While being a Slow Food member here in Pisa I do appreciate a good piece of fast food every now and then, especially after a long night out or when there is no time to sit down and eat a whole meal. That is also why I was very happy to read the following news article in the Dutch management magazine (MT Magazine, 13Th of April, by Peter Boerman) that I have briefly translated for the readers of our blog.

Sustainable fast food? Yes, it exists! In less than 20 years Chipotle has built a chain of 1,200 restaurants in United States of America. Now they want to conquer Europe. What is their secret?

1. Never bend for conventions.
In 1993, former top chef Steve Ells started for himself. With Chipotle he wanted to prove that eating fast does not have to have to be a fast food experience. He opted for fresh ingredients from organic farms. So all the ingredients used for tacos and large burritos, which are filled right for your eyes in the restaurants, are organic. It proved to be a huge success: what began in 1993 with 1 restaurant, in 1997 there were already 14, and in 2005 about 500. Revenue rose to $ 1 billion in 2007, and became more than double last year (2011). And against all conventions, says Ells. “People said that the food was too expensive and the menu rather limited. Both proved to be wrong. “The strategy of Chipotle is different: where most fast food chains work with a franchise model, the green McDonald’s remains the owner of all the restaurants. This way there is more control over what the customer is served.

2. Keep your employees.
Where the normal fast food industry has a high turnover, does Chipotle virtually everything to keep his more than 30,000 employees in account. The restaurant owners receive $ 10,000 for everyone they hire and who later grows into manager position. Also the company tries, unlike many other fast food chains, to build good ties with suppliers, the local farmers. This way at least 50 % of an ingredient used by the chain is locally sourced during the harvest season.

3. What you say counts.
Steve Ells thought that customers would run to his restaurant if he would tell them that there are no antibiotics in the food prepared for them and that the meat used by Chipotle was coming from animals razed without the growth hormones. That turned out to be not such a tasty story. So that is also why Chipotle, under the now famous slogan, “Food with Integrity”, prefer to say that it provides better ingredients for better taste and healthier food. It might look like the same message perhaps, but one that comes across much better. However, the company is trying as much as possible over the Internet to provide insight into where the food comes from via its web page on the internet.

Good news for the discerning consumers like many of us, who now can eat fast food without feeling guilty. Another interesting fact about Chipotle is that it also managed to tap into a potentially a very interesting market of ethnic food. A few years ago (in 2009) Jan-Willem van der Schans and I worked on a project that tried to identify the possibilities of producing for the ethnic food market by the Dutch farmers. The fastest growing ethnic food on a world wide scale was at that time Mexican. Therefore I think that Chipotle will be successful in Europe as well, which also means new opportunities for local organic farmers.

Recently I came across an interesting news item from Russian Internet sources where social capital concept has been applied to blogging. Popular, among Russian Internet users, blog hosting LiveJournal (“Живой журнал, ЖЖ”) started a new system of calculating the popularity rankings of its blogs and community diaries for all of its users, based on social capital.

Social capital is understood by the company as index of communication between people and is displayed in the statistics of the site for all of those interested in numbers. The new system, according to its creators, can be excluded from ranking blogs that are artificially popular. For example, when blogs are being followed by so-called “blog bots” (accounts of non-existing people).

“The rating on the basis of social capital is valuable because the new system reflects only the “live” traffic and allows the owners of the diaries to adequately assess their position on the “blog court”” – says the head of LiveJournal Russia Ilya Dronov.
At the moment, LiveJournal has 5 million registered blogs. The audience of LiveJournal numbers 65 million people, 29 million of them live in Russia.

Looking at the literature one can briefly define social capital as value generated by a (social) network. Social capital is the main theme of my particular interest in research on innovation within alternative food networks. I wonder if the same operationalisation of the concept can and should be applied to our Easy to Digest blog.

Some time ago I went on a trip to the Liguria region in order to meet my Italian relatives. They live in a cozy costal city of Savona, which is mainly famous for its harbor, Art Nouveau architecture and the fact that Christopher Columbus used to live here after moving from Genoa and before taking the job at the Spanish court. In terms of culture and climate Liguria has much in common with its French and Monégasque neighbors from Monaco and region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in southeast France. Today Liguria is one of the smallest regions within Italy (quite different from the times of the Republic of Genoa) but is at the same time one of the most developed and economically viable regions of the country.
During my stay in Savona I was lucky enough to be able to visit an interesting festival that took place in the port area of the city: Stile Artigiano; focusing on food and design products made in Liguria. First of all I was happy to see an interesting connection being made during this exhibition, namely the one between food and creative industry through application of design and sales of handicrafts related to food and beverages from the region. Secondly I met some very particular producers at the food court part of the festival. These farmers were specializing in the growing of basil and production of pesto. Even though today pesto is known to all of us it made its first introduction to the mainstream eaters of Italian cuisine outside of Italy only in the 1990`s. Generally speaking pesto is considered to be a typical Ligurian product and is made from crushed basil, pine nuts and garlic and flavored up by olive oil and cheese (mainly Parmesan but not necessarily) to produce this delicious green paste. By the way, this fresh pesto cannot be compared to the pesto we are buying in the supermarkets. I did not expect it but there is a night and day difference in taste between the fresh and industrially prepared one.
The famous rural sociology professor from Wageningen, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, has propagated that multifunctional farming and diversification for small-hold farmers for many good reasons and I fully agree with his ideas that by becoming multifunctional and more diverse the farmers will be less dependent on other players in the food chain, their risks will be spread in a better way, they will have different or additional sources of income, etc. But sometimes it also pays off to be specialized, just like in the case of pesto farms where Ligurian farmers specialize in growing basil and in valorizing this main crop into fresh pesto on their own. Probably if you have a very special product and it fits your strategy, goals and entrepreneurial skills specialization can also be a good strategy for certain farmers. You concentrate on producing what you do the best by specializing in a particular part or aspect of production and attempt to be the best at it.

