“When we loose a
flavour, a fragrance, we loose a recipe”
CARLO PETRINI
Most of us
understand the importance of seasonality, freshness, colours and flavour in our
cooking. As we become more educated about the food we eat we also see words
like fresh, local, organic and artisan appearing everywhere on restaurant
menus and food packaging. Although those words have never been more in fashion
than they are right now, it’s often too easy to get lost in all the marketing
jargon and slogans that we begin to forget what those wonderful words really
mean. That is until you meet someone like Laura Buades.
Laura is
incredibly passionate about the food we eat, where it comes from and how it is
grown. She has been at the forefront of the slow food movement in Spain over
the last few years and recently started her own company called loveat-beyond
organics to promote the use of locally produced, seasonal, biodynamic foods.
She believes in a reconnection with the lost rhythms of nature, the traditions
of the past and getting back to actually working the land. Laura has simple
farm to table mentality and believes that processed fast food is not only
changing the physical landscape through intensive farming, but it is also
eroding a way of life that revolved around producing and eating great food in a
relaxed, sociable way. As we
walked around her beautiful organic garden in Mallorca, she explained how many
rare plant varieties of indigenous fruits and vegetables are under threat from
standardisation and commercialisation just in the Balearic Islands alone. “It is overwhelmingly important that we
don’t lose our forgotten foods. Some of these varieties go back hundreds,
or even thousands, of years and are part of our culinary, scientific, genetic
and popular cultural heritage, they also ensure our genetic diversity is not
lost. Lets eat them, not lose them!”.
As Laura hands me
the most amazing sun-drenched peach I’ve ever eaten straight from one of her
trees, she tells me that, “At the end of the day we are what we eat, and the
land for future generations will be what we make of it. Together with
like-minded farmers, our aim is to raise awareness and protect local, lost
varieties, so that they may be rediscovered and returned to the market in the
future”.
After spending a
little time with Laura I’m reminded that our fast, modern lifestyles and
intensive production methods are the main reasons that we are losing so many of
our traditional foods. With their demise we also lose centuries of expert
knowledge and cultural traditions. We lose choice, flavour and the varied
landscapes associated with traditional farming. The simple truth is it is often
easier to find food from half way across the world than food produced on our
doorstep. It’s time to re-build the lost link between our food, the land, and
the people who produce it.
* The Slow Food movement was founded by Carlo Petrini and opposes
the standardisation of taste, defends the need for consumer information and
protects the cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions.
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