In 2010 Academy Director Christopher S. Celenza, FAAR’94, began the “Conversations That Matter” series with the aim of fostering discussions on mainstream issues in the public eye that affect society as whole, both inside and outside academia. Past conversations have involved a number of important figures such as Brother Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory who came to discuss science and faith, Vivian Schiller and Sylvia Poggioli of National Public Radio who joined us to ponder the future of news in the digital age, Director General of the ICCROM in Rome, Mounir Bouchenaki, who addressed the issue of cultural conservation in crisis zones, and Harvard Professor Jill Lepore on American History. Pursuing the very highest standard of scholarship can come at a cost of relative isolation so hosting this event provides the academy community with an important venue for engaging with these broader topics.
Earlier in October, Rachel Donadio, joined Director Celenza, at the academy table for a conversation about the trials and tribulations of delineating Italian affairs for an American readership. After five years as Rome bureau chief of The New York Times, Donadio has taken up a new position as the newspaper’s European Culture correspondent in Paris so the visit constituted a timely look back at recent Italian history. Since 2008 Donadio has covered Vatican and parliamentary scandals, the historic resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the election of Francis I, and the vicissitudes of Italian politics under Silvio Berlusconi. She related having quickly learned that, “time is power” and “power is opaque” in Italy. She quoted playwright Ennio Flaiano as having summed up the country’s most intricate complexities with the explanation that, “In Italy the shortest distance between two points is an arabesque.” Her reflections echoed many of the concerns raised by Annalisa Piras and Bill Emmott in their recent documentary film Girlfriend in a Coma. Despite the difficulties that the country faces, Donadio pointed out that, “the kind of questions Italy poses to you about what it means to live in history…to be a citizen, what the role of government is, what you can expect of the state and what you can’t, what you can expect of the family and what you can’t …these are the most profound questions and living here makes you confront them.”
Director Celenza reminded audiences at the Villa Aurelia on Monday night that no subject could be more universally relevant than food and guests of this most recent CTM are world figures in a culinary revolution. Carlo Petrini is a gastronomist and the founder of Slow Food International. Alice Waters, sometimes called the mother of American food, owns Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, which has consistently been rated one of the world’s top fifty restaurants and has now been operating for forty-two years. She also consulted on and helped found the American Academy in Rome’s sustainable teaching kitchen, The Rome Sustainable Food Project. Waters and Petrini sat down with Celenza to discuss the blossoming of slow food culture and their respective roles as activists, advocates and educators in Italy and the United States. Waters became deeply committed to the principles of slow food in the 1960s long before the term was coined. Returning from a period of study in France, she felt the traumatic loss of what she called the “tasty life” because she could find none of the same fresh ingredients in America. Petrini asserted that gastronomy is a holistic science, which demands a complete understanding of politics, economics and biology in addition to knowledge about food cultivation and preparation. He argued that it is possible to change the world if we start with food.
Ultimately the issues raised by the two food activists relate back to immense systemic questions about the role of capital versus labor in the global marketplace. Petrini and Waters decry falling food prices and assert that people do not appreciate the difference between price and value, but as Petrini himself pointed out, gastronomy should also consider history. The Industrial Revolution may have caused a visible rift between urban and rural societies, but it also permitted the rise of a middle class, which sustained the liberal revolutions of Europe and America. Developed countries may well spend only ten percent of income on food, but people in Cameroon, Belarus, and Egypt spend fifty percent and rising food prices are one of the major causes of sustained poverty in the underdeveloped world. When asked what young people might do to become involved in transforming the system, Petrini replied that we need farmers, but perhaps we also need thinkers who can take the lessons of history into the future to build on our successes and devise sustainable solutions to curb our excesses.
These “Conversations That Matter” about current affairs attract wider audiences to the academy and help promote a dialogue between public opinions and academic disciplines. They are discussions that pose important questions about how the artists and academics of our community can generate new perspectives and ideas to address the pressing political and economic problems facing our national and global communities.