BY GIA MARIE AMELLA

Food as a way of gathering is Barbara Nappini’s M.O. Whether behind the ivy- covered walls of academia or out in the fields of the family-run farm, Nappini believes there’s never been a headier, nor more urgent, time to have deep conversations about the sanctity of sustainable food.

President of Slow Food Italy since 2021, Nappini is the first woman to helm the organization in its almost forty-year history. This past September saw Nappini in the throes of Terra Madre Salone del Gusto, the motherlode of gatherings where small-scale farmers, food artisans, and champions of biodiversity from over 120 countries gather to celebrate and savor sustainable foodways — all within the framework of a staggering lineup of food-centric topics from the didactic (“Framing Agroecology”) to the delicious (“Exceptional Vegetables: Ancient Plants, New Flavors”).

Playing host to the world’s largest sustainable food event is serious business. At Terra Madre 2024, Nappini herself unveiled Slow Food’s newly minted Presidium for the protection of stable fields and meadows and, by extension, their caretakers, as well as cheeses derived from grazing animals. Affable to a fault, she likes to add a sheen of intentional levity to Slow Food’s on-point messaging. Take this year’s Terra Madre slogan “We Are Nature.”

“We wanted to be provocative but in a very naive way,” Nappini laughs, pointing out that the oft- repeated declaration isn’t so off the mark. “We’ve often used … expressions that, today, seem almost a bit presumptuous, like ‘we manage nature’ and ‘we control nature,’ when in 2024 it’s clear that we’re not the ones saving nature. If anything, it’s saving us.”

Nappini peppers her storytelling with the inclusive “we,” whether talking about sustainable paradigms, millennials’ vision for the planet, or simply the beauty of gathering. Congregating around the table clings as tightly to her mind’s eye as the countryside of her Tuscan childhood.

IDYLL IN TUSCANY

For urban Italians, a jaunt to the countryside was, and still is, sacrosanct. In summertime, Nappini and her family decamped to her grandparents’ home in the Alto Mugello northeast of her native Florence. Mornings started with an orzo latte made with fresh milk fetched the evening before from the village milk- woman. The kitchen table where the multi-generational family gathered doubled as a private classroom.

“My maternal grandmother came from farming people,” Nappini remembers, “and she used to crush the dry bread with the glass bottle to make breadcrumbs and then would store them … and I’d have my little breakfast. So there was this activity around the table.”

After college, Nappini worked for a global fashion brand, where she says she learned a lot and, with time, acquired all the trappings of a comfortable lifestyle. “I had a beautiful house. My situation was, in many respects, not luxurious but certainly easy,” she says. She became restive and “began to reflect on sustainability, on my lifestyle, and how many people could live like I did.” Nappini’s life gradually steered toward more conscious living: eschewing her car to bike to work, experimenting with mother yeast, baking her bread. She had deeper questions. Where did her store-bought food come from? How was it harvested and by whom? She quit her job and moved with three generations of her family to a farmhouse overlooking the Ambra Valley on the road to Siena. She joined Slow Food and, with a knack for grass-roots organizing, spearheaded the transformation of disused spaces into award-winning community gardens.

WAYS OF GATHERING

Nappini loved the idea that these newly revitalized spaces — “everyone’s and no one’s” — became places of gathering. In a working-class neighborhood where the Sikh community had established a temple, the “multicultural garden” helped bridge divisions “because people who had lived there for generations and Indians who’d been here only for a short time met to exchange know-how, swap seeds, even share different ways of doing things and understanding the garden,” she recalls of the cross-cultural project at a time when more migrants began settling in the region.

Nappini is particularly tuned into how women are vital to fostering community, that “the role of women … often acts as an adhesive: keeping together the family, the country, the tribe.” Often laboring in the shadows, Slow Food recently honored ten women from the Piedmont region dedicated to safeguarding threatened foodways and biodiversity. Whether protecting a chestnut grove or maintaining centuries-old cooking traditions, a common thread across their stories is the benefit to others.

