RESERVED AREA - MICCI EBOOK

FRANCESCO MICCI       

_{FOOD MAKES HAPPINESS}

          

Food makes Happiness Francesco Micci

 

FOOD MAKES HAPPINESS

LET’S DISCOVER THE DEEP CONNECTION BETWEEN NUTRITION AND JOY

 

Food makes Happiness Francesco Micci

INDEX

INTRODUCTION……………………......................................................................................................................... 1

FOOD IS MY CLOSEST FRIEND ........................................................................................................................ 8

TO EACH HIS OWN FOOD ................................................................................................................................ 10

THE FOOD REVOLUTION ................................................................................................................................ 13

THE PARADOXES OF FOOD ............................................................................................................................. 23

GO BACK TO LOVING YOURSELF .................................................................................................................. 37

BODY FOOD: LOCAL, FRESH SEASONAL, WHOLEMEAL ..................................................................... 41

FOOD IS NOT CHEMISTRY IT IS ENERGY .................................................................................................. 49

FOOD FOR THE MIND AND HEART .............................................................................................................. 56

FOOD FOR THE SOUL ......................................................................................................................................... 59

FOOD AND HAPPINESS ..................................................................................................................................... 62

MY LIFE AND FOOD ............................................................................................................................................. 66

 

Food makes Happiness Francesco Micci

Introduction - 1

'Eating is one of the four purposes of life... what the other three are, no one has ever known' (Chinese proverb)

Food is a determining factor in our happiness! Yes, you got it right; there is a deep connection between the food we eat and our joy.  

Have you never considered it?  Does it seem strange and exaggerated to you?  Try to reflect on the fact that food does not only nourish our body but also our mind, our heart, and dare I say even our soul. It contributes to our health in a broad sense.

Food 'builds' us. Every day, it feeds every single cell of our body with chemical components, energy, and emotions. It mirrors our physical state, our thoughts, and our state of mind. 

We can say that we really are what we eat and that, on the other hand, we eat exactly what we are in a continuous circle of energy exchange and flow.

We don't eat freshly picked strawberries or excellent salmon from the Norwegian seas; we don't drink Bourgogne wine or a hearty, oil-black Guinness. 

In reality, we eat and drink happiness or sadness, joy or sorrow. It is only up to us to choose what we want to eat and, consequently, what we desire to be.

Today, in the age of the food revolution, dominated by supermarkets and diets, we are far from this awareness; we have lost touch with the history of food and our history. 

It is essential to resume this dialogue, return to nourishing all levels of our being, and discover that food makes us happy. This is the path I want to take with you. 

Let us begin by imagining the sensation of touching an apple from the tree in our grandfather's vegetable garden, where we played as children, still wet from the morning dew that makes our hands moist, of sliding our fingertips over its perfect roundness, of delicately and lovingly pulling it away, perceiving its resistance to "die", to leave the branch that jingles and tinkles towards us. To squeeze it while its volume fills our hand like a luxuriant breast, to bring it gently to our mouth, already imagining the sense of freshness that that sweet bite will give us on our lips, then sliding over our gums, that turgid feeling of cleanliness on our teeth and the relief that will come over our heart, thinking that our grandfather himself had planted it with so much love and that it still lives in a certain way inside that apple.  And what a relief it will be for our souls: that apple contains, in its smallness, a reflection of the energy that animates and moves the entire universe with which we now feel in harmony.

What wonder and poetry in this simple encounter with a freshly picked apple!

It cannot be denied that food has something 'sacred' about it. Nevertheless, in recent decades, we have become accustomed to considering it as something measured in proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins... that mechanically meet our average needs, based on established medical statistics concerning standard elements such as age, sex, physical activity...  Chemical substances that once ingested 'inexorably' turn into calories, a real bogeyman for our scales. Very often, our expertise on food is limited to an uncritical knowledge of calorie tables.

Paradoxically, nobody really takes care of nutritional education in our society. The family only takes care of it if there is a particular culture within it (dictated by personal interest or experience); otherwise, it merely perpetuates acquired traditions. The school does not deal with it except for a few hours of superficial theory. 

Yet, it is a major, far-reaching topic. It is a fundamental issue that affects us as individuals and as a society and concerns the quality of our lives, present and future.

It is no coincidence that many different voices with the most diverse and fanciful theories and diets are proliferating, scrambling to attract the attention of the many needy, very often with the primary purpose of doing business and not nourishing or protecting human health.

Our eating habits have been profoundly transformed. We have become accustomed to consuming food in the fast food restaurant on duty, standing in a hurry, with our thoughts racing to the next thing we have to do once we have finished the food or even at the very moment we are eating we are already doing it, wholly alienated from the food itself.

It seems that food is sometimes not even worthy of a glance, of a listen... that its sacredness and the sacredness of the moment in which, by consuming food, we finally dedicate ourselves and our loved ones to ourselves.

We have come to consume it quickly, even within the walls of our homes, close to our loved ones, but in silence, with the television on loudly, without a word of appreciation for those 'creations' that someone has made with commitment, chewing fast, wanting to finish quickly and get up as soon as possible from the table to go and do something else.

How could we have forgotten that food is so full of messages to give and meanings to celebrate that it is, by nature, the seal of every actual social moment in all countries and cultures of the world?

How could we disengage ourselves from a path that has always been part of us, whereby food is our 'inseparable friend' from the earliest years of our lives and accompanies us relentlessly and with great patience in all the essential steps of our existential journey? 

The umbilical cord is the first 'catering' that nourishes us with matter and affection. Mother's milk is the first profound contact with the outside world and the true consolation after the trauma of childbirth, which immediately stimulates the development of different sensory domains (from sight to touch, from smell to taste) and initiates us in a broad sense into our knowledge of the world and life.

Food continues to accompany our physical and psychological growth about the completeness of the meal that our mother prepares for us in the evening, the wholesomeness of the products she chooses with care, the dishes where she combines them with wisdom and balance, the relationship between food and the satisfaction of our anxieties as a child to which we responded with a nice spoonful of Nutella.

Food becomes play and the manipulation of organic substances; it is the gruel that we squash on the table, it is the tomato that we throw at our older brother when he bothers us, it is the first shapeless pancake that we prepare with our mother, playing little chef, it is the carrot that we use as the nose for our snowman. It is symbolism and projection of our childhood images, our desire to play, dream and discover.

Food is knowledge of the outside world in its natural aspects, the fruit and vegetables in the fields, the animals, the fish in the sea... a large part of everything we see around us is or can become food in a dynamic evolutionary relationship, within the beautiful ecosystem that is our planet.

Food is culture; food traditions are one of the strongest elements of identification of any people; it is a symbol and accompanies festivals, anniversaries and rituals. The Christmas capon or the Easter cake are fundamental elements of celebrating those moments. Food is what, more than anything else, creates a strong sense of belonging with one's environment, with its history and socio-cultural journey understood in a broad sense.

Food is an awareness of abundance and scarcity: all children need to eat to grow, but in the world, some children waste away, and others do not even have the chance to eat.

Food is pleasure and joy; it always accompanies moments of welcome celebration. We eat on birthdays, anniversaries, baptisms, and weddings. Food is energy; it precedes and prepares other actions of man: we cannot work well, run well, or even sleep well if we have not eaten well.

