Celebrating International Day of Forests with food from the forests

19 March 2015 News

“Cuisine from the Forests”, the award-winning recipe book published by PEFC Spain, will be presented to participants of the International Day of Forests celebrations at the United Nations in Geneva this Friday, with the UN being “all forest” on this special day.

This year’s celebration is dedicated to the theme “Forests for Food – Food for Forests” and draws the attention to the forest’s environmental, cultural, social, economic and gastronomic benefits with a series of events.

The celebrations will centre on a cross-sectorial dialogue between forest and food experts to discuss how forests contribute to the food industry. It will also look into how our food and eating habits impact forests, including the relationship between agricultural expansion and deforestation.

In honour of the International Day of Forests, the UN cafeteria will be serving delicious forest-related and forest-inspired food during lunchtime and tastes from the Italy’s San Francesco Woodland will be available to employees and visitors at the Palais de Nations in Geneva throughout the day.

The evening will see the opening of the “Learning from Forest” exhibition in the Salle des Pas Perdu, surrounded by over 100 living trees. A Forest Gala will then draw the day to a close, serving food and drinks from the world’s forests; birch juice from Finland, game meat and sausage from Poland, mushroom risotto from Italy, black forest cake from Germany and other delicious treats from countries including the Russian Federation, Switzerland, and the United States.

"Cuisine from the Forests", which will be presented to participants of the celebrations by PEFC Spain and renowned chef Charo Val, is one outcome of PEFC Spain’s Tastes of Sustainable Forests project. The project, sponsored by the 2013 PEFC Collaboration Fund, aims at promoting wild food products from well-managed forests, as well as PEFC certification in the food sector.

The project has been tremendously successful in communicating the benefits that forests provide to entirely different audiences far outside of the traditional forest sector, helping to spread the message about the multiple functions and values of forests to a wide range of people that would have been otherwise difficult to reach.