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From the issue dated August 5, 2005

Slow Down and Smell the Garlic
An Italian university focuses on the craft of creating food and the pleasures of the palate

By Francis X. Rocca

Pollenzo, Italy

The neo-Gothic castle architecture may seem a trifle pompous for a set of barns. But the crenelated turrets and the moat encircling the Agenzia di Pollenzo — a self-contained agricultural estate — reflect an authentically royal heritage.

This complex of buildings in northwestern Italy, about 40 miles south of Turin, once housed facilities for the agricultural administration of lands belonging to the House of Savoy, the dynasty that ruled Italy from 1861 to 1948. Here, in sight of the snowcapped Italian Alps, generations of servants of the crown bred silkworms to produce ever-finer varieties of thread, and turned out the first vintages of Barolo and Barbaresco, now among the most prized Italian wines. (Just over the crest of nearby hills lies the Langhe region, where the moist soil is rich with another delicacy fit for a king — exquisite white truffles with an aroma like wild garlic.)

Today the Agenzia is home to a brand-new institution with a different, yet related, mission: to cultivate the growing academic field of food studies and to educate a new breed of food professional.

The University of Gastronomic Sciences, which opened for classes last fall, is the most ambitious project to date of an organization known as Slow Food. Founded in 1986 in response to the opening of Italy's first McDonald's, and now boasting 80,000 members worldwide, Slow Food is dedicated to the principle of "ecogastronomy," which holds that the best-tasting foods are those produced in ways most compatible with the natural environment — that is, on a small scale, and through traditional, nonindustrial methods. Emphasizing pleasure at least as much as ecology, Slow Food activists work to preserve or establish lasting markets for endangered varieties of Indian rice, English dairy cows, and French cheeses.

At the university, the five-year program of study consists of three years of basic training, resulting in a degree in gastronomy, followed by a two-year specialized degree in either communications or management (the latter to be offered at a smaller second campus, housed in a former ducal palace near the northern city of Parma). The goal is to turn out graduates who will practice and promote Slow Food's values, either by producing food products themselves, helping to organize those who do, or educating the wider world through journalism and public relations. Still in the works is another specialization degree in "agro-ecology," which will teach environmentally friendly systems of agriculture and animal husbandry.

One subject not offered, as students must continually explain to friends and relatives back home, is cooking.

The first 70 students, of a projected total of 300, come from 13 different countries, including the United States. Chosen from about 500 applicants, their reasons for enrolling vary, but they typically share a passion for the cultural as well as the sensual aspects of food.

"I love taking photos of food," says Allison Radecki, of Montclair, N.J. "I went to Montreal with a friend of mine, and when we came back people said, 'What did you see?' And I showed them pictures of pastries and fruit and meringue desserts." Upon arrival at the university, Ms. Radecki was delighted to find that many of her classmates shared such enthusiasms. "Here you see people come back from Bologna and say, 'Look at this great mortadella I got with my digital camera.' It's great to be with other people who are excited about food. You're not the freak taking photos of dessert."

Petra Tanos, a native of Hungary who moved with her parents to the United States when she was eight, attributes her deep interest in gastronomy to early memories of the foods of her native country. "There are actually specific flavors, tastes, and smells that I remember missing," she says, recalling with particular fondness a fresh farmer's cheese called tùro, used in many meat and pasta dishes, and a buttery biscuit called pogàcsa.

'La Dolce Vita' It's Not

How passion translates into profession is not necessarily obvious, at least not in a student's first year. Ms. Tanos imagines job possibilities that range from being a buyer for a supermarket that carries organic foods, to working for a nonprofit organization that promotes fair trade with developing nations.

Ms. Radecki, whose undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, were in sociology, psychology, and theater, is pondering employment in the field of food safety. Like her, almost all foreign students at the university came with previous postsecondary education, whereas the Italians are, for the most part, recent high-school graduates.

With a master's degree in early-childhood education and a stint in cooking school already to her credit, Mizuho Hirokawa of Tokyo is preparing to combine those areas of expertise in the practice of "taste education" for the young. That movement is epitomized by the "edible schoolyard" project in Berkeley, Calif., founded by the chef Alice Waters, which encourages school-age children to cook and eat produce from their own organic gardens, in order to cultivate their taste for healthy food grown in an environmentally friendly way.

