Prima settimana as a College Graduate. On a farm.

So thanks to my lack of monies, and pouring all my savings in that joke of a overly forced academia study abroad program, I am volunteering on a mostly olive and clementine farm in a region called La Puglia. Its hard to describe except the city where I am most near has a rustic lack of urban design as southern development is far down on Berlusconi's finance agenda, since flying his private escorts in to his villa obviously take more presidence than cleaning up the south. Sound familiar? give or take a prostitute, add some corruption, cocaine and/or corporate kickbacks/sponsorship and a pinch of empty promises. And thats the story of a lot of peoples lives.

Anyways, the people im working with are pretty awesome, very seattle-like for what concerns lifestyle. Good music, homemade stuffed pizza with olives from the backyard (not exactly Seattle...), a sweet pair of drums, matè, and napping by the fire. Its sort of inspiring to live out on a farm, work for your room and board but working in a way thats in syncronation with the sun and the dirt.  So I guess me being really broke and curious about food and doing that program actually has a brightside to it. Is it possible to become a traveller for profession? I think it would gross me out to settle and become a number at a job that wont make any sense just so that I can buy a car to drive to work and then drive to work to pay for that car. I know there are cool jobs that exist, but the chances of me finding one with a Bachelors in Italian in a economic crisis and the unemployment rate steadily increasing makes me shiver with pessimism. che brivido.

Anyways, the point is that when i get home, I think I want to figure out a way to learn spanish and go WWOOF in South America. Go see some mountains and go puddle jumping. It would kinda be neat. I can feel it.

Im getting pretty savvy into listening and attempting to decode various italian accents and dialects wherever I stay. And since Puglia was influenced by the Greeks, its dialect is a huge fridge for my linguistic appetite. Sometimes I catch my "boss" speaking in dialect and ask him to repeat and explain, and he usually tells me the words came from Latin and or Greek and I giddly mwahaha like a total geek. I also spend my free time reading old pugliese poetry, random italian contemp. lit. that reminds me of Kerouac and Palahniuk and cookbooks. Then nap by the fire.

Food in Puglia is wicked good. The cuisine seems to dig almonds alot, my 1st  treat when i got here was a almond flour pastry with dark chocolate coating filled with a orange marmalade with a spreads' worth of marzipan inside.  Fried Stuffed Foccaccia and Calzones is also one of their specialties, I ate a foccaccia that was made out of fried rice and stuffed with artichoke tomato and prosciutto. It was hearty. Then eating freshly butchered pork chops grilled on the fire from the neighboring farm who just slaughtered it maybe 2 days prior is also pretty fantastic. And, juicy.

I better go, its time for my nap by the fire.

p.s. please excuse my spelling. no spell check!! is ruining my life!

last 2 weeks= biggest whirlwind of my frickin' life.

To some it up:

*Halloween in Naples with flippin awesome dudes that had way cooler hair than me.

*Harvesting Olives in Umbria

*Week in Spannocchia, a organic self sustaining farm estate agritourism, hiking and playing with wild heritage Cinta Sinese piggies and piglets

*Roman Coma for 2 days

*Perugia for my smart little sugar muffin Serena's Master's degree in Linguistics Graduation (Laurea). She got a perfect score. 110. Auguri. Yeah, here you have to do a public exam about your thesis, which she took 250 pages to write. Congrats. She is a linguistic Buddha.

*Discovering Rome. Outside the tourist zones. San Lorenzo. Love it. love...IT.

*Went to a nudist meditation agritourism farm retreat in Tuscany that I may be a WWOOFing at after this program ends. While there, stumbled on a quant little village town while on a hike with other WWOOF'ers (who btw were flippin wicked, one been WWOOF'ing from New Zealand to Japan to Czech to now Italy and the other just WWOOFing in Italy to gather research for an Italian "taco" truck he wants to open in the states). In the village town, in a small speck of Tuscany, we taste AMAZING wines from a cantina/cellar who happens to export to Seattle. Nice.

