Petrini and Politics

“Perhaps people have not really grasped that when we started Terra Madre with Slow Food in 2004, we were present in 46 countries, today it is 160, thanks to food not as a closed circle, but open to the communities. The word for our future is at the center of the Chengdu Conference manifesto in China: community. In times of crisis, communities are able to regenerate the political and social tissues with a passion that politics forgets, accepting great challenges because they have affective certainty, mutual solidarity and are founded on the sharing of food, leading people to be active individuals even without having political roles. This is politics with a capital P”. These are the words Slow Food’s founder Carlin Petrini spoke, at the launch of Terra Madre Salone del Gusto 2018 (Turin, September 20-24).