorino doesn’t really exist”. It should be recognised as the origin of a product which is seen today as Tuscan and whose origins lie in the knowledge and culture of another part of Italy – “Tuscan pecorino owes a great deal to Sardinian immigrants”)

CULTURE
Obviously the issue of culture is disconcertingly vast but we can attempt, here, to identify some aspects which may be more interesting and/or useful in the construction of a system of high quality tourism:
- material culture
- behavioural culture
- culture as processing of the possibilities presented by objective situations (climate, land...) compared to the requirements of the population
- again, the culture of others: how many “other” elements have constructed the situation we see today.

TRADITION
Tradition is visible in a number of different areas:
- products → dishes
- legends → festivals, rituals
- productions → methods

A quality system based on identity, culture and tradition is linked to sustainability if it stems from the assumption that these three mainstays are three rights/duties shared by everyone and that by forgetting them many tourism systems we know have become distorted.

For a movement like Slow Food (founded as a quality wine and food association and which has worked for 20 years to restore the rightful prestige to this sector), when we talk about tourism it is impossible not to focus on AGRICULTURE and from here, implications of an aesthetic nature which can attract tourists and also economical implications which can make the system work in a sustainable manner. Sustainability must be considered in terms of products (sustainability for what), people (sustainability for who) and time (sustainability for how long).

Slow Food’s experience with the Presidia project has demonstrated that by focussing attention on farm food production systems, it is possible to build sustainable economic systems.
The production network revived by a Slow Food Presidium has a local application (short network) through which tourists are attracted by fine food products and typical products (which answer the question of identity, culture, tradition). This can also be more widely applied (long network) to guarantee further stability for the producer (sustainability) who can sell some of the products outside the local market attracted in the area.

Conclusions

1) The tourism system is protected by protecting the system in general: a place is nice to visit if it is a nice place to LIVE, in terms of sustainability. And also in terms of sustainability, it will remain a nice place to live if the tourism facilities bear that in mind and do not annihilate it.