Conferences, Arenas and Exhibition Areas

Terra Madre Salone del Gusto 2022 features a range of spaces for debate and reflection on the theme of regeneration

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The constantly evolving Terra Madre program has recently been enriched by another 100 new events, with Taste Workshops, taste education activities, cooking courses and convivial dinners as well as activities in the spaces dedicated to the next generation of activists and new exhibition areas.

Terra Madre Salone del Gusto 2022 will run from September 22 to 26 in Turin’s Parco Dora. As well as the Conferences in the Sala Kyoto of the Environment Park, the Parco Dora will also be hosting new spaces for debate and reflection, like the event’s two Arenas, named after two great activists of our time, Gino Strada and Berta Càceres. The Food and Health space, the result of a collaboration between Slow Food and Reale Mutua, the event’s official sponsor and main partner, will be the venue for Forums and Food Talks exploring the relationship between what we eat and our health from many angles. The University of Gastronomic Sciences is organizing a series of themed aperitifs and breakfasts with producers, tastings and meetings, while the RegenerActions offer a chance to discover—and learn to cook—recipes from Italy and the rest of the world. Terra Madre’s fringe activities are a great way to get to know the host city of Turin and explore the theme of regeneration with parties, book presentations, visits to urban food gardens, guided tours and more.

Find the complete program here

Terra Madre’s Conferences

The Conferences will provide the ideal forum for reflecting on the biggest international issues linked to food policy and the future of food. This year, the program is focused on how we can regenerate our food system, providing practical ideas for how to bring about the radical renewal that is desperately needed in society, the environment, the economy and culture. The conferences will cover all ecosystems, from cities to oceans, forests to plains, and involve experts from all over the world: philosophers, economists, activists, artists and researchers. All conferences will also be available online.

The program kicks off at 5.30pm on Thursday September 22 with The Regeneration We Need, the first conference to open the debate on the link between the food system and regeneration and how regeneration offers a response to the current climate, social and environmental challenges we are facing. During the conference, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini will be in dialogue with the movement’s new president, Edward Mukiibi.

Two more conferences will follow on Friday, September 23: At 3.30 pm, Changing Cities and Models of Regeneration will look at how to promote food regeneration in our cities, while at 5.30pm Loving the Earth will explore the meaning of regeneration in agriculture. The final two will be held on Saturday September 24 and Sunday September 25, both at 5.30pm: You, Me Us: Making a Difference Together and The Right to Food: Fighting for Social and Environmental Justice. Their aim is to show how we can take an active role in regeneration through our everyday choices and why it is important to talk about regeneration also in terms of social justice.

All five Conferences will be free and held within the Parco Dora. Anyone unable to attend in person can access them digitally, where they will be enriched by quizzes, surveys and in-depth insights.

An International Panel of Speakers

The speakers confirmed so far include philosopher and evolutionist Telmo Pievani, who holds the first Italian chair of Philosophy of Biological Sciences, at the Department of Biology at the University of Padua and Larissa Mies Bombardi, who teaches at the Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences at the University of São Paolo, working particularly on human and agricultural geography. She has focused her studies on the use of agrochemicals in Brazilian agriculture, which has led to her being forced to seek exile. They will be joined by New York Times reporter Michael Moss, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and author of, among others, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us; Carolyn Steel, architect and author of the book Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World, which offers a provocative and exciting vision of change and how we can thrive on our crowded and overheated planet; Elena Granata, a lecturer in urban planning at the Milan Polytechnic and author of Biodivercity, città aperte, creative e sostenibili che cambiano il mondo for Slow Food Editore’s Terrafutura series; Selma Dealdina of the National Coordination of Articulation of Rural Black Quilombola Communities in Brazil; economist and food policy expert Raj Patel, who worked for the World Bank and the WTO before getting involved in international campaigns against those same organizations; Rupa Marya, a doctor from the University of California who supports “deep medicine”; Elisa Loncòn Antileo, a Mapuche linguist and activist for indigenous rights in Chile as well as president of the Chilean Constitutional Convention; Virginie Raisson, an international relations analyst specializing in a geopolitical perspective, director of the French study centre Lèpac and author of 2033, Atlas des futurs du monde; and activist, writer and presenter Bela Gil, who studied nutrition at Hunter College in New York and natural cooking at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York and has a Master in Gastronomic Sciences from Slow Food’s University of Gastronomic Sciences. She is currently vice-present of the Instituto Brasil Organico, created to represent, promote, protect and encourage the Brazilian organic movement. Other speakers include priest, journalist and social activist Don Luigi Ciotti, founder of the Gruppo Abele and Libera, an organization fighting organized crime, promoting social justice and commemorating victims of the mafia, and French economist and philosopher Serge Latouche, one of the most renowned espousers of the theory of degrowth and emeritus professor of Economic Sciences at the University of Paris XI and the Institut d’Étude du Développement Économique et Social in Paris.

Regeneration Takes to the Arenas

At Terra Madre 2022 we will be remembering Italian surgeon Gino Strada, founder of the NGO Emergency and a friend of Slow Food, who spent his life working against all forms of war, and Berta Cacères, the Honduran environmental activist who was killed because of her struggle to protect the rights of indigenous peoples. The event’s two Arenas will be named after them. These spaces for exchange and dialogue will bring together anthropologists, philosophers, economists, writers, ecologists and educators as well as farmers, herders, fishers, cooks and members of the Slow Food network. Here they will share their experiences and offer their vision of the environment, agriculture and the food system they would like to see. Planned activities will include the by-now well-established Food Talks and other new formats designed to offer deeper insights into issues and projects.

The Gino Strada Arena will be inaugurated by Strada’s daughter Cecilia, who since 2021 has coordinated the communication for the Italian NGO ResQ People Saving People. She will be giving a Food Talk that will delve into the links between war, migration and poverty. Over the event’s five days we will also be talking about pesticides, GMOs, drought, agroecology, good economics and the many Slow Food projects active in Italy and around the world. These brief monologues will feature figures as diverse as journalist and writer Stefano Liberti, who will discuss agriculture put to the test by the climate crisis, and Chilean farmer and activist Andrea Cisternas Araya, who will tell the story of how he managed to beat the biggest factory farm in South America.

Over at the Berta Càceres Arena, the focus will be on indigenous networks, youth, migrants and alliances between producers. In the Forums, we will be giving space to thematic networks, particularly the Slow Food Coffee Coalition, with meetings organized in collaboration with Lavazza, while the Food Talks will feature producers from the Slow Food network. We’ll hear the stories of Umar Bashir Ochen, a young indigenous Ugandan who has been struggling alongside the Karamajong community of indigenous herders; of Kung, a young Amis from Taiwan, who works with her family to preserve the traditional agriculture and food culture of her land; and of Dali Nolasco Cruz, an indigenous Mexican grower of Serrano chili peppers and a new member of Slow Food’s Executive Committee.