How a Chinese-Italian chef hopes to foster a slow-food revolution in China

It’s a hot September day in Turin, northern Italy and Qi Jiangui, a chef at Beijing restaurant Mei Zhou Dongpo, is making spicy dumplings filled with tender chicken, pork and Sichuan pepper in a busy temporary kitchen.

The pop-up restaurant is part of Terra Madre, a food festival organised by the Italy-based Slow Food headquarters. It runs every two years in Turin and its aim is promoting and preserving culinary biodiversity and species facing extinction. In this year’s festival, which took place last week, some 7,000 delegates from 143 countries attended to present their country’s most interesting and underrated natural foods.

At China’s stand, about 60 products from around the country are on display. Wei Yugui from Guangxi has come to Turin with noodles made from rice she tends the traditional way by rearing ducks among the rice paddies as a natural form of pest control (they eat the weeds and insects). Zhang Xiuyun from Lijiang in Yunnan province has brought a local rice wine, while a farmer from Inner Mongolia is showcasing his jerky made from air-dried donkey meat and his Sanhe cows.

Elsewhere on the stand, wild tea from the forests of Yunnan provinceis being handed out and steamed buns made from wheat grown in the arid lands of Huanghua in Hebei province – in handmade wooden moulds shaped to resemble fish and hedgehogs – are catching the crowd’s attention.

“The only woman still making these sweet rice biscuits is 80 now,” says Ling Kuang Sung, one of the three founders of Slow Food Great China in 2015, and involved with the promotion of safe and ethically grown artisan food since the late 1990s. “Now we are going to ensure some young people are going to learn from her.”