Localized Quality in Tuscany

With its rolling hills, small farms, diverse products, and high-quality foodstuffs, Tuscany easily conjures up a world of diversification and localization. In fact, so many of the region’s products are seen as world class—notably its wines, olive oils, cheeses, and processed meats—that it is tempting to see this region as the prime example of an Interpersonal World (in Salais and Storper’s terms). Yet, Tuscany’s perceived success in this world of food is a recent phenomenon. Until the 1990s the region was thought to be rather ‘backward’ in character, mainly due to its inability to adopt conventional industrial approaches to food production and processing. While some effort was made to shift Tuscany on to a more industrialized development path during the 1960s and 1970s, by the early 1990s this was widely regarded as having failed. Out of this failure, however, came the search for a new development model, one that could work with, rather than against, the region’s core assets—notably, its localized variety in foodstuffs and environmental features. Thus, a distinctively Tuscan approach to the agri-food sector is explicitly identified in the recent Rural Development Plan (RDP) drawn up by the Tuscan regional government. The document states that the strategy elaborated in the plan is aiming at ‘strengthening the ‘‘Tuscan model’’ of agricultural and rural development’. The plan goes on to identify key characteristics of the model, including the presence of small and mediumsized farms, the existence of quality products, the diversification of agricultural production, the provision of adequate marketing networks, and the enhancement of the environment and the agricultural landscape (Regione Toscana, 2000). It is tempting to imagine that the consolidation of a diversified and localized world of food production in Tuscany owes much to the implementation of this model by governmental authorities in concert with other actors in the food sector. However, it will be argued below that the emergence of a new world of food in Tuscany owes as much to happenstance as it does to the conscious agency of differing institutions and organizations.