A World of Presidia

Food, Culture & Community

A World of Presidia: Food, Culture & Community, Chelsea Green's newest book from Slow Food Editore, vibrantly tells the stories of 65 Presidia-groups of traditional food artisans-from 30 different countries and the unique and delicious foods they are working to preserve. The book's color photographs and detailed descriptions bring Tibet's yak cheese, Cape May, Delaware's salt oysters and Chile's Purén white strawberries to life. As the world's biodiversity diminishes, we are in danger of also losing many delicious traditional foods, but these Presidia are fighting hard to keep these delicacies on the table.

Slow Food Presidia is a project of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. Each Presidia focuses on a group of producers of a single artisan food and develops production and marketing techniques to help them to be economically viable. Sometimes, it takes just a little to save an artisan food; it's enough to bring together producers, help them coordinate marketing and promotion, and establish quality and authenticity standards for their product. Other times, when the production of a food is closer to the brink, it takes more: building a slaughterhouse, an oven, or reconstructing crumbling farmhouse walls.

A World of Presidia is not just about the foods, but also recounts the stories of the men and women who safeguard them-the curators of our world's rich agricultural history. The slow food Presidia are doing more than giving you the opportunity to savor Brazil's umbu fruit or American raw milk cheeses, they are preserving a way of life.

Slow Food, founded in 1986, is an international organization whose aim is to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of the modern fast-food life. Through a variety of initiatives, it promotes gastronomic culture, conserves agricultural biodiversity and protects traditional foods at risk of extinction. It now boasts more than 80,000 members in 100 countries. A portion of the proceeds from sales of A World of Presidia will go to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity to support Presidia projects.