PS: for the second consecutive week the Ligurian region has been hit by heavy rains, floods and landslides with a lot of damage and lost lives so my thoughts are with the people of the region.

Together with other two PhD candidates from Italy and Brazil I was representing University of Pisa and our department (Laboratorio Sismundi) in particular at the Expo Rurale Toscana that took place in Florence. The theme of this event was the rural culture in Tuscany. Basically the park, where the event took place, was divided into 3 different parts: one of the main parts with animals typical for Tuscany; one part with the typical Tuscan food products and diners and a smaller part with booths and stands of all kind of knowledge institutions such as ours, NGOs, cooperatives, government bodies, etc.

After our shift at the booth was over the three of us decided to make small tour ourselves in order to check out the other parts of the expo. What was introduced to us at one of the stands with local products, as a very typical Tuscan product from the northern part of the region is called Lardo di Colonnata. This is a special type of lard that undergoes a very particular curing process in marble tombs that is said to have started during Roman era and has not changed since the Middle Ages and can only be witnessed in the rural settlement of Colonnata near the city of Carrara. This region is famous for its excellent white marble and it is here where Michelangelo came to acquire blocks of marble for his masterpieces. This also the place where the local people of Colonnata found out that the pork lard in combination with seasoning and herbs acquires a particular taste after a long maturing process in marble tombs that have been in operation for hundreds of years by today.

This beautiful product almost did not make it to the present day despite its long history due to the imposed EU hygienic regulations, which are equal and applicable for all the food producers within the EU member states. Luckily the local community and lard producers organized themselves and got in contact with Slow Food, which on its tern helped the community of Colonnata to preserve this traditional local product by applying for a Protected Geographic Idication (PGI) label, as defined by the EC, and by taking up the Lardo di Colonnata up in the Ark of Taste of Slow Food Italy.g and herbs acquires a particular taste after a long maturing process in marble tombs that have been in operation for hundreds of years by today.

So what is so special about the Lardo di Colonnata next to its excellent taste, artisanal and unique production process? Well, the fact that next to being a very typical local food of the Tuscan region in Italy it is in my opinion an even more typical product known all over Eastern Europe as salo (сало). Mainly it is recognized as a national product of Ukrainian cuisine but is also eaten in Russia, Belarus, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. Salo (lard) is traditional and highly valued food product in Ukraine and beyond. Salo can be consumed fresh, salted, smoked, bolied, stewed or fried. It even has ethnic cultural impact as many jokes, stories, etc., about this product are specifically related to the Ukrainian people. The first time this product has been mentioned in the written records dates back to the 7th centry A.D. and is still today a very popular product.

According to Istituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria (INEA) there are 173 products with a protected geographic status. Italy is the European leader in acquiring this status followed by other South European countries such as Greece, Spain and France (if we count it as a Southern country this time). This labeling system provides the producers of particular traditional products with many advantages and rewards: promotion of products with specific characteristics, improved income of the producers paid for superior quality, transparency towards the consumers, and retention of population in rural areas through job creation. But on the other hand this system also leads to unfair competition, creating barriers to entry, protectionism, etc. I wonder what will happen in East Europe in case Ukraine will apply for a geographic denomination status for salo. It might not only create an officially recognized local product but also lead to a local food crisis in the neighboring countries.