*My friend Elvi came to visit and discovering yet ANOTHER side of Rome. Circolo degli Artisti. Capital Hill in Rome. ahhhhhhh

Today? PEOPLES SOCIAL FORUM ON FOOD SOVEREIGNTY!

yes.

im stuck in a whirlwind called Italy, and i love her ever so much.

La prima....Eurochocolate and Midterms from inferno.

Last weekend, I went back to Perugia to visit some of my most lovely wonderful friends that i had the luck to make when I studied here 2.5 years ago. My motivations to go were of course to see them but also to experience: Eurochocolate. A ten-day long festival that converts the entire downtown area to a chocolate wonderland where you were bombarded by hot chocolate stands, cakes with hot chocolate sauce, bulk artisan chocolates, chocolate truffles, chocolate salamis,  handmade pistachio cardamom chocolates, chocolate beer, chocolate novelties such as chocolate kebab (not on a stick, but shaved chocolate inside of a crepe to simulate a pita like kebab) fair trade chocolates, free chocolates, dog treat chocolates, fruit dipped chocolates, chocolate making classes, chocolate liquor shot bars, oversized lindt balls the size of volleyballs, etc. Basically I carried a chocolate baby in my belly the whole weekend. At the end of the weekend I was annoyed with all the crowds since I realized that YOU COULD BUY ALL THIS CRAP IN THE STORES! AND GET THIS! FOR CHEAPER!!! Uffa!!!!!
It was ridiculous that this commercialized festival that was basically hosted by Perugina (recently acquisited by the Nestle world-ruiners)  and Milka, people all batcrazy to fill any public walking space, shoving thru crowds shoulder to shoulder in order to navigate this small quaint etruscian city. Let me sum up the food politics as to not completely bore you: Chocolate quality? i doubt it. Were all this chocolate producers in africa, asia and latin america properly compensated for supplying the magic that makes Eurochocolate possible? Ha. maybe for the one Fair Trade stand out of the other 600. Sugar? tons of it, also probably from exploited countries. There was a section of the festival that was dedicated to fair trade and sustainable chocolate production and we got to taste some delectable indonesian chocolate sweets from a gemmed heart gentleman who made them in his house the morning of. This sweet looked like a creme and brown striped block of glycerin soap, but when you bit into it you felt the perfect dance of coconut, vanilla and chocolate and with a texture that reminded me of a smooth like firm jello.

This midterm week has been pretty pointless. We were assigned 3 presentations and 3 coinciding research papers. Really? all in one week? Whatever it is what it is and I guess its not all that bad. Well, yes it is. Why should we have been stuck becoming laptop zombies for the last 2 weeks preparing for this nightmare week. Again, whatever. its going to get better. i think.

On a more positive note, we're going to chill out in the Tuscan countryside on a agro-tourism farmstead next week. Makin' pizza, goin' hiking, learnin' farming....its gonna be fab, i can feel it. But first, I get to harvest olives to make olive oil at one of my friend's family olive grove in Umbria this weekend...YES!

Ciao!

"Te Ne Dico 4, Non Sono D'Accordo!"

Prima visita al'UN FAO x l'occasione di World Food Day

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is located in Rome and October 16th was World Food Day. Our program had originally arranged for us to visit the FAO for World Food Day to witness a talk given by Marion Nestle, a leading food activist that has written several books concerning food safety and the perils of the industrial diet and is a nutrition professor at New York Uni.

I have mixed feelings about Nestle's talk. It was refreshing that she discussed the local food movement and that small scale organic farming is one of the most logical solutions to a clean and equal food supply that would feed and nourish the world, and showed a documentary called "Fresh" the exemplified these solutions. But when it came to the issue of GMO's, she hid behind her microbiology degree to proclaim that she couldn't fully believe it was a harmful technology and sang the progressive praises for the US Secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsak, who happens to be pro-Monsanto. Of course she was in front of the US ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Ag, Ertharin Cousin, whose track record includes her once high management position at Albertson's and pro-GMO stance. I did however win a door prize, a book on the the dangers of our current regulatory FDA standards and how they lack enforcing food safety (e.coli, etc). and she signed it at the end of her session.