Food is history: how beautiful and vivid are the memories of eating blueberry jam by the spoonful, taking the Bacio Perugina from the ceramic jar hidden in the drawer in the hall, eating cherries from the neighbour's tree, dining with cousins at the children's table at Christmas lunch or going to the greengrocer's to ask him to give us an apricot.  Or when we would go into the woods with Dad to look for mushrooms or chestnuts. What a wealth of life, emotions and memories around food!

Food is 'mother'; it nourishes us, supports us, 'educates' us, and lays the foundations of an immediate, healthy and conscious relationship with oneself, with food, with the surrounding environment near and far (in its natural and social aspects) that represents a fundamental element of the psychophysical and social balance of an adult individual.

Food is pampering; it is self-care and self-esteem. When we sit down in front of a hot chocolate with cream or slice a pata negra ham and place it next to warm bread when we scratch a freshly found white truffle on a plate of steaming tagliatelle, we take care with food, as a privileged instrument, not only of our body but also of our emotions and above all of our soul, we caress it with a tenderness made of shapes, colours, smells, taste, traditions, memories... of everything.

Food is love; it is gift and understanding; it is conviviality and gratitude; it is erotic play and sex appeal; food is an aphrodisiac and precedes, accompanies and follows the sexual relationship; food is taste and symbol that is linked to the exchange of love.

Food is... Life!

 FOOD IS MY CLOSEST FRIEND - 8

 "I cannot stand those who do not take food seriously.'' (Oscar Wilde)

It becomes clear how food is our closest friend and accompanies us in every significant moment of our lives. We constantly need it; we cannot do without it. If we miss it, we feel bad, but we are aware of its importance.

When it comes, it doesn't just fill our stomachs; it soothes us and allows us to think, rest, and dream: but what friend has this power? 

He can make us suffer for his absence and rejoice for his presence; we are bound with him in a double bond. 

It is the first profound contact with the outside world; breast milk immediately becomes nourishment, warmth, affection and love. 

Its generosity is confirmed when it turns from milk into soft, tasty gruel.  How nice it is to put your hands in, to let the gruel pour out of your mouth and drip it over the bib with that sense of abundance that tastes so much like joy. We become chubbier, and he, too, grows with us, becomes firmer, and is more consistent. From food alone, he also becomes play.

Then comes pasta with tomato sauce, rice supplì, meatballs, yoghurt muffins and even crepes with strawberry jam. 

The proposals of a mother who loves cooking contain all the colours, tastes, and smells a child can imagine- a true wonder for the senses. Our friend grows and develops his personality, takes on different shapes and colours, forges and mixes in the most imaginative and original combinations, aiming to make us happy and raise us healthy.

It changes its appearance with the seasons to delight us with new experiences and new wonders.

And when you start celebrating, he is always the first next to you, never missing, to make the best of it, to surprise and amaze: giant birthday cakes, communion lunches, confirmations and weddings, festivals and fairs, there is no party without him.

And when you start travelling, it becomes your loyal travelling companion, introducing you to new worlds and new cultures that it interprets in the first person, to which it gives voice, with its new and fascinating aromas and atmospheres. It welcomes you through new rituals and new faces with different features and languages; it lets you and lets you savour it, letting you enter gently, with pleasure, into a new context, different but wanting to be welcoming, accompanying you in your discovery.

And when you get to know it well, for many years now, and you start to become expert and refined, it too evolves with you; you can find it in new, increasingly gourmet and creative combinations, the result of unique processes thanks to the skilful hands of those who know how to treat it, but it is always he who inspires... he wants to continue to give and give you the best, he wants to make you discover the special suggestions that expertise can bring out. 

And if you love it, like your best friend, it lets you get to know it thoroughly, penetrate it, let you manipulate it, put itself at your service, let you learn the art of cooking and eating.

And even when you are ill, he does not abandon you; he feels you, he lightens and simplifies to help you cleanse your organism, or he concentrates his knowledge and his energies to transmit to you the extra vitality you need for healing.

But such a friend who understands you, follows you, adapts, moulds himself on you, and amazes you- but where do you find him?

 TO EACH HIS OWN FOOD - 10

 'Life is too short to drink mediocre wines' (Johann W. von Goethe)

Food is one of the most thought about and debated aspects. The word Food is one of the most clicked-on topics on the net. It is one of the most talked about topics in magazines, blogs, and TV programmes and increasingly also in everyday conversation.

We talk about what we love to eat, what is good for us and what is bad for us, about the latest restaurant we have discovered, about the diet we are experimenting with and how much panettone we ate at Christmas, which dramatically turned into weight. 

There are a thousand theories about food- everyone has their own- a thousand more or less official schools of thought, a thousand diets, and every day, new ones are created somewhere in the world.

Every day, some 'specialist', researcher, celebrity chef, or science or food magazine tells us what is right to eat to be healthy and fit or describes the latest invention related to food.

There are specific diets for diabetes and hypertension, for obesity or lack of appetite, those based on single foods and those on cellular nutrition. 

In this wealth of proposals and information, each of us creates their own beliefs on which to base our food model. One only has to change one's angle of vision, point of view or course of study, personal experience, family background, and economic and social status to see significant variability, even with respect to the idea and value attributed to food.

Each of us is a 'food microcosm' with its own 'theoretical and experiential background'.

It often happens that in one part of the world, people have discovered that food is the secret to happiness while in that prestigious university, they have discovered exactly the opposite. 

It should be said that since every individual is unique and unrepeatable, it inevitably goes hand in hand with unique and unrepeatable food in terms of traditions, beliefs, and habits.

And this wealth of gastro-food culture is built up piece by piece, brick by brick, starting with grandmother's stories and then moving on to mum's, to paediatrician's and nutritionist's advice, to aunt's and neighbour's, to chef friend's discoveries and those reported on the news or in the specialist magazine of the day.

And so the link is created between thought and action, between theory and one's own experience, from which first the attitude and then the eating habit, one of the most essential elements of identification, balance and stability in everyday life, starts and consolidates.

Therefore, one can say 'to each his own food' in the sense that nothing is more personal than the unique and very different tastes and eating habits of others.

Food is a fundamental element of the relationship between man and the environment. In such a rich context, in this encounter between the complexity and wonder of food on the one hand and man on the other, there can be no other rule than for each man to identify his own unique rule.

Let everyone learn to combine their knowledge, beliefs, and, above all, their experiments and experiences in the best and most personal way, learning to use food as a source of nourishment, health, and well-being at the same time.

Food thus becomes a mirror of every man and his experience, and every man is a mirror of the food he uses. Food becomes the starting point for improving one's condition, for evolving and discovering, but also, at the same time, the point of arrival, albeit a dynamic one, for achieving harmony and balance.

In other words, " to each his own food " means nothing more than to each his own life, the one that he dreams of, desires, and can truly realise. 

THE FOOD REVOLUTION -13

 'When the last tree is felled and the last river poisoned and the last fish caught, we will realise that we cannot eat money' (Indian proverb)

Precisely because the food we eat is the fruit of our life journey and, at the same time, a mirror of who we are, it doesn't seem easy to imagine that there can be foods and diets that are good for everyone and even in all parts of the world. 

