The diversity of food processes in organic short chains: the case of artisanal pasta
Résumé
To provide local and healthy food, an increasing number of French farmers make the choice to not only produce cereals but also process them into flour or semolina, then pasta and sell them on farm or through local food networks. Less or no gluten sensitivity have been reported by some consumers of these handmade products. A current participatory project proposes to inventory such initiatives in Occitanie region, to describe their farming systems and to evaluate the quality of pasta. The first results showed that on-farm processing and marketing are mostly the fact of small-scale organic farms growing landraces durum wheat varieties and other orphan Triticum species. Stone-milling is mainly used instead of roller-milling and the pasta process is soft, simpler but longer than the industrial one. The raw materials and the final products were analyzed in order to understand how the process influences the final quality of pasta, particularly the gluten and organoleptic quality.