Buying sausage in Italy - 05/27/2013

Several days ago, I went to the Consorzio di Agrario, basically a gourmet food store, to buy some good sausage for a cannelloni bean dish I was making. --> The two gentlemen ahead of us ordered sandwiches a salsiccia cruda, meaning sandwiches with raw sausage meat. The care in which the deli maker made the sandwiches, slowly spreading the sausage onto the bread and following with some delectable cheese, made me think of the slow food movement. --> After I ordered my sausage, an impatient customer asked when he was next and the deli guy told him “pazienza!” or "patience!" I could not help but smile at this exchange.

We have been learning quite a bit about the slow food movement in our class called Consuming Ethics taught by one of the professors here at the Siena School for Liberal Arts. I wanted to talk about this experience buying sausage and witnessing the potential ingestion of raw sausage by Italians because my reaction was so typically American. I was befuddled. "Can you actually eat pork raw?" I asked myself. Later, while cooking the sausage, (in my unrelenting quest to be less American and more Italian) I thought, "maybe I don't have to cook it ALL the way!", leaving a little bit of pink. I had trouble sleeping later that night for fear that Carlton and I would end up with trichinosis, a disease you get from the consumption of raw pork. I asked my professor about it later and she informed us that it is safe to eat raw pork here in Italy. The reason for this is that unlike factory farmed pigs in the United States, Italian farmers take great care in the raising of their pigs for human consumption. 

Here in the United States, we are obsessed with food hygiene and rightly so. If you've ever read Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, which details the horrors of the U.S. meat packing industry in the late nineteenth century, you become immediately grateful for public health organizations as well as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. However, we recently read how standardization processes can be a huge detriment to traditional food production processes, even the designation of something as "organic" or "local." This is an interesting dilemma for those trying to hold onto their cultural identity through traditional foods here in Italy. It remains to be seen whether the slow food movement could be a way of balancing necessary regulations while still maintaining the traditional, local and cultural identity of food. 

I don't know if I will be able to eat pork raw (some cultural habits remain strong) but I have not lost any more sleep over leaving a little bit of pink.