It is like imagining humans as machines, where diesel or petrol will fit all, as they are designed with an engine that works exactly the same.

It is a pity that every man is exactly different, unique, and unrepeatable. He has emotions and needs, which are generally the same (everyone has to eat), but if you get into the details, they are actually all profoundly different.

In millennia of human evolution, food, perhaps more than anything else, has marked the differences between different areas of the world, between different cultures, between different local socio-economic systems, between other families, and between different individuals.

Despite this, it is one of the areas where change has been strongest and fastest, where massification and homogenisation has had the most noticeable effect, where the ability to control and manage reality by small groups has yielded its most interesting results and made them available in real time to a large number of people.

The food industry has wanted to and has been able to overthrow the basic natural elements, to annul the difference between each individual, to 'corrupt' their uniqueness to say that we are all 'the same' and that we can all adopt the same eating habits anywhere in the world regardless of our culture, traditions, climatic conditions, to all become part of a vast global market. 

This massive cultural and economic operation has had a result that only 50-60 years ago was difficult even to imagine. 

This revolution wisely used two great actors, strong and endowed with charm, efficiency and the great gift of novelty: the supermarket and diets.

With the supermarket, the global industry has created a special emphasis on food: it has created a veritable 'temple of food', a mythical and fantastic place that has gradually replaced not only traditional shops but also city squares and, dare I say it, even churches. It is no coincidence that most of the most important contemporary architectural works are shopping malls; it is what we leave to posterity. 

In its more evolved versions, it brings together in the same place all the elements that were previously part, together with food, of a complex and articulated system of actions and relationships.

Its strength lies in representing not only an innovative synthesis of business, organisational, and logistical systems but also communication and, above all, a true lifestyle, to which consumption is obviously linked.

The world's population is increasing and every day new people demand food needs change and become more sophisticated, interest in different and unique foods grows, travel leads us to discover exotic products that we then want to find on our table. This opens the door to creating new food models to be answered by continuously creating new foods demanded by an increasing number of consumers.

It is becoming necessary to adapt production and distribution systems capable of producing ever more manipulated food, easy to reproduce on a large scale, and preservable so that it can be easily distributed to ever-larger markets, fast to consume and with ever higher profit margins. It is an exceptional business, a big, big market that is constantly growing in quantity and quality. 

They are foods designed to fill supermarket counters, with equal if not greater attention to form than substance, more to packaging than nutritional value, to extrinsic rather than intrinsic quality. They are well presented and attractive to choose from; they represent reassuring brands and are destined to fill our fridges and pantries easily.

They are designed to feed the kitchens of internationally renowned fast food formats, which can develop 10-figure turnovers with the same products and recipes in totally different economic and cultural contexts.

The secrets of this rapid victory, this planetary conquest, and this food globalisation are marketing and communication. Tools linked to knowledge, to the ability to understand and influence.

Through the media and increasingly the more capillary and penetrating social media, foods that often are not at all are proposed to us as quality products: animals raised in batteries with the help of hormones, products cultivated with the use of pesticides and carcinogenic fertilisers, processed to the point of losing all nutritional elements, with the addition of aggressive components, colourings and preservatives, sometimes subjected to irradiation and preservation processes that greatly alter their characteristics.

They are presented to us as excellences, as bearers of exceptional tastes and even as healthy elements, associating them, in the advertisements, with positive aspects in the collective imagination (nature, family, beauty) to stimulate their purchase: messages that only create, thanks to the protection of solid and reassuring brands, a lot of confusion among consumers who, subjected to different stimuli, find it challenging to choose and clearly choose in the end the easiest way, the one within reach and always generous with special offers every week. 

The large-scale distribution model hides, in fact, a paradox. While on the one hand, it guarantees you an extensive choice, opens up the frontiers of the possible, large spaces of freedom, promises you the possibility of knowledge and experimentation, and conceals the pitfall of a diametrically opposite result.

The great possibility of choice, the quantity of foods present, sometimes foreign to our tradition, disorientates and pushes us always to buy the same limited things repetitively, the foods are many but in reality for the most part very similar, all coming from the same production system, processed and impoverished, with little nutritional value. The visual abundance of counters and trolleys is transformed into a lack of nutrients, into food difficulties and anomalies.

This does not only concern physical nourishment but also the psychological and social nourishment typical of traditional distribution systems, which today have been replaced by a wonderful welcome that leaves one feeling empty inside when the trolley is full. The system of fast and compulsive shopping, the silent queue at the checkout, the rush out to the car and then home, the haphazard filling of the refrigerator... the feeling is one of alienation in the act of shopping.

It is a path that, while giving the perception of ease and security, does not seem to give us the sense of inner fulfilment that visiting the old shops used to give us. There there was a taking care of oneself, the renewal of a ritual, which the supermarket has tried to replace without succeeding.

And the alienation continues in the act of consumption, where often, due to lack of time and culture, one pulls from the refrigerator and eats quite casually. 

The difficulties, physical and psychological, that such a new style inevitably brings open up the space for a new need to turn into a trend and from a trend into business.

Dietary confusion generates imbalances to which we respond with a range of genuinely imaginative diets that go so far as to propose, in some cases, eating only one product.

It is no coincidence that multinational companies with in-house medical laboratories, teams of researchers and nutritionists, and externally supported by prestigious universities and testimonials of excellence, right up to a few Nobel Prize winners, are increasingly selling them in pharmacies to consecrate them as 'official' health prevention and care tools. 

Diet has something reassuringly sophisticated about it: you take care of yourself differently and specially thanks to a group of experts who guarantee you the protection of science and who never leave you alone. Because alone you have failed, you have failed to keep fit, you have failed to protect your health, you experience deep frustration and you are looking for solutions.

A large number of people in difficulty are easy prey to those who promise easy and affordable solutions, where it is not us who take charge of our health, but they tell us what to do, because they have discovered a miraculous formula, valid for everyone but at the same time 'designed just for you' absolutely personalised because 'you are unique and important'.

There is no doubt that diets, especially the 'more advanced' ones, start from assumptions and sensible analysis of man, from a less mechanical and more holistic vision, from a scientific research base, but then contradict themselves on the final recipe, on the miraculous proposal, on the foods proposed, almost always oriented to create addiction and not health.

From our point of view, we often don't even know what those particular foods are made of, or we don't understand why the proposed combinations are made, and we don't know; that's the company's 'secret', but the testimonials paid by the company and maybe even better our friend told us that she had great results, that she feels great, and that's what counts.

Often, these are diets based on preserved foods, completely unbalanced and a source of great stress for the body, which only lengthen the list of sick, and at this point, more discouraged people, who may have reached 3-4 different diets

Almost always, behind the declared slogan of health hides the overriding and poorly concealed mirage of weight loss, which is the scourge of our times: obese people or those who feel obese or are afraid of becoming obese are the first enthusiastic users of diets that propagate miraculous and high-speed effects for everyone.

 It is clear that if we do not eat or eat foods lacking in nutrients, the 'miracle' of losing 5 kg in 10 days happens, but at what price?  How will we feel after one month?  How will we be after six months?  If a corresponding path of inner growth does not accompany the fast outer path?

Have we forgotten that each of us reacts physically and psychologically differently, and that the organism has its own rules and times?

