The educational project “The Ark of Taste Goes to School” was born with the intention of bringing
the concepts of food cultures and traditions to schools through a recreational education pathway.
A new way of reading the reality which surrounds us and to deeply understand the value of biodiversity,
with an ambitious goal: to know and safeguard ecosystems (economies, trades, production, environmental
balance, ...).
Protection of biodiversity as the only response to the current situation of environmental and social crises,
biodiversity that allows adaptation to various changes and, last but not least, the protection of biodiversity
as the only possible insurance for the future. It is necessary to change the way we look at the world and
nature, and an individual and collective change is needed: fresh eyes are needed to read the relationship
between humans and nature, a nature of which humans are a part of and they are not the masters of.
The starting point of this new paradigm for Slow Food is and always has been food, a powerful element
that connects us to the earth, every day, several times a day. So, starting from food, from who produces
it and from the supply chains involved, we can read and better understand the ecosystems that host us:
we need to restart from the Earth.
For this project we considered it particularly strategic to involve schools to ensure that students,
consciously guided by teachers, identify products at risk of extinction in their respective territories.
But the main objective is that a method of reading one’s own territory is acquired, a unique ability to
observe and experience the community in which one lives, whether it is an urban context, a rural or
a coastal environment. Our daily choices and the ability to read the territory are the only solution
to the erosion of agri-food biodiversity.