Ali-menti, comporta-menti, menti: discorso sull’intelligenza alimentare

Abstract

Bread has always been life, both in the “wild” and “refined” versions. In the 1950s, with wide diffusion of a refined version of bread, there was an “improvement” from the aesthetic point of view but, paradoxically, not on the nutritional point of view. With this change, bread lost its stupefying power (there was no longer any need to alleviate the pangs of quantitative hunger) but at the same time it also lost an important part of its nutritional power (qualitative hunger). This just mentioned is not the only paradox of modern food systems; in the decades following the 1950s the relationship between food and man began to alter, we went from extreme excesses to dramatic scarsity, from traditional uses of food to new and competing uses, from overproduction to waste. In other words we can talk about “coexisting inequality”, “suboptimal use of food resources” and waste. Now the time has come, at least so we think, to reclaim ourselves both meaning and value of food, and the key is AI, but in the sense of Food Intelligence.