The boys jostled and jousted as they gathered round the soil patch but then swiftly got down to business: planting herbs – rosemary, mint and thyme – in the school’s vegetable allotment. The manual task over, the 11-year-olds tucked into a ftira biż-żejt.

We have forgotten how to taste

This was not your average planting ceremony. Students at Maria Regina Secondary College, Mosta, were recently marking the international Terra Madre day. It is a day which celebrates the concept that there can be a world in which all people can enjoy food that is good for them, good for those who grow it and good for the planet.

This is the philosophy of the Slow Food Movement.

“Imagine a world where there’s a farmers’ market in every neighbourhood, community vegetable allotments and a network of small local producers. This would globally re-shape the way we look at food and farming,” Carmel Cassar, leader of the movement in Malta, told The Times.

Slow food means living an unhurried life, beginning at the table. It’s an ironic way of saying no to fast food. Aptly, the symbol for this international movement – which has supporters in 150 countries and a network of 100,000 members worldwide – is the snail: because it moves slowly and calmly eats its way through life.

“Slow food is not about slow cooking. It is about respecting the dignity of nature by producing and consuming good, clean and fair food,” Prof. Cassar said.

The concept of slow food was founded as a non-profit association in 1989 by Italian journalist Carlo Petrini after he rallied (unsuccessfully) against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna.

Mr Petrini has since become an international figure, promoting high quality, small-scale farming and organising a relaxed life around long lunches with the motto that “a global food revolution begins from local roots”.

The Slow Food branch in Malta has only been recently set up and Mr Petrini is constantly encouraging the Maltese movement “to work closer with the producers” in an attempt to restore the link between the pleasure of good food and a commitment to the community and the environment.

“The link has been severed, to our own detriment,” Prof. Cassar, a cultural historian at the University, said. He cited how Malta lost its endemic strawberry, which was “tiny but incredibly tasty” for “a bigger, picture-perfect but tasteless version”.

The prolific use of farming pesticides in Malta has not helped the cause of the eco-system, either.

“Those toxins are part of our daily intake: we’re eating poison,” Prof. Cassar said.

The movement aims to make people eat healthier. “There’s a dwindling interest in the food we eat, where it comes from, how it tastes,” Prof. Cassar said, noting that most simply stuff their mouths with “tasteless and disgusting” junk food.

“We have forgotten how to taste,” he said, bluntly stating that the march of fast food outlets has resulted in food consumption ceasing to be a “ritual occasion”.

The main target is, consequently, children. “We need to instil in them the need to respect healthy traditional foods – that’s why we gave them all a Maltese ftira with oil and tomatoes after they planted the herbs. Slowly, slowly we get to change the system. It can’t happen overnight, perhaps in a generation or two.”

The local movement will be setting up school gardens and encouraging children to grow their own crops. “No oranges in summer; no grapes in winter: that’s the way they can learn what it means to eat products in season and do away with the less nutritious high carbon-footprint vegetables,” he added.

But with purse strings tightening, can the Maltese afford the luxury of slow food?

“We’re not talking about sophisticated gourmet here but simple cuisine,” Prof. Cassar said, underlining the need of going back to basics and reviving traditional food which had strong connections between plate, planet, people and culture.

The list is endless: the less fatty goats’ milk, instead of cows’; the olive oil; the fish-based recipes; the vegetable soups...

The deterioration of our food culture, according to Prof. Cassar, is largely due to world wars which disrupted the structure of society and made people adapt to systems that were not theirs. This certainly explains the nation’s obsession with corned beef.

“For a time, corned beef – or bulu beef as it was known – was the only food available and even though we became more affluent, old habits die hard,” he said. Canned fruit, which is still consumed on special occasions in some households, is another food relic of the war, he said.

Slow Food Malta hopes to gradually make people aware that these are not healthy items. As the Maria Regina students water and tend to their herbs, it is clear that hope is pinned on the younger generation.

For more information log on to www.slowfood.com or e-mail carmel.cassar@um.edu.mt