“All human beings have a right to eat, not just to feed themselves”

Yes, we are. We are what we eat in a number of senses. I think that this saying that is used so frequently in social settings is not fully understood. People should understand that when we eat, what we eat becomes a part of our health, of our future, of our good mood. That’s why eating well is important. Everything that we eat stays in us forever. For example, when we go and buy a computer or a sofa, we analyse the price in relation to how long the object will last. But with food, which stays in us forever, we don’t use the same criterion and we decide that it’s best to take the cheapest. Why? Because we wrongly think that it only stays in us for five minutes. But the saying “we are what we eat” is not only true in the physical sense. It is also important in cultural terms: we know our environment and our culture thanks to food. We should eat what we are, what we decide, what seems to us to be culturally and internally appropriate. Eating should be a complex act, related to our identity, interwoven with it. This commitment to eating taking into account our culture does not mean eating exclusively what belongs to a social or geographical environment. In fact, what we consider to be typical of a culture is already the result of contamination. Let’s take Italy, my country, as an example. What’s more typical than pasta? And where’s it from? From Arabia. And the tomato that I pour on it? From America, as is the corn, which is the basis of our typical polenta. But they are now a part of our identity, because that is the result of geographical, historical and social contamination. What’s important is the ability to decide what we eat. If we decide to eat something different, fine! It’s a question of balance. I don’t have to eat our products all year. If I want to try a product from somewhere else, it makes sense to try it. The problem today, and one that concerns me, is that I end up buying the seasonal products that I’ve also got where I live after they’ve travelled thousands of kilometres. Where have the strawberries that you eat come from? From California. And what happens to the Spanish strawberries? They’re eaten in the United States. Quite apart from harming our pockets, this policy harms the planet. But also, without a doubt the best and most nutritious strawberries are the ones I eat that are in season and that haven’t had to travel. Why? Because they haven’t had to be picked early to reach your table in time, they haven’t been put in refrigerators to travel and no preservatives have been added to them so that they can withstand the whole of the journey and still look good. It’s simple: if I make the right choice, I’m helping the planet. At a time of crisis such as this, we also have to support local products as they are cheaper. But also because the small farmers can’t go into large-scale production, they can only sell in our markets. Otherwise, we’re condemning them. Although, let’s not kid ourselves, food has never cost little, it’s never been cheap. When something is cheap, we face a twofold problem. If it’s good quality and doesn’t cost much, the producer suffers for it to be like that. Perhaps they don’t earn enough or they get into debt. Or if it’s not good quality and it doesn’t cost much, it’s the consumer that suffers. Or in the developed world, there’s a third possibility: if it doesn’t cost much, it’s good quality and the producer doesn’t suffer, it’s because it’s subsidised. Then others suffer, the farmers in the developing countries, whose products can’t compete with ours. No! We have a right that is very often forgotten: the right to food. I stress that we have a right to eat, not to be fed. And that is a right of every human being. With a rather closed mind, it seems normal to us that someone who is hungry does not have the right to choose. They only have the right to be fed no matter how. In the great famine of a few years ago, Zimbabwe rejected the genetically modified corn that the United States sent to it free, which became a scandal in certain sectors in our countries. People said “How dare they?” The United States did not make such an offer for one single reason. On the one hand, they were trying to help. But on the other, they were trying to colonise the African country’s agriculture through genetically modified corn, as was proven after a short while. Zimbabwe’s stance unleashed a long discussion with the FAO, which finally proposed to Zimbabwe that it should accept the corn ground so it couldn’t be grown but would only serve to feed the starving masses. Zimbabwe accepted but the United States said no, that it was too expensive to grind it and it didn’t want to pay for it. Then, Sweden offered to pay the cost of grinding it, but the United States refused in any event, making it obvious what its motives were. We should be clear that those who are poor do not have fewer rights than the rest of us. Hunger is not a weapon. The truth is it’s a subject we should be looking at. I’m not sure. Do you know where there is a great food culture? In poor countries like India, where there is still a great rural culture. Poor or country people still go to the markets or their neighbouring farmers, from whom they buy first-level products. By contrast, in the large cities, the rich people buy in supermarkets because they want foreign, processed products, that show their class. However, it’s said that here things are rather the other way round. The supermarkets sell food that doesn’t belong to anyone, with no great quality, while the markets seem to have only expensive products. I’m not certain but it should be looked into. It’s not true that you can eat well only if you’ve got money. We have to fight for that not to be so. At Slow Food, we defend the stance that we