What is in your kitchen?

Besides the usual basics — pasta, rice, pulses, jars of olives, pickles and preserves — it depends. At my house we shop every day. Fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh eggs, fresh milk, fresh fish, fresh bread.

At Slow Food we obviously have lots of contacts with small-scale farmers, so I’m lucky to be able to have access to some of the finest produce in the area where I live in southern Piedmont, Italy.

How would you sum up your food philosophy?

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Food should be good, clean and fair. Good in the sense that, whatever it is, it should be tasty and wholesome, capable of satisfying all five senses.

Clean in the sense that it should be healthy, produced without putting a strain on the earth’s resources, ecosystems and environments.

Fair in the sense that it should respect social justice, by which I mean decent wages and working conditions for everyone involved in the supply chain, from production to distribution to consumption. I’d also add that the shorter the distance food travels from source to table the better

How has British food and our attitude to it changed in your lifetime?

Observing from the outside but as a frequent visitor to the UK, it seems to me that you’ve lost all sense of food as pleasure. By that I mean not only the actual eating, but also the joy of sitting round the table and talking and generally enjoying the occasion. In a word, conviviality. A meal should be a moment of exchange and affection, in the family, at the workplace, out with friends.

The British media talk about food obsessively but the British people seem to me often to eat their meals as if they were stopping at the petrol station to fill up their cars. Eating as fuel consumption.

What annoys you about the food culture in Britain?

The British fascination with celebrity TV cooks and chefs. It’s all about ego, glamour, style, design. The more a country feels the need to be bombarded by recipe after recipe, the less connected it is with its food roots.

What is Britain’s best-kept food secret?

You have some wonderful produce. Cornish pilchards and Falmouth oysters, Old Gloucester beef and cheese, artisan Somerset Cheddar... These come to mind because they’re protected and promoted by what we call Slow Food Presidium projects. But from experience, I know you have lots of other delicious foods in the UK.

I’ve eaten great fish in Scotland and interesting organic produce in various parts of the country. I’d really like to see the British recovering their own food culture, so they can discover their hidden treasures for themselves.

Do you prefer eating in our eating out?

It depends on the occasion, on time of year, on my mood, on the company. A simple salad eaten at home or an elaborate restaurant meal — both can be pleasurable experiences. I do like eating out, though, but there’s not enough space here to say where. I’m always reluctant to compile lists of my favourite eating places. It’s not that I don’t know who to include, it’s that I’ve got so many friends who are great cooks that I don’t know who to leave out!

What is the next big (real) food trend?

I hope it will be increased consumers awareness. As a matter of fact, at Slow Food, we don’t even speak about consumers any more. We’ve coined the term "co-producers" to describe people who are informed about how food is produced and actively support those who produce it, thus becoming part of the whole process themselves.

It all comes back to biodiversity, to the protection of specific animal breeds and vegetable species, to the excitement of having a range of options to choose from. To make all this happen, we must look to the past, a past which, in countries like my native Italy, is not that far away, and which, in prevalently agricultural parts of the world, still lives on in the present.

We need to learn from traditional wisdom, from what we have forgotten or shelved in the name of modernity, to ensure a serene future for ourselves and the world we live in. This is the most useful thing we can do today.

Slow Food Nation (Rizzoli, £11.95) is available from Times BooksFirst for £10.75: 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

For more information: www.slowfood.org.uk

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