FOOD MAKERS GO GLOBAL

Food artisans from East and West meet to work together and create new delicacies.

Two food artisans producing the same kind of food – one from Europe and another from Asia – meet up, spend time together and swap knowledge and know-how. The series delves into their different worlds: their work, their businesses, their lives, their production procedures and the different market conditions they have to address. Age-old skills thus join forces with new food-making techniques in a common fight against standardization.

Our heroes are food and the people who produce it. Each episode is dedicated to a single organic product – from cheese, fermented cabbage and flatbread to salted fish roe and pasta – and to the stories behind it. Stories of real people who work to produce outstanding foodstuffs, rooted in their local environment and culture. What will they learn from each other?
What happens when a Sami woman making exceptional flatbread travels from her native Lapland to India to see how they make chapattis there? Does a goat cheese producer from Nepal make his cheese in a totally different way from his renowned counterparts in France? Petros from Greece meets Takano in Japan and they discover that each has his own personal way of making botargo, salted mullet roe. Ms. Yao from Jiangmen in China visits a pasta maker in Italy and a German sauerkraut maker goes to Korea to see how they make kimchi. All these food artisans are keen to develop their knowledge and the series connects them, allowing them to compare the ways they do their work through every stage in the production and supply chains.

The series reveals the essence of the same specialities produced in different countries with different social and economic conditions, taking us on a backstage tour of quality food and introducing us to flavours and places and the special people whose stories are never told: people intent on developing their craft and fighting the big corporations that are suffocating them. Their unique products and experience raise our awareness of how the food we love is made and show us how important it is to preserve the world heritage of food-making techniques.
The series not only gives us a better understanding of the food we eat and how it can be produced sustainably on a global scale, but also takes us on a unique and original voyage of discovery through the eyes of people who are maintaining the culinary traditions of their different countries against the beautiful diverse landscapes they live in.

2018 / 5 X 26′ / HD

Director: Clio Sozzani & Claudia Palazzi

Production: Stefilm, Ma.ja.de Filmproduktion, MDR in collaboration with ARTE and RSI