Slow Food is counting on its existing convivia in California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Utah, and Vermont to identify products for the Ark. It takes time to think of what qualifies as a medieval cathedral in the United States, with its relatively short history and its ever-frenzied embrace of the very latest technology, which obliterates artisan traditions. His cheeses, already well known to American connoisseurs, are obvious Ark candidates, and so are southern country hams, fruit preserves such as apple butter and cherry jam, apple cider, and New Orleans pralines. Foreign enthusiasts may inspire us to preserve our own patrimony. Putting a face to a food makes it come alive both in the mind and on the palate.
Personal warmth can make it come alive in the heart.
Flavio and Ferdinando Marino, brothers in their forties, grind corn at the Mulino Marino in Cossano Belbo, near the truffle capital, Alba, below Turin in the hills of the Langhe. The flavor is better, they insist, not to mention that the variety is close to what grew in the area for a century or more. He managed to be both officious and charmingly at ease, with the adults who crowded the long table and with the playmates his age who appeared after lunch. On a long walk after a long lunch Fulvio listened intently to his grandfather's tales of escaping with his partisan comrades by way of a tunnel cut through the town wall when German soldiers thought they had the place surrounded. He pointed to the sunnier parts of the hills, which grow the best corn, and enumerated the production of the various farms, all starting from the same seed corn provided by his family.