The diet offers us the 'magic formula' through a standardised but adaptable product of different individuals based on the intersection of data and values, easy to sell to as many consumers as possible with scalable and growing profits. The diet treats humans as an undifferentiated mass capable of absorbing generic principles and applying them slavishly, with the promise of astounding results achieved in a short time.

The food revolution, this new way of 'global food management', does not stop at the impact on one's health but goes much further, impacting also the balance of our environment.

Local socioeconomic systems that have always been found in the model of food production and distribution, a fundamental, daily point of reference, do not stand comparison.  Shopping at the farmer's and visiting the small neighbourhood shop were not only an excellent method of caring for and sustaining one's health but also methods of giving economic sustenance to the local community and solidity to a set of micro-relationships between people, which strengthened the sense of belonging.

The supermarket, with its gleaming metal counters, brightly lit by neon bulbs, full of colourful, thematically arranged and above all abundant products, has an undeniable appeal. Marketing knows that one of man's problems is the sense of scarcity, the fear of being 'without'. The supermarket promises absolute and permanent abundance, endless products and all in one place. It is no coincidence that it takes care to have the counters always full, and how sad it is to see a supermarket with counters where there is a shortage of products, you want to get out immediately!

At the supermarket, you can save the time you no longer have to dedicate to yourself, you can hurry up and improve your life, and you can save your money thanks to economies of scale: it's a dream that can easily be worth the closure of an entire historic centre's fabric of shops!

The tour of the small shops, talking to the owner who listens to you, making a joke with your neighbour, choosing the fruit you like best, perhaps tasting it, the one that reminds you of when you were a child and picked it from the tree near your home, which your father had planted and carefully grown. This broader 'nourishment' of the person, which had a strong psycho-social value, and a substantial impact on the 'happiness' of the individual, is unfortunately severely compromised. 

You can go armed with trolleys with increasingly attractive designs (and trolleys for children so that they are distracted and entertained and do not limit their parents' shopping volume and immediately perceive it as 'familiar' and start to love the place) and conquer the food.  Your eyes are filled, and consequently, so is your trolley.

Woe betide if you go out with an empty trolley - is that all you bought? Because the great thing about the supermarket is that there are lots of things in the trolley you don't need. You have the licence, for once, to go beyond 'the ordinary', to shout 'drop dead' and buy unnecessary and redundant things, to 'treat yourself to a possible luxury'. Too bad that all this 'good stuff', if you don't eat it quickly, spoils, expires quickly, is easily perishable and has a good chance of sadly going to fill the rubbish cans.

Hostesses in miniskirts and well-groomed, smiling operators are always offering you new things, whole salami, sliced, hollowed-out and oversized, from all regions or from abroad, ready-made and already cooked food: how wonderful!

The supermarket does not only offer you food but also a lot more, a series of 'services'. There are those who prepare, those who cook for you, those who bring the food to your home. You don't have to think about 'learning the art and putting it aside', about knowing the food, where it comes from and how it is in season, about how to choose, process and cook it, there is someone to do it all for you! Besides, you no longer have the time!

And everything is available at all times, away from the excitement of tasting a firstling: round and all the same tomatoes, giant and fluffy strawberries are available 365 days a year!

To make the survival of local production and distribution systems even more difficult, there is also the deliberate proliferation of sophisticated food hygiene regulations. Defined with incomprehensible acronyms, suggested and written by large-scale distribution to facilitate its bursting advance, they have 'outlawed' and put traditional producers and distributors out of business, unable to make the necessary investments to adapt to the new wave of attention to health!  Traditionally made, quality and great-tasting products, such as Fossa cheese, are no longer compliant, are 'dangerous' and therefore not worthy of occupying their place in the glittering counters occupied only by 'healthy and certified' foods.

The result of this victorious offensive is that territories rich in not only food distribution points, but also social reference points, have become like a desert, with a large, glowing cathedral in the middle. 

The largest surviving producers, having to produce as 'demanded by the market', beautiful things to look at, swollen and colourful fruit, have had to change their production methods, increase the use of chemicals and exert increased pressure on soils and pollution factors to keep up and not be cut off, clearly paid with lower and lower prices for the benefit of distribution.

And it doesn't end there, the agri-food industry has thought, since it has made a desert around it; to not leave us alone and to suggest a new model of social life and leisure enjoyment, the supermarket, which has become Hyper and Mall, has easily replaced the same cathedrals of yesteryear: the supermarket is a new temple where a new 'religion' can be celebrated!

Even town centre squares emptied of shops and activities, of traditional markets, have been easily replaced with the 'courtyards' (not a casual name that refers to noble places and feelings, the inspiring elevation of one's condition) of supermarkets that welcome us with their restaurants and fast food outlets, mostly belonging to international groups that use products that are certainly not local and seasonal and that do not reinvest their considerable profits in the area, creating employment, but mostly precarious. 

Not only food and services but also entertainment and sociability. Supermarkets become places of meeting and 'cult', of use of leisure time piloted and clearly oriented towards consumption, which extends to every day of the week, indeed at the weekend (traditionally, in our culture a time of rest and attention to family or self) it reaches its peak in terms of work and turnover: there is no time to rest, you have to sell, buy, consume. A visit to the supermarket has become the favourite 'pastime' of many at the weekend; before, people used to stroll along the main street in the city centre, today they stroll through the malls of shopping centres.

"Sacred and profane' once again go hand in hand in what can be described as a beautiful 'fun fair', not surprisingly in the collective mind a strong attraction in that it is exceptional and rare. 

There is no denying that this new model is partly based on sensible rationalisation and management concepts, it is convenient and offers useful services, it is competitively priced and has great choice, and I use it as do most of us. 

It is a great business model and a source of secure profits for those who run it. Still, it is also clear how it has created numerous paradoxes, disrupted and replaced a centuries-old system of food, food management and procurement that had a lot to do with one's life, one's landmarks, one's happiness.     

THE PARADOXES OF FOOD - 23

  'The dish of the day is fine as long as you know which day it was prepared' (Pierre Dac)

The food revolution that has taken place and the increase in the use of manipulated and impoverished products that results from it is the source of several paradoxes, the first of which, unfortunately, is the increase in the number of people who suffer, attend doctors and hospitals with problems of all kinds, linked to intolerances, critical food issues, deficiencies that the organism cannot handle, increasingly bombarded by elements that have little to do with nutrition. 

The reassuring view that it is 'important to eat everything', once the cornerstone of the old peasant culture (where, as there were few economic resources and therefore shortages, one had to painfully give up certain things that were desired because they were rarer and more expensive) has been taken up and successfully used with a completely different meaning and purpose.

Here, the paradox is that the 'eating of everything', which in the old days consisted of the local products available in limited quantities and was reduced to a few essential components, has become the symbol in the negative of what one no longer wants to live on. There must be no more scarcity; nothing must be lacking, and there must be abundance. The 'poor' products that were the symbol of scarcity have been largely eliminated, replaced by a very wide range of available products, with first and foremost those products that were once rarer, such as meat and fish, as a natural need for compensation. 

With economic growth, the latter became the symbol of affluence, what could not be had and then became available, a kind of social status codifying the end of misery, the symbol of the consecration of a new era, membership of a certain social class.

