Within a week, two important professional events have taken place for me: my new book Food has been published by MIT Press in its Essential Knowledge series; and the exhibition Food: Bigger than the Plate, for which I was an external advisor, opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Besides the obvious satisfaction for the outcome of both, I believe the overlapping of the two events is not serendipitous, but suggests how food studies as a discipline is becoming increasingly relevant in offering insights and – at times – stimulation and guidance in the public debates that are developing around food. What we eat, how, with whom, where our food comes from, how it gets to us, and how we dispose of it have moved from the periphery to the center of a wide range of cultural, social, and political conversations.
Sustainability, climate change and resilience, technology, international trade and the financialization of food commodities, health and nutrition, food justice and food sovereignty are acquiring growing relevance in our collective consciousness, generating new and quite diverse expressions of associativism and activism among producers and consumers that some already – but I believe prematurely – hail as the beginning of a “food movement”.
You can read the post in Italian here