“Each had an individual path in mind, but also the positive impact it would have on the community and territory,” Nappini says about these remarkable women.

For example, Irene Calamante opened a bakery in a remote village near the Ligurian border to make good bread with ancient grains (thereby increasing local grain production and putting mills back in business) and to create a welcoming space for residents. Millennial Elisa Mosca abandoned the big city to take over managing her elderly grandparents’ pastures and grazing animals. She’s now a proud fourth-generation cheesemaker who distributes her wares to farmers markets.

TRAILBLAZERS, FOLLOWING HER OWN VISION

With Slow Food’s general elections around the corner and her first book hitting shelves this past September, Nappini’s riding high on her own merits: coalition- building, taking on food policymakers in the name of agroecology, fair pay for agricultural works, and ramping up support for Slow Food’s latest initiative to increase plant-based food production.

She’s quick to give credit to sustainability trailblazers who paved the way. Nappini praises chef, author, and restaurateur Alice Waters — “she is Terra Madre” — champion extraordinaire of locally sourced, organic ingredients at her iconic Chez Panisse that opened its doors in Berkeley, California in 1971 — and later spearheaded the Edible Schoolyard Program, providing meals to K-12 students across the U.S. and worldwide for three decades now.

She brushes off any comparisons to Slow Food’s revered founder Carlo Petrini. Being female gives her the leeway to forge her own path and follow her own vision, she believes, “because what he accomplished in past decades is truly unrepeatable at a point in time when food was trivialized and he brought food back into political discourse.”

It’s worth noting that Petrini’s legendary status as a staunch defender of home-grown food traditions goes all the way back to 1986. That year, Petrini and hundreds of protesters converged upon Rome’s iconic Spanish Steps (some proffering bowls of pasta to passersby) to protest the opening of Italy’s first McDonald’s, setting in motion a “food revolution” that, in time, went global, with the beneficent snail as its symbol. A clever slogan from its early days, “Slow food is happiness. Fast food is hysteria. Yes, slow food’s good!” captures Petrini and his cohorts’ tongue-in-cheek approach juxtaposed by a subtextual disdain for what they saw as a real threat to Italy’s deeply rooted cuisines.

With Petrini’s imprimatur, Nappini puts her own distinct twist on the original vision. “My interpretation of what Slow Food is in 2024 is probably a bit different [than Petrini’s]. But in that sense, he sees it as a positive evolution,” she says of her mentor’s trust in her leadership. “He has the ability to stay on the sidelines … but always be there when help is needed,” she adds.

SLOW ALL THE WAY, PLEASE

When it comes to sustainable travel, Nappini references Slow Food’s mantra: Take it slow. “Go to Florence and do as the Florentines do, go where they are. Stop at a cafe and linger for a few hours to see how the city moves. Make friends, meet a Florentine who can offer advice on where to eat,” Nappini advises on getting the most out of visiting her home turf, adding, “Banish the logic where you have to consume as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. Follow [your] curiosity.”

SIMPLE INGREDIENTS, SIMPLE PLEASURES

Italy’s twenty-one regions are a treasure trove of primary ingredients, but most visitors taste only a small fraction of each season’s bounty.

In this writer’s area of Tuscany, autumn brings crunchy apples from the Valdichiana, the chewy, chestnut-flour dessert castagnaccio, and melt-in-your- mouth Zolfino beans, a Slow Food Presidium, delicately flavored and versatile.

What’s Nappini’s favorite food? “Good bread (a true Tuscan, she opts for the unsalted pane sciocco), preferably new olive oil, and garlic. Simple, vegan, delicious!” That, and all manner of protein-rich legumes featured in regional dishes such as the hearty white bean and kale soup, ribollita. Nappini’s cell phone is pinging. “Take the time … to reflect, to choose, to idle. Productive idleness.”

For more on Slow Food Italy, visit www.slowfood.it and for Slow Food USA, visit www.slowfoodusa.org.