Slices/ We defend real food, with our teeth*

The concept of real food now has a specific denomination: "real food", a food current that discovers how important it is to eat whole, seasonal and local, delicious and identifying foods and as little processed as possible. Good clean and fair, in short. And yet, alongside this widespread awareness, we continue to observe an imposing pressure from certain companies with their "marketing armies", to take the trivialization of our food to extremes and its enormous cultural and ecosystemic impact: in the USA, synthetic food has already received an initial approval from the Food and Drug Administration for placing on the market, and in general a narrative is proposed according to which this is "the food of the future", on a par with insects as a new food

BY BARBARA NAPPINI Slow Food Italia President www.slowfood.it

frontier and food obtained from out of the ground plants: the so-called hydroponic or “vertical” cultivation. Behind synthetic food, behind above-ground agriculture and insect meal, we often know that there are big food multinationals (such as Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Nestlé, some of which are leaders in the industrial zootechnical sector) and those investment funds that are not motivated by the desire to build a fairer food system, to defeat hunger, to protect biodiversity and ecosystems, or - as we are often told - to eliminate animal suffering. Indeed, in some cases, they are the same subjects who promoted the "Green Revolution" in the 1970s: that process of change which, through powerful mechanisation, the use of synthetic chemistry and modified seeds, should have feed the entire world population. A political objective tragically missed: we know that today almost a billion people on the planet do not have regular access to food, even though the planet produces much more food than it needs.

We need to produce (and distribute) better, not more. Yet, an important study published in the prestigious medical journal "The Lancet" has shown that if we redirected diets and production systems in a sustainable direction, there would already be enough food to feed over 10 billion people. In addition, we could reduce the number of deaths from eating-disorder-related diseases by more than 20%, equivalent to approximately 11 million human lives per year. We cannot repeat the same mistakes as the past, starting from a partial analysis and arriving at an answer that is always and only the industrial technological one, which is also partial. "Slow Food defends real food with its teeth": because for decades we have been restoring value to food which then simply "becomes us". Isn't it perhaps important to choose the quality of what we transform into energy, which allows us to function and to be us? It is said: "we are what we eat" - and it is true -, but the opposite is also true: we eat as we are. Consciously determining what I buy, where I buy it, how long and how I keep it, how I treat it and how I transform it, should be our daily priority because it is a form of respect for ourselves and care for our loved ones but also a gesture that implies interest in the environment and for others. If our living conditions do not allow us to treat our diet as a priority, perhaps we should humbly and deeply reflect on the type of life we are leading and on the type of society that produces these existential conditions. We cannot reduce these issues to polarized positions but we can seize the opportunity to deepen them, understand them, and develop a critical thought in order to then go, both individually and collectively, in the most equitable, right and sensible direction. The author of this article is an incurable optimist: certain that human beings have many resources to draw on if only we abandon nihilism and a certain almost cynical disillusionment, to embrace the joy of living by determining our daily priorities, becoming agents of change, builders of meaning and interpreting the path towards a better future, also starting from food.