We cannot answer out of instinct and that’s even though if our instinct followed current trends it would lead us to say that nature is absolutely good and that saving 4 euros on each one of the 200 pizzas which we eat in restaurants every year, on average, would leave us with 800 euros to spend on something else.

Perhaps on remedies for a bad stomach or on unlikely successful tests of our sensitivity to gluten. Let’s put aside pizza, for now, and focus on nature.

According to Italian dictionary Treccani  “natura” has a very complex definition, but for this occasion I’d like to mention nature as “the universe considered in its phenomena, activity, order, like an objective reality which man observes, studies, changes".

In the simple words of Dario Bressanini during his speech at PizzaUp in 2015, the “natural” changes of wheat have always been a continuum, because nature is a dynamic concept: it describes the cycle of birth-life-death of every (temporarily) leaving creature.

Together, all these transformations make evolution, which is the “movement that follows a goal” (source: Treccani), the movement of the survival of the strongest, following the principle of natural selection, an act of incredible cruelty towards the weak, though necessary so that a “natural” balance of the living species can exist.

This is the “ruthless” side of nature, which human beings have studied since the first civilisation and to which they have opposed technological evolution, as a way to protect their existence. One such example is refining flour: if we didn’t remove micro-toxins before milling the wheat, we’d transfer the highly toxic result of one of the “natural” attacks caused by climate change into our bread and pizza.

At the same time, some people use natural selection to pick only the best wheat, the one that, on a specific year, has proven to be stronger and more resistant (without synthetic chemicals) to the natural attacks caused by the climate. A technique called “participatory genetic improvement” (prof. Salvatore Ceccarelli): farmers scatter a mix of seeds in the same soil, pick the spikes that survive the natural selection and collect their seeds for the next seeding. This way, in the future, they participae in the natural evolution of varieties without interfering with artificial defences, but leaving climatic natural selection to do its course.

This is Petra Evolutiva, the result of an allegiance between nature, the Sicilian farmers of Simenza and the ancient milling activity of the Quaglia family, transforming a mix of organic, totally natural wheat into flour that has flavours and aromas that change every year.

It’s the first flour with an identity that means uniqueness and not equivalence, different each year in terms of aromas and flavours, always the same in terms of how it is processed. It is the artistic result of the meeting of climate selection and the most advanced technologies of clean milling available in Italy. Info:petraevolutiva.it


Piero Gabrieli
source: http://www.identitagolose.it/news/view.php?id=97

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