BUT in addition! Our teachers announced that we were FORMALLY invited to the UN Ceremony commemorating and recognizing World Food Day, with UN Ambassadors! I couldn't believe it that we were able to enter the room shown on the news when reporting on UN talks/events!  So I already was thrilled to be able to see Nestle in real life speaking at the FAO, but then we were able to exclusively attend the opening ceremony! I have to say, after sitting down and sitting through 2 hours of various foreign ambassadors including: The director/general of the FAO Jacques Dioff,  The 1st lady of the D.R. who is also a Goodwill FAO Ambassador, The italian under-secretary of state of the ministry of agriculture, food and forestry policies Antonio Buonfiglio, and the secretary general of the Ibero/American Summit Enrique Iglesias.  I was not as impressed as I thought I would be. They all seemed to repeat the same thing about being devoted to ending world hunger, but the solutions as they saw seemed to come back to "technology" and expanding the 3rd world to the global "free market". No talk of creating sustainable solutions that would promote self-sufficiency, local economies, and eliminate the need for foreign meddling, such as "technology", the World Bank, the IMF, and Monsanto. These are the institutions we are learning that have helped CREATE world hunger. No such talk was given on solutions to eliminate poverty but to increase food production with the help of technology. I wonder if anyone has ever told them that food production is well above par with human need, the problem is a lack of access caused by poverty, a problem that could be solved socially with the help of local uncorrupted politics. And there is not only no proof, but hard proof that industrial agriculture does not increase yields but actually leads to less food produced per hectare. But yet this is what policy is subsidizing and supporting rather than small scale sustainable agriculture.

here are some facts that I gathered from the talk:

80-90% of cereal prices remain 25% higher than 2 years ago. Affecting mostly the food security of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

As of 2009, fertilizer costs are up 175%. Seeds: 70% and animal feed 75%.

The question we should pose ourselves is how can productivity, the answer that the UN FAO proposes to alleviate hunger, increase with cost increases like these?

In addition to these staggering rates, FDI (foreign direct investment) has taken a 42% nose dive that should have been used to invest in roads, infrastructure, development, food, etc.

So tell me, mister directors/generals/secretaries: how will technology and higher production solve hunger when FDI is down and cost inputs and grain are at a record high? How is it that most of the ambassadors at this talk are more than well-clothed (some with servants) and eat the organic food in its cafeterias yet suggest conventional farming and keep your wealth to yourself?

I will end this post with some wise words, the only sense spoken of during this ceremony, by the FAO Goodwill Ambassador, The 1st Lady of the D.R. Margarita Cedeno de Fernandez:


"What we need is social justice and structural change. We need to address the problem of inequality and improves access to more nutritional food. We need to change worldwide consumption patterns."

Prima lezione della cucina italiana.

Now I have entered into the 2nd week of lesson on this wonderful amazing program. Since part of the program is hosted by the Anthropology department at the UW, there is a historical ethnographic analysis/study aspect to how food ways and Italian culture of eating has been affected by various food politics. During WWII, the italian economy was weak and imbalanced and as a result, most people struggled to eat. Hence a particular genre of Italian cuisine was hatched, la cucina povera (the poor cuisine), and today our class was given a live cooking class by a very charismatic Tuscan who grew up in that period retelling her childhood kitchen experiences and then we went on to prep, cook and eat the cucina povera way, although by the end of this seeming feast our appetites were more than well satisfied. I would marvel at a cooking class about la cucina ricca!  Now Italy enjoys a cucina ricca (rich), or benestante (well-off), I guess you would call it these days, which has lead to much revolution for what concerns Italian cuisine and food production which is precisely what we intend to study and understand. And how else would we learn but the hands on way? To cook and eat.

