Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 8:51 pm
Damn! That's a real shame.
Hopefully some other top distributor will fill the void...
Hopefully some other top distributor will fill the void...
Yeah, like Facets or New Yorker.FSimeoni wrote:Damn! That's a real shame.
Hopefully some other top distributor will fill the void...
Italy's toxic waste crisis, the Mafia – and the scandal of Europe's mozzarella
By Michael McCarthy and John Phillips in Rome
The Independent, Saturday, 22 March 2008
It may be the moment when the throwaway society meets its retribution. A shadow this weekend hangs over one of the great staples of modern European life – Italy's mozzarella cheese.
The topping on a billion pizzas, the magic ingredient in a million salads, is at the centre of a major food scare involving pollution, corruption, the Mafia and southern Italy's remarkable crisis in waste management.
It centres on the buffalo milk used to produce the purest form of the rubbery, cream-coloured delicacy, now as prized an Italian export as extra virgin olive oil – mozzarella di bufala. High levels of dioxins, potentially hazardous pollutant chemicals, have been found in buffalo milk in a group of dairies in Campania, the southern province centring on Naples where most mozzarella production takes place.
Italy's public health authorities believe that the contamination is the result of illegal dumping of toxic waste in Campania, where the waste industry is under the control of the Camorra, the local branch of the Mafia, and where Naples and its region are undergoing a major waste management crisis, with disposal facilities either broken or full, and rubbish piling up in the streets.
The scale of the problem is such that it is becoming the cautionary tale par excellence of the modern throwaway society, showing how a major city can be swallowed up by its own refuse and making Naples and its region a symbol for filth around the world.
Over the past week, Italian authorities have searched dozens of buffalo dairies and seized milk samples for tests after higher-than-permitted levels of dioxins were discovered in products from 29 mozzarella makers. After government chemists had analysed milk samples taken from some 2,000 herds of buffalo, the herds attached to 66 dairies have been quarantined pending further investigations, and prosecutors in Naples have placed 109 people under investigation in connection with the inquiry, on suspicion of fraud and food poisoning. Already, sales of mozzarella across Italy are said to have fallen by up to 50 per cent.
Many Italians are naturally linking the buffalo milk contamination to the local waste and pollution scandal. "Of course we don't know for sure scientifically, but the high rate of dioxin is most likely linked to what the buffaloes ate," an Italian environmental official admitted yesterday, adding that the buffalo "grazed in areas where we know that toxic waste has been dumped in recent years".
Le mani sulla città di Francesco Rosi (1963)
Il restauro è stato progettato, curato e finanziato dalla Cineteca Nazionale con la collaborazione degli aventi diritto, la francese Société Cinématographique Lyre e la compagnia italiana Galatea, sulla base dei negativi originari e due duplicati positivi in buono stato di conservazione. Il negativo scena è stato acquisito in digitale a 2k. Le lavorazioni sono state realizzate presso il laboratorio Cinema Communications Service/Eurolab di Roma con la supervisione della Cineteca Nazionale.