Happy New Year

Slow Food Vancouver wishes you a happy New Year filled with happiness, good health, and great food. As a convivium we are pleased with our successful year in 2010 and have exciting plans for 2011.

Looking back at the last year, some of the highlights were the Slow Food cycle tours and our second Terra Madre day on December 10th. We sponsored 10 delegates at the international Terra Madre meeting in Torino. Italy. We also hosted smaller events such as the High Teas at Schokolade, a coffee tasting seminar, an Italian family dinner and book launch, as well as supporting the DOXA 2010 film festival’s opening film, Terra Madre.

                                                                                               
                                                                                                    (Photo: Julian Worker)

So, for our first blog post of 2011, it’s fitting to leave you with the words of Terra Madre delegate Chris Hergesheimer, also known as the Flour Peddler, delivered at Terra Madre Day 2010:

                                                         
                                                                                                        (Photo: Michael Marrapese)

Good evening everyone, thank you for being here tonight. I would like to begin tonight by expressing my gratitude for the opportunity to be here with you and for having had the experience at the Terra Madre gathering in Italy. It was an honour and a privilege to join to group to represent BC and Canada. It was quite the experience and I am so grateful for being selected to attend.

In celebration of all we have experienced and all of us joining together tonight it is also my honour to pay tribute to local grain with you. I have been working with the local grain movement for five years now, working to establish and preserve strong relationships between landscapes, farmers, millers, bakers and eaters. Julia Child is supposed to have said “how can a nation be great when their bread tastes like Kleenex?”

The bread we are going to enjoy tonight is nothing like that; the bread we are going to enjoy tonight is slow bread; good bread; good, clean and fair bread. Healthy, wholesome, and heartening.
Tonight we come together in this celebration and share in our local grain - with a small taste of bread made from locally grown and milled whole grain flour provided by the Urban Grains CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] also here with us tonight.

One of the core tenants of the slow food philosophy has been the creation of a food relationship, shifting the focus from producers and consumers to producers and co-producers. For some this is simply semantics, for others this is a powerful symbolic shift. What better model of food procurement and provisioning could there be to illustrate this shift and this concept than the CSA model?

For this bread in particular, 250 people, a farming family, a fertile stretch of cared for farmland have come together to create and sustain this relationship.

The ability to pay tribute to local grain tonight is a result of all of terra madre’s gifts; water, seeds, soil and sun, all that contributes to our collective sustenance. But there are also human hands involved; hands that care for and preserve seed from year to year, hands that work the land, hands and hearts that connect people and families to a place. And of course to not overlook the realm of ideas and creativity, a desire to rework systems, a longing to close the gap between producers and consumers through mutual commitment, the application of the CSA model to grain and flour and bread.

Henry Miller is reported to have said that “you could travel 50,000 miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread”. So what is good bread? What is it that makes this bread tonight so special? It