Can ‘Slow Food’ save Brazil’s fast-vanishing Cerrado savanna?
The original version of this article, by Sharon Guynup, appeared on Mongabay.
It’s November in southeast Brazil, and the tall, feathery macaúba palms (
Acrocomia aculeata) are beginning to drop ripe coconuts. By January, the ground is littered with them, as some 67 families that live nearby, outside the town of Jaboticatubas, get to work dragging the trove home.
This coconut serves as the lifeblood for these traditional farming communities in the Cerrado savanna in Minas Gerais state, Brazil. Archaeological sites trace its use back to at least 9,000 B.C.
Every part of the all-purpose coconut is used, from its delicious yellowish flesh to the nut at its core. It’s a favorite kids’ snack, and is used to make a highly nutritious flour, baked into bread and cookies. Livestock eat it too.
Published December 29, 2020, 10:00 AM
Despite the pandemic, Slow Food International, a global organization that promotes local food cultures and heritage, pushes their 13th Terra Madre Salone del Gusto, their largest worldwide festival on food, environment, and food policies.
Terra Madre 2020 is a mix of digital and physical events happening in over 160 countries. For the Philippine chapter, they’ve lined up multiple activities for different regions, which involves an online food talk series that is currently on-going via Slow Food Negros Community’s Facebook page and YouTube channel.
One of the episodes of the food talk series tackles urban farming. In Bacolod, a garden sits in a backyard that used to be a garbage dump. The area was then unoccupied, not until when Anabel Villanueva-Salacata, a retired infectious disease doctor and owner of Twenty Six Herb Garden, decided to transform the lot into an edible garden. “You do not have to have a 2,000 or 3,000 sqm or a hecta
Food & The Environmental Revolution: Nourishment To Save The Planet 2020-12-22
Soup cans don t grow on trees. Of course some of the ingredients inside them do, as well as in the ground and on plants and vines. But by the time all those natural products reach your stomach, too often they ve undergone processing, been transported hundreds (or thousands) of miles and generally bear little resemblance to the organic state they came from.
Yes, the over-industrialization of the food industry has put so many steps between the consumer and the product that most of us have forgotten the most elementary principle of food: We re human beings who rely on the earth for nourishment.