Regional cuisines have been formed and changed due to foreign occupations, politics, time and space. The Sicilian region was occupied and influence for hundreds of years ago by Spain, France, Greece and various Arab countries. As a result, they developed a cuisine typically consisting of eggplant, flatbreads, pinenuts, tart cheeses, chocolate, various spices, stewed meats, etc. This cuisine is still strong to its foreign roots that were present many years ago. Lets hope that Globalization and the Industrialization of food doesn't have as much of a lasting affect on influencing Italian Cuisine. 

La cucina povera consisted of a lot of bread, stale bread, water, salt & pepper, modest amounts of olive oil, unleavened chickpea flour, inexpensive vegetables such as cauliflower, potatoes, carrots and spinach, and of course a few eggs and sugar here and there. But apart from the bread and water, everything else is a mere condiment for flavor and perhaps trace minerals.

The menu that we created was:

Dante's Sweet Mess: bell peppers (the sweetness), a few capers (just for savour), anchovies (to give the saltiness to the dish instead of salt itself), and a smidge of olive oil on top of sliced bread. All this pan cooked makes the mess.

La Minestrone- una battuta (a beating. im not sure why the teacher called it this but whatever im not italian) of onions, carrots, celery and oil slowly fried and add then steamed potatoes, chard, spinach and fresh parsley to make the soup. No water added. All the moisture from the steamed veggies make the broth base.  This modest concoction is then served upon garlic rubbed (rubbing instead of adding garlic in the soup since garlic was also pricey and needed to be stretched out as much as possible) and drizzled olive oil bread and voila. yummy.

Zuppa di Cavolfiore- simplest delicious soup. Water Broth (made from the stalk and leaves of the cauliflower), a head of cauliflower, salt and pepper. Basta. You then dip a piece of stale bread in the water broth and serve the soup on top.

Farinata di Ceci- an unleavened "bread/flatbread" made only of chickpea flour (very cheap and very filling, a cucina povera prereq.) water, a few drops of olive oil, salt & pepper and a couple sprigs of rosemary. baked and fantastic.

And yes, there was a dessert.

Dolce Pane (sweet bread pudding)- stale bread slices, lemon zest from 2 lemons (not easy work!), a shy handful of raisins, and a beaten egg/sugar sauce to pour over and bake into a bread pudding. We poured a little bit of milk on top of this to be a little more ricca.

Enjoy!

Prima Settimana a Scuola

1st week of school. Let me start off by explaining how my bones and tendons are yelling lactic acid build up. I have been so excited to start school so on monday when I proudly gather my luggage from my friend's in Perugia for my train to Rome, the handle of my luggage decides to shatter and break, about a block after we left the house. I had about 30 minutes till my train left and still needed to pull out money for the train and for the minitram to get me to the train station. Oh, me. What did I do? Well, i pulled out a scarf and tied to to my bag and dragged it up some hills to the station. I had at that point 6 minutes till the train left. Tried to buy a train ticket at the macchine. Of course it froze once i inserted money. What did i do? Cry like a baby? No, I said "im getting to my apartment in Rome and nothing will stop me, not even a 40 euro fine for being on a train without a ticket!" So i threw my luggage down the stairs (to get to the platform) lugged it up the platform and got on the train and still had 2 minutes before departure. So I hunt down the train "captain" (capotreno) to beg for mercy, tell him my Seinfeld like circumstances as to why I did not buy a ticket in time and convince him to sell me one on board without the fine. He, of course can't do it. So THEN I decide maybe its time to start crying like a baby. He stops me and tells me he has a solution. At the next train stop, he let me off to buy a ticket and wouldn't let the train leave until I got back on. Don't worry, it didn't hold up the train because at this point I was so pumped with adrenaline that I did it in like 43 seconds. Sweet ending to a bitter beginning. Oh and of course I had to drag my 65 pound bag around Rome to school to get checked into the apartment b/c I was too stubborn to pay for a taxi and then lugged it up 4 flights of stairs to the apartment. I rewarded myself with ice cold Limoncello. I think i might need to buy a new piece of luggage.

