How do you get people to treat food and cuisines as a serious part of the creative economy that supports economic as well as social development in a country? That is what a group of restaurateurs in Turkey have just tried to do by convening a global gastroeconomy summit in Istanbul on 29th March. They brought together speakers from around the world, including me, to talk about how other countries, such as Denmark, Peru and Spain, have made food a key part of their creative economy, to discuss what trends they should consider and guidelines for investment, as well as speakers from around Turkey.
After a packed day of talks, I managed to interview a few of the speakers to get a flavour of what was discussed and some of the major points made at the summit. We met at Mikla, which is run by chef Mehmet Gürs, a speaker at the conference and proponent of the New Anatolian Kitchen – building on the traditional cuisines found around Turkey. It’s listed as the 51st best restaurant in the world – a well deserved view judging by what we ate. It was amidst the chatter of the diners I asked Kaya Demirer, chair of the association putting on the summit why they had done so:
Spain is country that already makes millions from its cuisine and their approach was explained by Inaki Gaztelumendi:
While Spain’s may be a very familiar cuisine around the world Peru’s was not. That, however, is changing as part of a deliberate policy to use food as part of developing the economy, according to Isabella Falco:
In Korea, it has been government support for a key element of Korean cuisine that has helped put its food on the map worldwide explains Dr Jaeho Ha, General Director of the World Institute of Kimchi:
Government legislation can be an essential ingredient in securing the ability of a place to build its reputation for food and wine, as Clay Gregory from the Napa Valley in California explained:
There are, though, some essential things to consider if you are investing in this area as well as one key equation, as investment advisor Sebastian Nokes pointed out:
Food is part of the creative economy and a means to support the sustainable development goals and is supported by the UN Conference on Trade and Development, said Marisa Henderson:
Ismail Erturk, senior lecturer from the University of Manchester explained about gastronomy’s role in the economy.
As I pointed out in my talk, it was 40 years ago this year since I first went to Turkey to help establish an agricultural information centre at the Aegean University. At the time, my wife and I were thrilled to discover the fantastic cuisine that we found in Turkey, which was then a self-sufficient food exporter.
It is good to see that is now being celebrated more but it is important, as several speakers acknowledge, that when people talk about cuisines and gastronomy they do not think it is about fine dining for the rich and take a relatively narrow perspective in thinking about food. Rather, it is about understanding food in all its social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific contexts. It is this approach to gastronomy as a holistic understanding of food and the cultures and habits that surround it they take in the Masters course in gastronomy at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh where I’ve been giving an annual lecture for the past few years (see this blog). As such, my view of a gastro-economy perspective is that it must look at how we create a world in which everyone is well-fed through a diverse range of cuisines with sustainably, fairly produced and healthy food. It was good to hear that in thinking of developing the gastroeconomy in Turkey that is something people are also considering.
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#Climate destabilisation and #biodiversity loss threaten our future – but too little attention is being paid to the latter
It seems to be a year of anniversaries for me. It’s 50 years since I went to university intending to study chemistry but then changing to study soil science. Soils are really complex physical, chemical, biological systems. Their health is affected by the social, cultural and economic activities of us humans who depend on them for our existence. Soils also host a huge amount of the biodiversity on the planet, yet you cannot see most of it.
I was prompted to think about this by a paper I was sent the other day. Its rather long title is “Our house is burning: discrepancy in climate change versus biodiversity coverage in the media as compared to scientific literature“. Basically, the multiple authors found that comparing the amount of research reported in the scientific literature on climate change and biodiversity versus the amount of coverage in the selected range of newspapers over a 25 year period showed a considerable imbalance. Given the level of research reports, there was far more coverage – up to 8 times as much – of climate change issues in the 12 English language newspapers they surveyed than that on biodiversity.
Climate change and biodiversity loss both impact on human well-being. This imbalance in coverage is impeding understanding and undermining efforts to address biodiversity loss. The authors called for more action by scientists to raise public awareness on biodiversity issues.
There have been a lot of longer-term scenarios and what is often called ‘horizon scanning’ on the impact of climate change. Much less so for biodiversity loss, most of which is hidden. The focus tends to be on the impact on iconic larger mammals like elephants, polar bears or tigers. Yet with soil, you need to dig down into it to see the different horizons in a soil profile. The amount of biodiversity in it is far from obvious – but is beautifully illustrated in the global soil biodiversity atlas (free to download).
While the biodiversity in soils may be largely invisible to the naked eye, healthy soils depend upon it (see also http://www.soilanimals.com/look/overview). However, as the report on The Status of the World’s Soils Resources noted “…the majority of the world’s soil resources are in only fair, poor or very poor condition. Today, 33 percent of land is moderately to highly degraded due to the erosion, salinization, compaction, acidification and chemical pollution of soils”.
The Global Land Outlook said “A minority has grown rich from the unsustainable use and large scale exploitation of land resources with related conflicts intensifying in many countries.”(see ch 9 on biodiversity and soil). To address concerns about this we also need to look at the rules, regulations and power relations that frame what people do with the soils and biodiversity on the planet. Here, one important set of rules are also little known and invisible to most people – those called ‘intellectual property rights’.
It is 20 years since I worked on a paper looking at the implications of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for food security and biodiversity (Trade, intellectual property, food and biodiversity: key issues and options for the 1999 review of article 27.3(b) of the TRIPS agreement). This agreement is one of the three key pillars of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Ten years later a book I edited with a Canadian colleague, Tasmin Rajotte, was published called “The future control of food: a guide to international negotiations and rules on intellectual property, biodiversity and food security“(free to download in English, Spanish and Chinese). Rules on IP are also a key bone of contention in bilateral trade negotiations.
What is clear over these last couple of decades is there has been much greater coverage and concern about climate change but less about the huge loss of biodiversity and especially agricultural biodiversity and the rules that shape what happens to them. It is time that changed.
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