Yet the evolution of the human body has been accompanied by local food, composed of grains, vegetables and pulses in most areas of the world. History quickly dismissed it as something outdated, as something obligatory due to scarcity, the 'poor' foods symbolising a 'sacrifice' no longer necessary in a world of affluence.

And so the former basket of just over 15 products has been transformed into a basket of at least 1,500 products that are entirely different from the originals, which used to be fresh and local and are now preserved, manipulated, packaged in the most attractive forms, produced by other brands with different variants and from all parts of the world.

The transformation undergone, thanks to cultural evolution, in terms of provenance, quality, and freshness of our shopping bags from the age of scarcity to the age of abundance appears impressive sometimes they do not even seem distantly related, sometimes we struggle to find a product that is similar to those we have eaten for millennia, much of which has little to do with the body's nutritional needs.

 This kind of 'programmed food schizophrenia' is often reinforced by a system of beliefs that each of us has built up about food, frequently forcefully proposed by the food industry, which is now ingrained and has much to do with the psychological and affective sphere and much less to do with the real needs of our bodies. 

The problem arises when the conviction contrasts with an apparent negative impact on health, which we then try to deny in every way, to attribute to something else, not to see because eliminating that food means eliminating a part of our history and our affectivity and so we choose the lesser suffering.

Think of milk, the food that represents par excellence, the link with childhood and maternal love, almost an extension of the breast. It is identified in the collective imagination as the ideal food for children's growth and health, just as mother's milk is in the first weeks of life. 

This image is strongly reinforced by the marketing and communication machine put in place by the dairy industry, which strongly associates it with healthy growth, with images evocative of nourishment and affective security such as the family environment, pictures of a happy mother and child, the love of the mother for her baby, something incredibly precious. 

It is evident that it is then tough for many to abandon it, to give up this element considered 'vital', absolutely indispensable from a physical and emotional point of view. 

Sometimes, this feeling is associated with a sense of a lack of maternal love that we may not have had as we would have wished, and that milk reminds us of as an element that comes to fill that void, to reward us for the lack we had.

Sometimes it is associated with elements of nostalgia, whereby we had motherly affection but miss it very much, we wanted to stay in those protective arms and never become adults, never face the hardships and sufferings of life. Milk takes us back to those 'golden days' when life was easy and happy! 

That is why, for many adults, even those in their seventies or eighties, milk is indispensable, the cup of milk and biscuits accompanying them from childhood until death.

It is a pity that cow's milk is not mother's milk and that it is very different, that it is the number one food as a cause of allergies and intolerances and that it has now been established even by western medicine that lactose is a major cause of several diseases including cancer.

Another example is meat, a food that, until 60-70 years ago, was consumed by most of the population on average once a week on feast days.

With the advent of affluence, meat became its primary symbol. The absence of beef harkens back to times perceived as times of misery and hardship, as does its abundance to the new level of affluence conquered. One cannot renounce meat just as one cannot renounce wealth, so it becomes natural that meat becomes a 'noble protein' that must be present in the diet and that many families prepare meat on their table once or even twice a day.

It is a pity that meat is a dead food (unlike other foods that are still alive at the moment we eat them and therefore also intuitively bring another type of energy to the body) that tends to rot in a very short time and that the production system due to the way the animals are reared, the food given to them combined with a whole set of chemical components aimed at fattening them up and at the same time keeping them healthy, is certainly not that of the farmer who reared chicken in the farmyard. 

That was the meat we ate once a week at feast time, which remains so strong in our imagination, whereas today, the meat we consume is very different.

By grafting itself onto a well-established historical, cultural and psychological path, retaining the same elements present in the collective imagination but giving them new form, the food industry managed to achieve a miraculous metamorphosis in a 'natural' way. To transform an age-old nutritional model quickly, to realise that the advent of post-war economic prosperity brought the possibility of going far beyond local production and distribution systems to imagine an enormous global market to be attacked with a new production and distribution model.

I do not deny that I am somewhat fascinated by the intuition of these men who, animated by an entrepreneurial spirit, the prospect of profits and why not, perhaps, also the desire to achieve an easier life for all, more abundant, a different and better world (at least some of them) imagined this great dream, this remarkable transformation, and managed in a very short time to put it into action.

But the most significant thing is the depth of the cultural transformation, which started from further afield and went far beyond food.

 Think of the old farmers, by birth and definition, the first to be tied to the rhythms of nature and a traditional method of production, who came to 'forget' their origins and convert to the easy world of mass distribution.

It is no paradox to see old men with canes struggling to push trolleys full of colourful foodstuffs and discover in their homes mammoth freezers full of frozen meat.

And it is, after all, easy to see why. It is precisely they, who have suffered war and hunger, who feel gratified, especially psychologically, by those full trolleys and freezers and how this makes them feel safe and secure, now more than ever at their venerable age, against those threats they could no longer withstand.  

It is precisely on these feelings that business was founded, on these fears, on these just and natural desires for well-being and abundance, that it was easy to trigger a sudden revolution that relied not only on the material and psychological elements mentioned above but also on another important 'aesthetic' element, the sense of modernity. Modernity and progress are the permanent dreams of humanity; for many, they embody, by definition, the idea of a better life.

New and well-packaged foods are modern foods; they are a sign of growth. The world must move forward, evolve, and even food becomes 'technological'.

Abundance and modernity together promise a better life. A better life is also an easier life, freed from certain burdens that made it genuinely complex, a healthier life as well (and undoubtedly a varied diet of nutritious foods is an element of health and prosperity for the organism) that goes hand in hand with a rich diet that must contain all (or at least as much as possible) of the new products of the agri-food industry. 

The essential problem that has 'plagued' mankind has been (and unfortunately still is for many) that of procuring food in a context of scarcity. The supermarket has come to say that this is definitely outdated.

This promise of emancipation provokes by reaction, a more profound revolution, a revolution related to worldview and lifestyle and, above all, to the vision of oneself and one's well-being:

from taking direct responsibility for priority functions to substantial delegation. The promise is that we can abandon certain commitments and certain functions and delegate them to others, even at the cost of losing the core of our essential autonomy.

Commitment, choice, research, and growth are exhausting and represent the characteristics of the citizen; we are less and less citizens and more and more consumers without often realising it. 

Here is the paradox of emancipation that is not realised because, in reality, we have become more fragile and dependent on a system that wants to manage not only the food we eat but our health and, actually, our very lives.

It does not matter whether one eats or does not eat meat, or whether one drinks or does not drink milk, first of all, because food, as stated, is and must, in any case, be the source of a very personal choice of the individual, a mirror of his or her needs, not only physical but also, emotional and spiritual. 

What is important, however, is the awareness one acquires based on transparency, knowledge of things, the study of the history of food and its contribution to human evolution, and the understanding of how we function and our needs. This allows us to have an open mind, to come out of ignorance, to free ourselves from the messages of marketing and communication, as well as from habits acquired from the outside, from the limitations and nostalgia of experience, to be able to choose and also to be able to understand what is in front of us and what impact it has on us: this is our right.

From this point of view, food is inevitably a cultural conquest; it is a relationship, like many others, linked to curiosity, the desire to know and learn that activates a path of experimentation, which breaks the tunnel of suffering. Through food, we open ourselves to the new; we question ourselves and experiment with the ways of the possible to understand and permanently dynamically adjust our eating patterns.

