Terra Madre Salone del Gusto 2026: Where Food and Politics Converge
Updated: Sep 8
If you are on the French Riviera and have never made the journey to Turin for Terra Madre Salone del Gusto, this may be the year to put it on the calendar. Just a few hours by car from Nice, Turin makes for an easy long weekend away. From September 24 to 27, the Piedmontese capital will transform into an international meeting place for people who love food and those who fight to protect it.
The sixteenth edition will bring together food communities from more than 120 countries, with around 1,500 farmers, fishers, producers, cooks, Indigenous leaders, researchers, and others involved in the future of our food systems. Held across some of Turin's most famous spots, including Piazza San Carlo, Piazza Castello, Piazza Carlo Alberto, Via Roma and Piazza Valdo Fusi, the event is part food festival, part food politics conference where researchers and activists lead the conversation about what we want the future of food to look like.
The theme for 2026 is “Biodiversity – Be Diversity,” an idea that runs through virtually everything Terra Madre represents. For Slow Food, biodiversity isn't simply about having more varieties of tomatoes, preserving an old breed of sheep or keeping a rare cheese alive. It is about resilience, culture, livelihoods and ultimately our ability to feed ourselves in the future.
Protecting Biodiversity: Saving More Than Heirloom Tomatoes
One of the most interesting things about Terra Madre is that it asks us to think about traditional food in a much broader way. There is no preserving a traditional food without also preserving the people who know how to produce it; the landscape in which it grows; the animals and plants that make it possible, and the knowledge passed from one generation to the next. This knowledge can disappear surprisingly quickly.
Slow Food has spent decades documenting and protecting agricultural and culinary biodiversity through projects including the Ark of Taste, Slow Food Presidia, Slow Food Farms and the Cooks' Alliance. At Terra Madre, these ideas come to life through the small farmers, cheesemakers, fishermen, bakers, shepherds, growers and artisans who are working every day to keep food traditions alive.
Seeds are particularly important. Once a locally adapted variety disappears, it is not necessarily something that can simply be recreated. The loss can mean losing not only a particular flavour, but generations of agricultural knowledge and a crop adapted to a specific climate, soil and landscape.
And this is where the conversation becomes much bigger than food.
Slow Food: From a Small Italian Protest to a Global Movement
For anyone unfamiliar with Slow Food, this is also a good opportunity to understand what lies behind the name. The movement began in Italy as a reaction against the growing dominance of fast food and the loss of traditional food culture. Over the decades, it developed into an international organisation with a close-knit, global community.
Slow Food has never really been about simply eating slowly. It is about asking where our food comes from, who produced it, whether the landscape can sustain its production and whether the person producing it can make a living. It is about recognising that a traditional cheese, an indigenous crop or an old grape variety can represent centuries of knowledge and losing it can mean losing a small but important piece of our collective agricultural history.
This year, that mission will inevitably have an added emotional dimension following the death of Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini on May 21, 2026. Petrini's influence reached far beyond the original movement he created, helping to change the way people think about food, agriculture, biodiversity and the relationship between what we eat and the world around us.
For Bon Vivant readers who have followed my coverage of Cheese, Slow Food's biennial celebration in Bra, Piedmont, there is a familiar thread here. Cheese is a wonderful example of how a food can carry a landscape, a tradition, a breed of animal and generations of knowledge with it. Terra Madre takes that philosophy and expands it to encompass virtually every aspect of our food system.
How to Get There
If you are looking for an early autumn foodie escape from the Riviera, Turin is a great weekend getaway. If you are in the Nice area, Turin is approximately 217 kilometres away and a roughly 3-hour drive, depending on traffic. By train, the journey is longer and normally involves a change in Ventimiglia and Savona, taking roughly five hours.
For the full programme, conference details, speakers and practical information, visit the Slow Food Terra Madre Salone del Gusto 2026 website:
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