Food, health and society: the town meets the countryside

Abstract

It is not long time that food culture has undertaken a process of renewal started when severe food safety problems did reveal through the “food scandals”: the so called mad cow disease (BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) or the swine flu and bird flu, and other various contaminations occurred in the late 20th century. The first development in food culture, so long, was due to safety needs but was the beginning of a new consciousness about the importance of food and diet on human health. Quickly, the demand for quality food oriented itself towards qualitative – local, traditional, organic – food features. This was a great challenge and a new opportunity for agriculture: to supply valuable goods and new services, to a wide range of consumers, searching for local, ecological, ethical, healthy requisites, from food and country. In the meanwhile a new sensibility has grown referring to urban life quality, due to overcrowded cities that hardly supply the needed services and suffer for the loosening of the contact with the environment as well as with the countryside. In this context, food has become, in a wide sense, the mean by which the territory is supplied inside the town: a food that must be evocative of nature and history, healthy and correlated with the share of social values.