Since gustatory pleasure is so central to the university's purpose, it is easy for an outsider to imagine studying there as one extended feast. Students enjoy what may be the finest cafeteria in the history of higher education, which shares its kitchen with the campus's own four-star hotel. On an ordinary school day, lunch in the cafeteria might feature a delicately sweet crema di zucca (cream of squash soup); risotto with radicchio, cooked to just the right degree of firmness; and tender vitello al vino rosso (veal braised in red wine).

The rest of the day is not so luxurious, however, with classes that run almost nonstop from 9:30 until nearly 6 in the evening, Monday through Friday, and include such topics as microbiology and statistics. Another course, sensory analysis, bears about the same relationship to eating as the study of anatomy bears to sex: Each student sits at a seminar table with a piece of cheese or salami, or a glass of wine or olive oil, and fills out a questionnaire about every imaginable quality including color, taste, aftertaste, aroma, and texture.

50,000 Bottles of Wine

Such a schedule leaves little time for reading assigned texts, much less for the relaxed pace of life essential to the Slow Food ethos &151; an irony frequently noted on campus.

One sign that the university is still a work in progress is the underdeveloped state of the library. While the wine cellar already holds 50,000 bottles from every region of Italy (in crates piled around the ruined foundations of an ancient Roman tomb and a medieval abbey), the shelves in a converted granary upstairs hold only 5,000 volumes, most of them recipe books by authors ranging from the master French chef George Auguste Escoffier to Jack Nicholson's private cook.

Administrators say they are expanding the library's collection, and have ambitious plans to make the university a research center. The institution, which relies almost exclusively on visiting instructors, will be adding permanent professorships as well as full-time research positions over the next several years, according to Alberto Capatti, its academic and scientific director.

Food studies has been a subspecialty of other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and history, says Mr. Capatti, a historian of gastronomy who also teaches at the University of Pavia. "Now we want to develop the identity of alimentation as a discipline ... to give it a face of its own."

For now the most obvious obstacle to that goal is language. Eugene N. Anderson, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Riverside, who this winter taught a two-week class here on the history of Chinese food, says his dealings with Italian colleagues and students were scarce, largely because of the linguistic barrier. The University has two official languages, English and Italian, but has yet to offer intensive instruction in either. Although they had to pass tests in both in order to be admitted, foreign students now complain that they cannot follow lectures in the local tongue, and Italians say the same about classes in English.

Communication has proved easier outside the classroom. Students live together in university-provided apartments in the nearby city of Bra, where at dinner and on weekends they share with each other the delights of their native cuisines, which include Turkish, Mexican, and Ukrainian. Merely living in Italy is a gastronomic education for foreigners, notes Ms. Radecki, who dates her appreciation of fresh local produce to an earlier stay. She was shocked to discover that her neighborhood greengrocer here — unlike the supermarkets back home in New Jersey — did not carry broccoli in summertime, but was eager to offer her fresh seasonal tomatoes instead.

Yet even Italians have things to learn about food. Enrico Bonardo, a student from the northwestern Italian city of Chivasso, admits to having believed that Americans ate mainly fast food, and was pleased to learn about artisanal cheeses produced in the United States. He now looks forward to next year's field seminar in California.

Extended field trips — which the university calls by the French term, stages — are clearly the most popular part of the curriculum. Run in cooperation with producers and restaurateurs who meet Slow Food's quality standards, the trips have included visits to a Tuscan chicken farmer who raises a rare breed of rooster, sea outings with a Ligurian fisherman, and a comparative tour of producers of Parma ham. So far the trips have been confined to Italy, but upcoming destinations include France, Slovenia, India, the United States, and Australia.

The $22,900 annual tuition covers trip expenses, as well as those upscale cafeteria lunches. Aside from tuition, the university is supported by donations from food producers and local governments.

A Full Plate

Like the rest of the program, however, even the stages can prove intense. During the expedition to Tuscany, after several days of long, sit-down lunches and dinners at medieval castles and golden stone villas, featuring the likes of tagliatelle con interiora di pollo Val d'Arno (pasta with chicken innards) and tortini di frittate con salsa chiantigiana (small omelets in a Chianti wine sauce), with an appropriate wine for every course, students decided they literally had too much on their plates.

"We finally canceled one night of dinner because everyone said: 'We need fruit! We're not hungry!'" Ms. Radecki recalls.

That experience yielded yet another important gastronomic lesson, she says: "We actually want less, to enjoy it more."

http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 51, Issue 48, Page A35

Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education.