So today was my first day of school. I was really excited because for about 5 of us there is a specific conversation class about the course topics, and the other students have to take a crash course in Italian as they have had no previous training. Did I mention I graduated in Italian Studies?  So when I went to this "conversation class" I was horrified by having to take a grammer exercise quiz. I just spent 3 years, plus several months as an exchange student in Italy prior, worked my butt off to get a semi good command on the language and literature and here I was back in 103. It was a nightmare. The teacher at the language center even did flashcards with foods on them to see if we knew how to say them in Italian. This class is 2 hours a day, by the way. I went to my professors and asked that I be given something in place of the language class as I have already payed my dues to vocab and grammer drills, and I was the only person in that group of 5 that had beyond a year of Italian training. They gave me an awesome task. To research a food issue that appeals the most to me and relate it to Italy and do a research presentation about it. And possibly even do some translation work with a CD they acquired an an Italian event concerning the politics of food sovreignty.  Im in a little bit of heaven. I get to have 2 hours a day to myself researching my intellectual passions.

Then we did a tour of the Campo de Fiori market. We were given a little tutorial about the history of open air markets.  The Campo market has seen some unfortunate changes due to gentrification, tourism and globalization (mostly americanization). 30 years ago there were 100 fresh fruit and veggie stalls. In 2002  that number dropped to 20. We were given a little exercise to count today, in 2009, how many stalls there were. As I walked around and had this in mind, I started to notice the darker heart of Italy. How there were stalls selling pure crap. Signs written in poorly translated english. Imposter designer vendors about a foot away from their "stall" (cardboard on the ground with knock off Vuitton bags) in the case a policeman decided to notice, since more than likely they reside as clandestines in Italy illegally. I noticed produce that was surely not grown in Italy. Floods of tourists that blindly enjoyed this atmosphere, made exactly to please them and make money off of. There were no farmers at these stalls. These vendors went to distribution centers at an ungodly hour 20 miles away from Rome to give people (and rip them off) the romantic experience of shopping at a farmers market in the historical center of Rome. The darker heart of all this is that a society erases certain romatic traditions for accomodating tourism, business and profit. At the end of this tour, I counted about 8 stalls of fruits and veggies. And as I saw mostly western tourists enjoying paying for overpriced supermarket quality produce and a few trinkets and gourmet truffles, and also I saw a few extremely dirty bums laying down in the nearby allies. Its sad for me as a romantic to see that traditions are wasting away and polarization of rich and poor are ever so gapped, but we still can at least enjoy the Roman sun. You can't americanize that.

That was basically my first day of school.

Prima Settimana in Italia

My first week or so in Italy has been good, pretty chill and mostly unpredictable.

The basic highlights were

*Aperitivo (happy hour) that actually started at 8pm and we stayed till 11, drinking delicious calabrian (a southern italian region where some of the best agriculture takes place) white wine, eating modestly marbled cured meats like speck and salami, ripe and tart umbrian cheeses, artisan breads topped with only the freshest and most aromatic tomatoes and basil from the courtyard garden....all this cost a shy 8 euros. In a group of 5, we each had about 3 glasses of wine and plenty of "appetizers" to suffice for dinner. Plus it was outside, with a perfect briskness, overlooking the seemingly candlelit Umbrian countryside and a pretty descent live band. 8 euros, which is about 11 bucks. In Seattle, 10 bucks would have been just for the entrance fee! I am constantly reeling over how affordable some luxuries can be. Oh and a light heavenly cappucchino and a buttery sweet croissant is a mere euro1.50. Caffe Vita, you can keep my 3 dollar americano and 3 dollar obviously-trying-too-hard-to-be-an-edgy muffin and the obligatory tip and give it to some other shmuck. And half the time Vita doesn't use direct trade/organic for their espresso/ coffee of the day. But hey, my classes will probably teach me that 1euro cappucchino is laced with poor free market exchange policy. Until then....=)

* I actually did some reading for my classes ahead of time and I am pumped about the course content, in otherwords i'm pretty excited to start learning this quarter and to do my homework.

