Quite simply, perhaps, even schematically, I would not like to start, as from “obvious habits”, from the description “of who I am” or “the things I have done or represented”, but what contribution I can offer to the research related to gastronomy, meant as the adventure of food in an “anthropological space”, as a “sensitive value” and “cultural matrix. I am Antonio Grosso, and I deal with hotel reception, gastronomic history and writing, I love good food, sharing and storytelling the “stories” of peoples with their customs and customs. I believe that the enlightened resurgence of the table, meant as the pleasantness of the banquet, comes from the need to free itself from the scratching barbarity of the old almost baroque-triumphalistic food logic , trivial variant of the antiquated molecular science, replacing it with a new gastronomic knowledge functional to the disenchanted alacrity of a bold and reflective awareness, agile, unscrupulous, for whose correct use it is necessary to free the mind from the gross nourishment to pass to identity as sensory and educational memory, not as a historical constraint, but as an exciting possibility.
Every country has its own eating habits, the result of a historical memory that has been handed down from generation to generation and that has meant that our culture was rooted around the food of our “grandmothers”. The food system, moreover, carries within it the culture of those who practice it, every cooking ritual or simple preparation of a meal is something that has been structured over time, becoming the repository of the traditions of the place and the identity of the group. An extraordinary instrument for self-representation and cultural exchange. Food thus tells a story: that of the places where it was made, of the people who made it, of the traditions of the countries from which it comes. What we call culture is at the intersection of tradition and innovation. It is tradition because it consists of knowledge, techniques and values that are handed down to us. It is innovation because those knowledge, those techniques and those values change the position of man in the environmental context , making him able to experience new realities. Culture is the interface between the two perspectives. Harmonizing their own rhythms of life with those of Nature has always been a primary need of men, but, at the same time, they pursued the objective of controlling, modifying and in some way counteracting the “natural” times.
At stake is our ability not to be resigned subjects, passive consumers, but actors aware of the choices we make. The right to adequate and healthy food must be defended. The producers of good food, those not marked by the tear of the umbilical cord with the earth yet, possess a knowledge that is not learned atschool, that is not calculated with mathematical formulas, but that is the result of a symbiotic relationship with all creation. The distance created between producers and consumers is not only an ideal distance, represented by their mutual incommunicability, their antagonism, their living in different worlds, both obfuscated by the politics of profit and unbridled consumerism. We must restore the spirit of local adaptation, relocate; having the knowledge that food is a co-production network, where knowledge must be shared and process methods sustainable. There is more and more a sort of flattening or – worse – a cultural massacre, during which the knowledge of the past loses value and meaning. In fact, the same peasant wisdom, however uncertain or demonstrable as the official science, has an element of common sense that is no longer traced in the calculation, that does not pursue the profile but survival itself, in the best possible way. Slowness re-qualifies that education and that feeling of community belonging and actualizes it with encounter, exchange, gift, participation.
Written by Antonio Grosso