While reading the notoriously famous Gomorrah (2006) by Roberto Saviano I came across a fascinating passage in the book on the relation between illegal waste disposal, local underworld and local food. The local mafia of Naples and Campania region, also known as Camorra and its members as camorristi, has obtained large interest of activities in what turns out to be a very lucrative business: waste

management. There is a huge worldwide demand for disposal of waste and especially contaminated or toxic waste, which also means high costs of its utilization, requires proper governance and many internationally and nationally standardized regulations. The Camorra offers one total solution to all of these “challenges”: illegal disposal.  The success of this model of waste management lies in its simplicity. International illegal shipments arrive in the harbor of Naples where they are being reloaded and recoded  (under false papers) either to other ships, which later get reed of their fill in the international waters near the Horn of Africa or the cargo is being dropped of somewhere at the illegal waste landfills in the area near Naples. In case of the droppings near the African coast it often happens that the droppings eventually end up on the Somalian and Kenyan coasts where the local fishermen and the coastal villages are exposed to the dangerous cargo. The Somalian pirates are said to often use this fact as legitimation, justification and remuneration of their activities. Often the waste is poisonous and contains high volumes of dangerous materials such as dioxin (heavy metal) and PCB (policlorobifenil). When the waste is being disposed in Italy itself it mainly happens in the rural region of Campania and the metropolitan area of Naples where the waste is being “safely hidden” under the ground or either burned. What happens is that exposed to the nature and its forces the waste eventually starts leaking and contaminating the area. The air, groundwater and soil get contaminated and any agricultural activity in and around this area present direct danger to the farmers who work on the land, livestock (mainly sheep), the environment and eventually also the consumers who buy the products produces on this land. Often the camorristi are the only one who know where the illegal landfills or other types of disposal locations are, which makes it difficult to discover and organize the remediation of toxic soil in the contaminated area.

At the moment the Gomorrah was published it became instantly an international bestseller and even was read by the officials working at the EU institutions in Brussels. Also the popularity of the book created momentum for the local social movements who are trying to fight this problem. European Commission made several information requests to the Italian national government and even had threatened the country with an export ban on its mozzarella cheese to the rest of EU member countries, as the first reaction by the Italian government was the one of a total denial.  The members of Camorra prefer not to eat local products, which have been produced in and near the areas of their “business activities”.  Later on the Italian government declared that the mozzarella, which indeed contained too high levels of dioxin and was dangerous for human health, was mainly sold for the local consumption and was not meant for export markets. So it happens that next to all the usual challenges local food producers have to face the farmers of Campania are presented with an extra hurdle of the negative externalities: the activities of the Camorra.

For those interested in a thorough analysis of the situation I am strongly suggesting to read the following article: Conflict in Campania: Waste emergency or crisis of democracy. This is an article written by Giacomo D`Alisa, David Burgalassi, Hali Healy and Mariana Walter and published in Ecological Economics 70, (2010), pp 239-249.

It was surprising for me to observe a big difference in societal and consumer concerns between the Netherlands and Italy towards

food, especially when it comes to animal welfare. The Dutch consumers seem to
focus their attention mainly on the sustainability aspect of their daily
purchases in the supermarkets or elsewhere. One can think of such issues as
food miles a product or meal has travelled before arriving on their plate, how
much water was used to produce the product, its CO2 impact on the climate, the
conditions in which an animal has lived when we think of meat products. In
Italy on the other hand the consumers are in the first place more concerned
with the quality of the product they are buying. For them a local product often
represents superior quality and therefore it also includes high animal welfare
and well-being standards, which represent a totally different concept of the
livestock breeding compared to the intensive and industrialized animal
livestock breeding. This phenomenon has been coined by the scientists as “territorial quality” and can be mainly
observed in Italy and France. Two European projects on Consumer Concerns
about Animal Welfare and Food Choice conducted by Department of Agricultural
Economics University of Pisa in 2000 and 2007 present interesting findings. They
show a higher concern among Italian consumers, compared to the Dutch ones, when
it comes to animal welfare in terms of food quality, food safety and human
health. Researchers explain this difference by the relatively high trust among
Dutch consumers in the national institutions that perform control on food
safety among the producers and retailers and relatively low trust in national
bodies of control among the Italian consumers.

During the International Master of Rural Development
summer school organized by the University of Pisa we have visited a vast amount
of small-scale farms in the northern part of Tuscany region (Garfagnana area,
province of Lucca). What caught my attention was the fact that all the farmers
stressed to us, upon our visits of their farms, that their animals represented
high quality meat, milk, etc., and that the animals were in great physical and
mental shape, as we could observe ourselves. Asked whether they used these
obvious results of their particular small-scale farming methods in the
marketing of their products they all replied negatively. On the contrary, in
the Netherlands farmers tend to be using any possible opportunity to stress
their successful sustainability efforts, especially the animal welfare in order
to meet both societal and consumer concerns with animal welfare and animal
breeding for consumption.Dutch farmer
(supported by other members of the food supply chain) organize open doors days
in order to increase their transparency towards the concerned consumers, NGOs,
etc., and try to put the so-called face to the picture in terms of marketing
and communication tools by using their own family photos and images of their property
/ farms in visual marketing on and of their products.

In the light of the findings presented here above and
my own observations I think that the Italian small-scale farmers have an excellent
business case that can be exploited in their own advantage in the competitive
battle with their more industrialized colleagues. By stressing the advantages
of territorial quality and superior animal welfare conditions they could differentiate
themselves from the mainstream intensive livestock breeding and use this added
value in their marketing strategies as well as in terms of increased
transparency towards the interested or concerned consumers.