* Went to Bologna (more northern Italy) and went to Ferrara (about 45 min. away) to see a festival of International Journalism hosted by a pretty cool weekly magazine called Internazionale, a weekly raccont of the worlds most pressing political developments and issues. I sat in on a talk with 5 international journalists discussing the new revolution that is certain to come in Iran. The most compelling point made is that this revolution will differ from the last because the feminine movement will guide its succession where as the last was driven moreover by masculine ideals. I saw 2 documentaries called "The Yes Men Fix the World". Well, they fix the world by hacking corporate websites and impersonating CEO spokespeople and create a whole sort of media attention for those companies that they feel lack corporate responsibility/liability for their business as usual practices. In a very hysterical way. Example, the BBC contacted one of the sites, supposedly DOW, and these Yes Men actually went on television for the Bhopal disaster anniversary and declared all responsibillty to clean up and fix the pesticide explosion site that occured and compensate the victims, as DOW had merged with the company, Union Carbide, that created the disaster. Basically in the hour the world believed in corporate responsibility, the DOW-Carbide stocks plummeted as stock holders did not see incentive in this act of pentinance. Please look them up!

Another doc i saw was by this awesome director Petr Lom about Iran called Letters to the President. It was illuminating how Ahmandinejad is seen by his supporters and gave us a sense of how these people see him and see the western world. And also see how the poor really have struggled at the hands of his inadedequacy but still remain faithful. The general consensus nonetheless seemed to blame Ahmadinejad for its massive Inflation, one woman filmed reported saving money for 3 weeks just to buy a pack of strawberries from the government run discount store for her son, meanwhile waiting on a response to her plea for help in one of these "letters". I also reccomend. I also got to see a concert of Ascanio Celestini who song pretty moving politcal satyrical rock music. Perfect way to end the mild autumn day in Ferrara after a days worth of intellectual mind candy.

And monday i start school and move into my apartment. I have never been so excited to start school. I can't wait to do my homework. Is there something wrong with that?

I'll post back after i settle in Rome, Probably after the honeymoon with school wears off=)

A dopo! Ciaooooooooooooo!

Heading to Italy

Hi everyone, as you know I am a participant on a study abroad program titled "The Culture and Poltics of Food in Italy" in Rome, Italy. The program is first in its nature, hosted by the Anthropology and Geography Dept. with UW Seattle. I will be studying at the Rome Center in Campo Dei Fiori (field of flowers), where I will also be residing close to. This "Field of Flowers" is a famous tourist stop for its huge daily farmer (bazaar almost) market and this is where we will start studying the Italian Food Chain and reach to the Global scale of how food is obtained and produced through Italy. And through this travel we will stop off at the Slow Food Movement that was started in Italy in response to the Fast Food (virus) who, McDonald's, started to appear in the eternal city, Roma.

When I arrive in Italy, I kinda have no clue what i'm doing until my program starts on October 5th. Basically gonna vagabond i suppose on friends' couches throughout Umbria, Tuscany and maybe even up north a bit in Emiglia-Romana (Bologna). Homeless till the 5th! It will be awesome.

Wonder if you knew this, there are no Starbuck's in Italy. Urban legend says the government banned them from even trying. I think its because there is a cap on how much cafe's and bars can charge for coffee...max i believe is 1.80 or 2 euros and maybe 5bucks realized that can't compete with that. Boh!

Personally I imagine that I will learn that the once pure and prideful Italian foodways have been tainted by globalization. And that all the fantasy that I want to believe that the Italian food supply has been protected in spite of the global rise of factory farming, conventional agriculture, and GMO's will be painted over. I also think I will learn about the Mafia's corrupt role in farming and agriculture. I hope to learn about product quality polemics as a result of the global food trading market.

In all, I'm excited for what I am about to learn and experience. All 3 of my love affairs should be melange'd into one trip: my love for Italy, my love for Food and my love for politics. I hope that some of you stay tuned and find my blog as interesting as I do.

I will update this pretty well, if you have gmail, you can click on the follow option and you can get email notifications about new posts.

Take care guys! Ciaoooooooooo!

Love,

Coral