Slow Food’s Discover Biodiversity Exhibition at Expo 2015 in Milan

Slow Food’s message at Expo 2015 is that feeding the planet with good, clean and fair food for everyone is possible, if we start with biodiversity. Slow Food aims to show that there is a way to feed the planet without exploiting the world’s resources.

Due to the importance of biodiversity, the Slow Food space at Expo 2015 will feature the Discover Biodiversity exhibition.

The exhibition constitutes an interactive place where visitors can read, watch and play, grasping the significance of our fight to save biodiversity with every step. The Discover Biodiversity exhibition is divided into various sections, with large wooden tables dedicated to different themes.

• The Tree of Food installation, for example, shows how food is made up of many different interweaving aspects, all communicating with each other: language, culture, place, social and environmental sustainability, the five senses, conviviality and much more.
• Another installation—the Corn Man—is based on the world’s principle crop. It will explore the industrial foods that use this ubiquitous cereal grain, identify the names it hides behind on food labels, and examine its origins and the countries that currently produce it. Small-scale food production is now set against this giant, the flagship product of industrial agriculture and a constant presence on supermarket shelves.
• A huge Hourglass will represent the increasingly accelerated pace with which we are losing biodiversity, and a series of photos will show the thousands of varieties of fruits, vegetables, legumes, cattle, goats, sheep and other animal breeds at risk of extinction.

Different stations within the exhibition will inform about the history of agriculture, discuss fast food versus food from markets, and compare different food production systems.

If the goal is to establish a food system that also looks to the future and thus aims at feeding the world sustainably and with respect of the environment and the food producers, then there are many reasons for focusing on the preservation of biodiversity:

• local varieties and breeds have adapted to their local areas, becoming stronger and more resistant and requiring fewer external interventions

• uniform or biodiversity-poor systems are more fragile and highly vulnerable

• there are no monocultures in nature

• biodiversity is also a priceless source of medicinal remedies

• biodiversity guarantees the well-being of rural communities

• by cultivating and eating biodiversity, we learn how to fight waste, respect the seasons, safeguard traditional knowledge and bring it into dialogue with official science

• by starting from biodiversity we can imagine a different model of development

Serena Milano, Secretary-General of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity says: “Since the 1950s, the task of feeding the world’s population has increasingly been entrusted to monocultures and industrial farms, and to an ever more limited number of plant varieties and animal breeds, which has led to the standardization of tastes; the loss of many local sources of nutrition; the destruction of many of the world’s important ecosystems; and to the restriction of the world’s diet mostly to the three grains: wheat, rice and corn. Saving biodiversity will help re-establish the most urgently needed balance of the world’s ecosystems, without which the planet will struggle to survive and find itself increasingly unable to feed the world’s population in the future. Biodiversity is a protagonist in solving many problems of the current food system and in securing food sovereignty, food security, and a good, clean and fair diet for everyone.”

For more information and updates about Slow Food’s participation at Expo, please visit:

http://localhost/slowfood/expo2015/en/

The following Slow Food projects are dedicated to preserving biodiversity: http://localhost/slowfood/expo2015/en/feeding-the-planet/our-projects/

For further information, please contact the Slow Food International Press Office:

Paola Nano, +39 329 8321285 [email protected]

Slow Food involves over a million of people dedicated to and passionate about good, clean and fair food. This includes chefs, youth, activists, farmers, fishers, experts and academics in 158 countries; a network of around 100,000 Slow Food members linked to 1,500 local chapters worldwide (known as convivia), contributing through their membership fee, as well as the events and campaigns they organize; and over 2,500 Terra Madre food communities who practice small-scale and sustainable production of quality food around the world.