Speaking truth to Slow Food

ResearchBlogging.orgSlow Food is against standardization, right? Slow Food is for diversity, right? Well, sort of. That is certainly the rhetoric, but a paper by Ariane Lotti in Agriculture and Human Values ((Lotti, A. (2009). The commoditization of products and taste: Slow Food and the conservation of agrobiodiversity Agriculture and Human Values, 27 (1), 71-83 DOI: 10.1007/s10460-009-9213-x)) suggests that the practice can be rather different.

Lotti, who’s something of an insider, analyzes one of Slow Food’s projects in detail and comes to the conclusion that the organization is not as “alternative” as it claims, or believes itself to be. How can it be, when its imposition of production standards mimics the food system it purports to undermine? How can it be, when its taste education efforts can exclude “not-so-good-tasting foods…, potentially eliminating a part of the agrobiodiversity and associated processes that Slow Food is trying to save”?

Too harsh? A paragraph from the conclusion is worth quoting at length.

It may seem as if I am expecting Slow Food to do the impossible and protect agrobiodiversity while not engaging the structures of the conventional system, not creating a market for its exceptional products, and not trying to convince people of the importance of taste in the food decisions they make. Rather, I have tried to do something the organization has so far ignored; I have tried to take a critical look at the ways in which Slow Food attempts to achieve its mission and the effects of its activities. This is lacking in Slow Food and other alternative agriculture organizations, perhaps because a critique is often assumed to be a threat to a movement’s fragile existence. Without a critical examination of an organization’s activities, however, unintended and potentially negative effects are overlooked.

And of how many similar — and not so similar — organizations could something similar be said! Lotti longs for a middle way — no Cartesian dualist she.

…the binary of fast food and slow food ignores how the two extremes are related within the same agriculture system. This relation, in the case of the Slow Food organization, does not lead to a combination of the two to create what Mintz (2006, p. 10; emphasis in original) refers to as “food at moderate speeds”; that is, foods with the availability of fast foods and the characteristics of slow foods.

To truly fulfill its potential Slow Food needs to stop thinking of itself as somehow apart from — above — the conventional food system. Referring to the Basque pig keeper who was the subject of her analysis, Lotti points out that…

Pedro is not just a producer of Slow Food Presidium pigs and meats; he is a protector of global diversity and genetic resources. The industrial pig farmers, when they find themselves in a genetic corner with only conventionally-bred pigs to work with, turn to farmers like Pedro. The industrial pig is tasteless, and when the participants of the National Swine Improvement Federation Conference decide that they want to provide consumers with a “positive taste experience,” they go to farmers like Pedro, who raise non-industrial pigs, to look for taste (Johnson 2006, p. 54).

Closer attention to context and a critical, reflexive look at its efforts will “help the organization engage, address, and challenge more effectively the structures that undermine the continued production of the diverse catalogue of breeds and varieties with which it works.”

Will Slow Food slow down for a moment and listen?

Three good ideas

I think I have already pointed out that Nigel Chaffey does an entertaining round-up of botanically themed items from the world’s media on every issue of Annals of Botany. The latest one has three stories — on training, innovation and information — of great relevance to some of our recurring obsessions here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

  • Teaching Tools in Plant Biology is a new, online feature of The Plant Cell consisting of materials to help instructors teach plant biology courses. Each topic includes a short essay introducing the topic, with suggested further readings, and a PowerPoint lecture with handouts. The materials are peer reviewed by leaders in the field to ensure accuracy, like all material in The Plant Cell.” Anyone want to volunteer to do one on agrobiodiversity conservation?
  • InnoCentive, the global innovation marketplace, “where creative minds solve some of the world’s most important problems for cash awards up to $1 million,” is to tackle the problem of the European corn borer, though the solvers of this one get only $20,000, and must relinquish all intellectual property rights. Will be interesting to see if anyone bites. The deadline for submission just passed.
  • Annals of Botany is going to take part in a project “to establish whether content in various formats from disparate sources (e.g. literature from publishers and data from public databases) can be delivered to a central ‘knowledge brokering service’, which then makes the content machine-readable and allows key pieces of information to be extracted by data-mining approaches.” I really like this idea as a way of aggregating information on germplasm accessions, data from databases but also published results from papers etc.

Geographical indications to preserve Ethiopia’s biodiversity

From André Heitz.

Ethiopia is one of the frontrunners in the use of Intellectual Property to make the best use of its plant genetic and traditional knowledge assets. In the absence of legislation on geographical indications, it has endeavoured to use collective trade marks in the main export markets to add value to its Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harrar/Harar coffees. There is more on the Ethiopian Coffee Trademarking and Licensing Initiative at the Ethiopian Coffee Network and Light Years IP.

The Ethiopian Parliament is now expected to pass geographical indications legislation later this year. This will then provide the legal basis for Ethiopia’s plans to register geographical indications protection, first nationally and then abroad, over emblematic home garden products like coffee, beans, spices and condiments or aromatic plants.

The Home Gardens of Ethiopia project says:

Biodiversity is under threat everywhere, and Ethiopia is no exception.

This country features an exceptional biodiversity, and its gardens, shaped generation after generation by rural populations, represent a unique natural and cultural heritage that must be handed down to future generations.

To preserve this horticultural heritage, Ethiopia has chosen to design and implement an effective institutional and promotional tool: a Geographical Indications system.

The “Home Gardens of Ethiopia” project seeks to promote and develop native horticultural productions, while preserving in situ the biodiversity of the country’s gardens. Its approach is both original and efficient: to offer farmers communities legal protection and help them promote selected native products with new marketing opportunities. Ethiopian farmers will be able to make their traditional modes of production more sustainable, and preserve the biodiversity of which they are the custodians.

We’ll keep fingers crossed.