This democratic process of growth and knowledge regarding food is a junction that many cannot access; there is so much information and proposal that they are confused and suffer without knowing why.

And in suffering, another paradox occurs. The wonder of the organism is that, when subjected to the aggression of essentially foreign substances, it begins a process of adaptation to the new conditions to try to keep itself healthy.

How many times do we hear: 'I have been eating this food every day for 20 years and I have never had a problem', or 'She has always eaten like this and lived to be 100 years old!

The organism adapts as far as it can. The lack of symptoms does not mean that there is not within it a process of suffering, deterioration of the immune system, or progressive loss of health that manifests itself in all its evidence, sometimes when it is too late.

The belief system that determines that that food, that lifestyle is OK, pushes in every way for it to be so, for the body to accept it willy-nilly, the mind is stronger.

The mind does not question it until the day there is a breakdown, and the lack of natural, healthy food leads to illness, if not death. And then the above phrases become 'he was so well, for 20 years he didn't have a problem and then, inexplicably...' he is no more. But it is natural that an organism that for years defends itself, adapts, at a certain point, gives up and gives in sometimes without remedy, having now spent all it could consume.

This path of substantial suffering has experienced the paradox of finding much of the medical system, out of complacency, interest or ignorance, as its first ally.

 It is easy to imagine the power wielded until the advent of the Internet (which has also given individuals the opportunity to quickly obtain information directly) by the advice of the family doctor or, even more so, the specialist, the only official, accredited and, consequently, credible sources on health matters.

The natural counterbalance to the impact of manipulated food has become the pill, the medicine that solves everything. "Doctor I have a stomach ache, maybe it's because I've eaten so many dry sausages in the last few days, should I stop?"  "Don't worry, don't exaggerate but don't take away this pleasure. When you feel the burning take this Maalox tablet and it will pass. Then you can continue to enjoy the pleasure of good food.  

In this cultural context, characterised by the 'myth of the pill', the link between the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry, in a huge overall business, is consolidated to the detriment of the health. Therefore the happiness of individuals: the transition from supermarket 'consumer' to hospital system 'user' is sadly fluid.

A communication and management system is created that links the various components and proposes a 'coherent' path, which, for those who have not developed their own food culture, their own personal vision, risks being almost a forced path.

After all, food and medicine are increasingly being lumped together in a one-sided vision where mechanical biochemical reactions are what counts.

I eat food and have an effect; I take a medicine and have an effect.

In a culture where we have to eat everything, where our nutrition is regulated and decided by the outside world, and all we have to do is adapt to the wonderment presented to our eyes, even the medical part is regulated by the outside world, we don't have to understand what we have and prevent its causes, it's not worth it, we take a pill and everything is solved, and if it happens again, a new pill or maybe even two, so that bad symptom is fixed for the holidays.

Too bad that that symptom is a cry of despair that our body (and sometimes not only our body but also our mind, our heart) throws at us through food to say enough first of food and then of medicine.

Until recently, to say that some foods were bad for you, or even more so that some foods, on the contrary, could cure and improve your health, was considered fanciful, to say the least. How often have I heard the fateful phrase: 'If it is a mild thing, yes, you can prevent it or use other treatments, but if it is a serious thing, you can only cure it with medicine'?

Only recently has medicine begun to speak out (albeit in moderation and because it is driven by the new and growing vegan and natural food lobbies) clearly about the adverse effects of food on health (until a few years ago, deliberately concealed by the official health care systems in 'collaboration' with the manufacturers' lobbies), something that was previously the preserve of isolated and often opposed think tanks such as macrobiotics and vegetarians. 

Today, there is a very important medical strand that has embraced this new vision and sees prevention, attention to lifestyle, personal care as an act of responsibility, as the new frontier of health.

Another paradox evident to our eyes is that even medical discoveries about the negative impact of certain foods on human health (those that are disclosed next to many that are deliberately concealed) have the effect of spurring the food industry into new business and turning a potential problem into a new, more refined and targeted market. 

It is precisely when we move from the individual to the group, to the mass, to the 'numbers' that everything becomes a business: those who sold steaks yesterday (and still sell them today) and mocked vegetarians (still too few and not very visible) now produce alternative foods for vegans (many and visible).

Many of us, previously isolated voices, are now pursuing our own path to food and health, trying to support and reactivate small local productions and the social fabric that accompanies them, focusing on quality. These sentiments have also turned into strong trends towards a return to healthy living, starting with health, with the vegetarian movement and then the vegan movement on the rise, as well as the strong return to organic and 'historical' non-manipulated foods.  

Important changes, the result of a new consciousness, with some risk of instrumentalisation when the movement, the group, becomes more important than the person, and here too comes the need and risk to adapt and the fear of being cut off.

The labels provoke a further paradox in a world strangely inclined to intolerance (contrary to what the development of civilisation would have led one to imagine), the affirmation of groups and trends that, all the more so if they are visible and relevant, are perceived not as an opportunity for growth for all but as a threat to the established order, an intransigent 'extravagance'. It is enough to see, just to give an example, how today vegans are accused of intransigence because they choose the food they want to eat, by those who would like with all the more intransigence (if we consider that they claim to decide on the health of others) that they remain within the status quo or at least manifest their choices with more moderation, eating at least a little and at least occasionally the food of 'normal people' that everyone eats.

We do not actually need to identify ourselves as vegetarians, vegans or macrobiotics; we do not need a philosophical and cultural 'shield', a membership to assert our right to be and eat as we want, as individuals beyond adherence to trends and movements.

It is rightly claimed in many quarters that man's life span has lengthened and that this has also depended on food. It is undoubtedly true that shortages in the past led to early mortality. The scarcity of food and its incompleteness was one of the causes, combined with inadequate sanitary conditions, work involving high physical exertion and wear and tear, unheated dwellings, poor culture on issues of health and prevention from pathogens and pollutants, and so on. The combination of these elements certainly contributed to making life more complex and its expectations much shorter.

The food revolution had in its power a great opportunity: not only to extend our lifespan but to improve our food from our traditions, to keep health at the centre of the journey, thanks to the tools of modernity. The selection of food could be made on the basis of principles that have always characterised man's connection with the earth and, therefore, healthy, natural, unmodified, seasonal food.  

This could have happened and did not happen. The culture of knowledge, the centrality of the individual, and attention to needs were not created. The assumptions and goals were different, and we temporarily lost the battle for health, but we did not lose the war. As seen, there is a gradual but significant return to who we are.

It is important to work on inner awareness. It is important that each person chooses what they are and translates this through what they eat: 'You eat what you are, you are what you eat. ' 

In a family (perhaps with some organisational problems in the kitchen), vegetarians and carnivores, vegans and egg-and-cheese enthusiasts, fathers and sons can coexist serenely, each respecting the other's choice and existential, nutritional and health path, all accessible from the suffering that finds its first origin in ignorance.

Today, we have the tools and sources to understand the origin and purpose of the paradoxes surrounding food, to decide whether to suffer or not to suffer, and to decide which side we want to be on.