have to work towards quality, that it has nothing to do with what you were saying about gourmet boutiques. Food is quality if it’s clean, good, fair. A simple potato can be of the utmost quality because it hasn’t harmed the earth, or the person who grows it or the one who eats it. That food produces health. But, be aware of one thing! Quality is a universal right. Do people who don’t have money have to eat badly? Don’t they have a right to be healthy? We need to think. It’s a market, a chance for power and domination for some, of wealth or of pressure. That’s why it can’t be solved. War doesn’t always explicitly benefit economic power. However, there are multinationals that flourish when people are dying of hunger. They get rich out of the situation and then they have the cheek to say that they will do away with it because they have the miracle. And the poor countries don’t always have the ability as Zimbabwe did that time to oppose what the rich countries are proposing. A miracle to do away with hunger? Only small-scale agriculture does away with people’s hunger! The first need of simple people is to have food security. Being allowed to make mistakes is a luxury that only we rich have: if we miss a train, we’ve got the money to catch another one. If the luxury doesn’t exist, a minimum level of security is needed. In the agricultural sphere, one harvest a year of different varieties on the same field is the minimum level of security. Sure. It’s important how we eat in a given situation. It’s true that eating together, with others, is good. Eating is a social act, one of communication. But eating alone is not eating sadly. Every day, for a whole host of reasons, we have to eat like this, but we have to continue to allow eating to be something pleasurable. Nature, the gods…, whoever devised things this way that for animals, the group to which we proudly belong, basic acts that mean we do not die out are pleasurable. If the survival of the species depended on clean shoes… Most poisons are bitter and we associate a sweet taste with something that makes us better. It’s good to know that we eat to enjoy a pleasure that takes its time, that has its own style, a pleasure of company, relaxation, reflection… If eating is filling up with fuel, if going shopping is going to buy fuel… producers will also produce food as though it were fuel. If they do not put any love into producing, neither will there be any love in the act of going shopping, or of eating. It’s just a chain. Of course! When I go shopping, I haven’t the faintest idea about the product’s history. I take a piece of cheese out of the supermarket fridge and read the ingredients: milk, rennet, salt. What does that mean? Nothing. It’s the same anywhere. There’s no history to the cheese or the producer. Why? Because only a small producer can give you details. The large multinational has no idea about the product’s history: where the milk’s from, how those cows were looked after, what the pastures were like. Supporting local produce again is the only way to retake control as consumers. A significant amount of food culture and production used to be the responsibility of women. But industrial agriculture and capitalism have devalued that work, that culture. Perhaps it would be better for us if this gender cultural heritage had not been undervalued. Capitalists have valued paid work, public work, in short, work by men. We have not valued women’s culture in terms of food and agricultural production. When agriculture was run by women or couples – the man prepared and sowed, and when sowing time came, the woman was already thinking about what to eat and kept the seeds safe. They knew what they had to cook and what the family liked. It was an integrated production and food system that valued women’s culture. When capitalism began to establish itself, it required people who could produce full-time. Women were and are multi-functional in their role, because of their gender identity – they are mothers, workers, they look after a home… Today, women have been left out of mass agriculture and market productions. They are only given roles of little importance, some as awful as indicators of bad health in poor societies. When problems arise in developing countries, the first to stop receiving medical care are women and young girls. This enables us to detect problems of nutrition and disease. We have lost a lot with the male guidelines that industrial development has followed. In the past, people knew that food was the building blocks for health, beauty, well-being. In short, the building blocks of the future. But capitalism meant that we had to forget it. Today, many of us believe that food is fuel: we have to eat to carry on functioning because what we eat is in fact burned in a much more important act, namely producing. That’s not true. Also, however, 30 years ago you could ask young people things about agriculture and they knew the answer. Today, you can ask them about iPods and video games. It doesn’t mean that this is bad, but all the other knowledge is missing, which is also important. For different reasons, part of everyday education has been lost: population concentration in large cities, in our homes we no longer have generations living together as they did in the past and the family nucleus and culture is being worn away. We adults see that we don’t know how to choose our daily food, though we do know about the scandals such as mad cow disease. But young people are in danger, besieged by advertising. Even though it isn’t a product for children, the advertisements refer to them. Experts know that they have a great influencing power over parents. Some modern parents get over their sense of guilt by buying things. We’ve seen that what works very well is educating children so that they educate their parents.