Terra Madre 2008

Held concurrently with Salone del Gusto in Torino, Italy from October 23 to 27, the third edition of the biennial international meeting of the Terra Madre Network will bring together food communities, cooks, academics and youth delegates for four days to work towards increasing small-scale, traditional, and sustainable food production.

This year, the network grows stronger thanks to the emerging Youth Food Movement, committed to the defence of food and food culture, which was launched at the Fifth International Slow Food Congress. The Youth Food Movement originated with students from the University of Gastronomic Sciences and Slow Food USA, and consists of a group from U.S. university campuses, young producers, cooks, and activists. Their objective is to engage, by the end of October, an additional 1000 youth from 150 countries worldwide, active within their own local food communities. Together with 5000 farmers, breeders, fishers, food artisans and processors, 1000 cooks, chefs, and restaurateurs (the bridge between high-quality production and consumption), and 500 academics (key to the exchange of knowledge, whether empirical, theoretic, from rural experience, or research-based), these young people are helping to forge links in the ever-strengthening chain that is the Terra Madre network.

Terra Madre 2008 will be an opportunity to expand this network to future leaders in the world of food production. The participation of a delegation of young people representing the Youth Food Movement assures that food and agriculture knowledge will be handed from one generation to the next, and that it will be preserved for a new generation of active and involved co-producers.

Terra Madre, an event organized by the Terra Madre Foundation, brings together food producers and workers from around the world, giving them the opportunity to discuss the major themes of food production. Together they share and compare the diverse and complex issues that underlie what “high-quality food” means to them: issues of environmental resources and planetary equilibrium, and aspects of taste, worker dignity, and consumer safety.