GO BACK TO LOVING YOURSELF -37

 

 "Marry someone who can cook. Love passes, but hunger does not. (Anonymous)

Food is an extremely important aspect of an individual's life that should by no means be underestimated. 

It has to do primarily with our freedom and the value of our individual choices.  The question we have to ask ourselves regarding our existence and, therefore, also regarding our food is: Do you want to decide your life, or do you want others to choose it? Do you like to be an actor of your destiny or a spectator?

The question is understood broadly, and the resulting answer clearly defines our approach to life and also clearly defines food as an essential element.

A choice of freedom is clearly more demanding; it involves researching and listening to oneself, getting to know one's body, learning about food and using it in the best way.

On the one hand, it means questioning our own nutritional patterns, those of our childhood and family of origin, reviewing our traditions and changing our habits.

It means knowing how to change and leave behind foods that have accompanied us and with which we have grown up.

It means, on the other hand, the opposite, knowing how to go back to the original models, to rituals full of meaning and love. It means recovering one's own time to go shopping at the farmer's, to cook as mother used to do, churning out food and pampering.  It means recovering in one's own life not only healthy food but the quality of those atmospheres, of that deep emotional nourishment that is so closely linked to the word love.

It means taking our relationship with the primary source of survival and our first contact with the world into our own hands; it means listening, loving, and caring.

This is a substantial step of great significance. Being able to decide to change our relationship with food means being able to master an essential part of us.

It also has a significant symbolic meaning. Changing food is a great starting point for changing everything else. It is a gymnasium, a test, a path of tension that creates self-confidence and shows that we can do it. 

The resulting results give us even more strength and self-confidence to continue to persevere and, why not, to grow.

The pleasure of a healthy life, a balance that positively impacts the whole of existence, is much broader and more important than the immediate pleasure of a chocolate paste. Pasta is something that we can clearly indulge in, but decide when, enjoy it to the fullest, and not be possessed by it without the possibility of resisting.

Short-term pleasure is something immediate and intense but often very fleeting, a strong feeling that frequently leaves a sense of emptiness.

The pleasure of a journey, the sense of growing and improving, is based on the previous steps, the achievements, the brick upon brick that creates a feeling of fullness and continuity.

With respect to food, as concerning all aspects of life, we can choose to have short-term solid pleasures or manage a long-term path of satisfaction; it is the difference between the pursuit of pleasure and self-love, between an orgasm and a family; both give an undeniable but utterly different sense of pleasure. 

It is very much related to who we are. Food is our mirror in the sense that we look for the food closest to our personality, but it is also a mirror in the sense that it reinforces us in who we are; it perpetuates the state related to its energy. If we are strict and balanced, we will tend to eat balanced foods that maintain our state of well-being. If we are unbalanced, we will try to compensate with strong food and our shortcomings in a swing of sweet and salty.

If we love each other, it is natural to think that a healthy mind must be housed by a healthy body and that this involves choices.

If we eat local, seasonal and fresh food, without additives and preservatives, we will have made the most logical and obvious act of love for ourselves and the world around us, a clear step towards greater happiness and sustainability. It is an ideal but also a very concrete choice that we can make today by choosing where to buy, what to eat ... start building for ourselves and others a different life and future.  

This also has a positive impact on another aspect that we are very sensitive to, the grocery bill, because while it is true that healthy and organic food is more expensive nowadays, we need far less of it, compared to preserved and impoverished foods that bloat but do not give a sense of satiety. And then if it is true that we spend so much money on so many sometimes superfluous things, is it not worth investing a few more euros on our health?  On ourselves? On our happiness?

BODY FOOD: LOCAL, FRESH SEASONAL, WHOLEMEAL - 41

 "Let your food be your only medicine.'' (Hippocrates of Cos, Aphorisms, 5th-4th century).

Reading history is very useful and reveals many truths about the present that we have often strangely and paradoxically forgotten. 

It is always useful to go back and read it, not to repeat it slavishly, that would make no sense, but to pick up on the continuity cues that are the basis for all evolution, the red thread that accompanies us and is the foundation of every true revolution.

In a nutshell, if we look at the development of food patterns in different areas of the world, we find (clearly with some exceptions that can always be related to historical or socio-economic elements) up to the post-war period, some simple, banal and extremely easy to understand main elements.

Over the centuries, man has consumed food on the basis of four essential principles: Local food

Food was largely locally sourced. Production and distribution systems were local. You could find the same food either in the fields near your home or in the small grocery shop in the centre of town where you went on Sundays.

It was the food that you had seen since childhood and that had always populated your table. It was something extremely familiar, not only because it was what you had grown up with, but also because it was what you knew precisely all the steps of.

It was the wheat that you saw sown in the fields, that you saw harvested or that you also harvested, that you saw milled at the mill below your house and then transformed into flour that you saw become warm bread freshly baked in the morning at 5 o'clock with that smell that flooded the whole neighbourhood and that your mother took care to pick up and have it on the table for you, with that cherry jam smeared on it.

They were those calves that you went to see being born with your father because it was an event, that you saw running close to their mother in the fields when you cycled past, that you found hanging in the butcher's shop that day, ready to gladden your Sunday meal.

It was those sweets that were always made with strawberries picked under the house every year, that you liked so much and that made the arrival of summer sweeter, or those with walnuts and honey that you always found under the Christmas tree and that made that festive moment so sweet.

It was that wine you already knew in part, having taken a nice bunch of ripe grapes from your neighbour's vineyard and seen passing by on the vats of the trailers, that wine with a sour taste, without the correction of the expert hand of an oenologist.

It was food that never left you because it not only nourished you but accompanied every moment of working life, festivities, and celebrations of a local community.

It was not by chance that it was the food you ate; it was the one you found in your territory that provided the best conditions for development; it was the one whose production was in harmony with the environment; it was the one that gave you the energy you needed to live in your habitat and find harmony.

Today, food comes from all over the world: bananas are eaten at the North Pole and Norwegian salmon in Africa; there is no longer a link with the land, there is no longer a link between food and the environment, between the energy that food conveys and the physical needs of the individual.

The direct connection is lost, and there is a table extremely rich in elements but profoundly disconnected from each other, disconnected from the territory in which they are produced and the territory in which they are consumed.

Whereas before, there was a kind of direct and inevitable contact between food and needs (albeit with all the shortcomings there might have been), and this gave stability and continuity, today there is everything, and this does not help in the direction of nutritional balance

Fresh food

Modern food storage and transportation systems have favoured the explosion of preserved food. When such technologies were unavailable and only a few rudimentary preservation systems existed, food was either fresh or spoiled and therefore inedible. Preservation times were those dictated by nature and known to all, after which it was no longer food for humans; at best, its role was to fatten some animals with a stronger stomach than ours.

Foods used to be few and well-defined, each with its precise nutritional role and intact energy value. Today, the creation of a myriad of preserved foods with the most diverse techniques allows for a great variety but hardly any truly fresh food.

Seasonal food

Food, like human life, is linked to the seasons and what is possible in that particular place and climate. Food is inevitably linked to the energy of the weather and the relative climate that requires different foods from the body in natural harmony.

Each season had discoveries and gastronomic delights, often tied in with local festivals and traditions.

The firstfruits announced the arrival of a new phase, with all that it entailed, preparing the body and spirit for change. It was the one that gave full awareness of time passing and that a new spring, a new summer, had arrived. 

