Salone del Gusto. Or, Adventures With Cheese.

This year, seeing as how the usual activities of hiking among autumn leaves and playing with pumpkins were not possible, we celebrated my birthday with a trip to Torino.

We did the normal tourist things...

...admired the royal palaces, gazed at the Shroud of Turin (a reproduction of it, anyway; I found it to be oddly reminiscent of those early '90s magic eye posters), saw the ruins of the Roman theater. 

AND! And we went to the 2008 Slow Food conference, Terra Madre. Or, technically, we went to the Salone Internazionale del Gusto, which was occurring in conjunction with the conference and was open to the public. The fact that much of this occurred in venues of the 2006 Olympics gave me the impression that we were witnessing a kind of food Olympics. 

This is a lot of pigs.

Aged Parmigiano: it doubles as furniture!

One cheesemaker we talked to proudly showed us a 14-year-old wheel of parmigiano. "We ate its sister two years ago," he said, wistfully. 

So, we tasted cheeses and meats, wines and vinegars, and everything else that came our way.

Did you ever wonder how to say "raw milk on tap" in Italian? 

There was also plenty of educational content, though much of it was geared toward "Slow Kids," Slow Food's unfortunate nickname for the under-12s. 

Slow Kid J discovers that apricots are a Bad Choice in October.

I am not sure what this was all about, but for Halloween 2008, I hear leek costumes are in. (Better than Sarah Palin costumes, anyway.)

This is the "Piazza of Natural Fibers," which doubled as lounge area until several hours later when some Slow Kids had an epic fight with handfuls of wool, angora, and flax. 

Bundles of newspaper provided another sustainable seating option:

(They are sturdier than they look, but I still prefer a sack of cashmere fleece.)

We also investigated Slow Food's answer to fast food, a student-staffed cafeteria featuring local ingredients. The "chicken morsels with hazelnuts" and "persimmon and chestnut cream mousse" were fabulous. 

We heard that a contingent representing the Yale Sustainable Food Project was at the conference, but we didn't run into them among the thousands of people there. However, we went to a panel on school gardens which featured Yale's Melina Shannon-DiPietro (as well as Alice Waters and others from around the world-- Austria, Kenya, Canada, Italy-- who are working on school garden projects of various types). 

And now, we're back to our libraries-- a few pounds heavier.