MEXICO – A tasty business card that says more than a thousand words, capable of opening horizons of growth and comparison even overseas. A delegation from the Gandino Corn Thorn Community, made up of president Antonio Rottigni and chef Diego Fiori, participated between the end of May and the beginning of June in the annual meeting of the Delice Network held in Merida (Mexico) and included among the activities of the international Pueblos network of the Maiz.
The Pueblos del Maiz network was born in 2022 thanks to four cities that are part of the UNESCO Creative Cities for Gastronomy: Puebla and Merida (Mexico), San Antonio (Texas) and Tucson (Ariz.). Since the beginning of this year, Bergamo (and through it Gandino and the Barbed Corn Community) has also become part of a network that has the importance of promoting the meaning and importance of corn in cuisine and culture food of each participating city, developing important international events.
“In Mexico – underlines Rottigni – we experienced intense days of meetings and conferences, with sustainability and the importance of origins at the centre. Numerous international chefs discussed current gastronomic proposals and concrete opportunities for innovating typical cuisine, always respecting the quality of raw materials, with students from Merida’s hotel schools. Corn has been the common denominator, an element that binds communities around the world with an ideal spiritual connection to Mother Earth. The products from our supply chain based on Spinato Corn from Gandino were the protagonists with the classic polenta, but also with biscuits and wholemeal biscuits”.
Chef Diego Fiori received unanimous praise for the recipes proposed and aroused great curiosity among the “chefs of the future”, who requested photographic selfies on several occasions. Welcomed by the organizing committee, in particular by Josè Luis Martinez Semerena, director of Economic Development Tourism Merida, by the mayor and various local authorities, the people of Gandino handed over, in memory of the meeting, a precious silk-screen print with the reproduction of the historic center of Gandino , created by the goldsmith Mauro Moioli.
Mérida is the lively capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán, deeply linked to the history and culture of the Maya. For millennia, corn has constituted the food and nutritional basis of the Yucatan population, to the point that according to local tradition all human beings are “children of corn”.
The Delice Network whose annual meeting was celebrated is an international professional network dedicated to global cities that come together to acquire skills on the use of Food & Gastronomy as a powerful tool for the development of their territory, also through the sharing of experiences . On the days of the meetings, the city’s restaurants as well as the party area around the Hermitage and the San Sebastian neighborhood were animated by themed dinners, conferences, street food tastings, shows, outdoor exhibitions and cultural insights Maya. From now on, everyone has an appointment for next autumn in Gandino, when the “I Giorni del Melgotto” exhibition will return, which will reach its seventeenth edition in 2024.
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