Seasonal food ripened naturally and with plenty of time, tasted as it should.

Today, we have strawberries in the winter and oranges in the summer, cabbage in August and courgettes at Christmas, and many people, especially young people, do not know what the natural season of each food is; they consume it all year round regardless of the weather. It is clear that the body needs different food in January or July and that consuming the same food all year round at +40° or -5°, on the beach in the sun or in front of a lit fireplace, is at least abnormal. 

Whole food

Since the modern agri-food industry was underdeveloped, food was essentially intact, not manipulated except to a small extent, and consumed as nature intended.

This had the great advantage of keeping the nutritional value intact and maximising the supply to our bodies compared to the quantities consumed.

Today, we have, and consume a great deal of food that has been heavily manipulated for preservation or presentation on the market in the best possible form in order to compete on supermarket counters with competing foods, which, in the various processing steps, often lose much of their nutritional value, becoming something different and greatly impoverished. Just think of the difference between wheat grain and double white flour 0.

The paradox is that by eating a lot more and a lot of unnecessary food, one enjoys a lower nutritional intake and perhaps even gains weight. The body receives many elements, perhaps often 'unnecessary' but not enough of those that are necessary and indispensable.

Hence, deficiencies, imbalances, anomalies, and illnesses are often 'inexplicable' because the things in the fridge are many, rich, and well presented but not substantially adequate.

Apart from the fact that man has built, developed and given continuity over the generations with local, fresh, seasonal and wholemeal food, it seems pretty obvious that it is this simple mix of elements that allows us to find harmony between what is outside of us, nature, the seasons and what our needs are and thus nourish our bodies both chemically and energetically, helping us to progress and not fall ill.

These are four principles of balance that can still represent cornerstones even in a modern society where they can be safely applied, indeed improved, in a table that allows a richer and more varied menu but not at the expense of its value and intrinsic quality, which is inevitably linked to its principles of origin.

It is not a question of returning to the courtly era of peasant purity or denying the benefits of a richer and more varied diet for a more harmonious development.

It is about appreciating progress for its benefits in terms of experience, taste, and health, but using it in harmony with the essential principles, in essence, for the well-being of man and not for agribusiness turnovers.

At the end of the day, it is only a question of objectives and a vision of man and his needs that determines the choice and the type of final product. 

Particularly in the wealthy areas of the world, which, not surprisingly, represent the most attractive markets for the agri-food industry, a mechanistic view of the individual involving food and medicine has become increasingly established.

The individual is seen as a machine composed of parts and functioning based on chemistry. 

It is a quantity-based approach, which assumes a standardised individual, much like a car, which needs the right fuel between petrol, diesel, LPG or methane, and maintenance by specialised technicians. There is the tyre specialist, the carburettorist, the mechanic, and the electronics expert. Man is also treated with this approach. If he has pain in his knee, he goes to the orthopaedist and his ear to the ear specialist, specialists who are more and more detail-oriented but without any global vision. 

The general practitioner, once an invaluable health orientator, a connoisseur of his patients in all aspects, both physical and personal and family, and sometimes an attentive psychologist, managed to resolve 70-80% of cases that were not severe and required hospital intervention.  Today, he is reduced to a petty bureaucrat whose main objective is to refer his patients to the various specialists or to fill medical certificates and prescriptions for medicines that sometimes he does not want to prescribe but that his patients require to be reassured, to find a quick solution and to give meaning to that visit to the doctor.

No account is taken of its energy intake or its intrinsic nutritional value. Yet it is pretty obvious, that if the food is whole, seasonal (and therefore ripened with the sun and its energy and not artificially) and fresh, it will have a different potential and intake for our bodies.

Although almost self-evident, this principle has been strongly watered down by different goals, those of profit and not of health, and by different visions, that of the mechanical man and not of the holistic man.

A mechanical, globalised man is ready to eat modern, modified food with enormous business potential. If he is educated, convinced, and incorporated into this worldview, he will educate his children, and the business will run for generations and generations.

The body is an articulated system interconnected on a chemical and energetic level with its environment, where the links and balances are complex and a harmony is linked to coherence. It is no coincidence that in Umbria, we produce lentils and not mangoes because the climate is different and with the climate, the earth, production and the human body.  It is a perfect system that, with science and knowledge, we can improve we can adapt, but we should not be upset or enslaved to logic different from our own.

It is important to understand to ask questions:

1) What are our real needs, primary, existential and not induced needs? What does our body need?

2) Why do we find a certain kind of offer in the supermarket? Do we breathe a certain kind of message? What are the goals and the vision of man and the world behind it?

If we understand this, we can make a conscious choice and nurture ourselves in harmony with our needs; we can make a personal choice of freedom.

 FOOD IS NOT CHEMISTRY IT IS ENERGY - 49

 The division of food into categories of chemical elements provides a highly divided and compartmentalised view of food and man, whereas, in fact, both the productive ecosystem and man are actually complex and interconnected organisms.

This approach does not consider the qualitative elements that are, after all, the most important. Food is not just chemistry but, above all, energy. Food transmits to the organism the power it has accumulated and created in its process of constitution and maturation, its life force. A grain of wheat, if placed in a jar with wet cotton wool (an experiment we probably all did in school as children in science class), germinates and, if nourished, has the potential to grow into an ear. Beyond the chemical components it contains, its true strength, its proper nourishment that we put into our bodies, and that food imparts to us is precisely this growth potential. Try putting white flour in wet cotton wool; the result you get after just a couple of days will tell the difference from the grain of wheat.

The actual 'fuel' is the energy that food expresses and translates into energy and health of our body.

The energy intake defines the contribution I receive and have at my disposal in quantitative terms, in the sense that I will feel more or less intense (as we say not surprisingly, 'I am full of energy') but also in qualitative terms. Each food has a precise energy that derives from its characteristics, and when it is transmitted to our body, it influences it profoundly. 

If we dwell on this, it becomes clear how fundamental the choice of food becomes in relation to its energy and how important it is to reverse the trend we are used to of eating a lot and badly' by starting to eat 'little and well'.

We have convinced ourselves that to be healthy, it is necessary to eat a lot. Past shortages have led us to overindulge in the opposite direction and consume an inordinate amount of poorly nutritious food that only burdens our vital functions. 

We need little food that is selected, highly nutritious and targeted to our real needs.

Chinese medicine has always adopted a holistic view of man, where the interconnection of the internal organs and external parts is essential. This view is completely different from the mechanistic one. 

Like all things, food is divided into chemical components and yang (which, in extreme examples, binds to masculine and alkaline foods) and yng (which binds to feminine and sugary foods) energy elements. 

It is a qualitative reading of food that opens us up to two completely new realms:

- tells us how food influences us by providing us with what we need depending on the role we play, the physical and mental fatigue we have to prepare for, the emotional moment we experience, and the sporting performance we have to sustain; it tells us whether we are fragile or strong and need to strengthen again or relax. - tells us how important it is not so much the individual food but the way we combine different foods; it is from such a combination that the 'frequency' of energy arises, which finally, from the digestive system, is distributed to the whole body, to every single cell, influencing our actions, the way we perform them, their outcome.

It is easy to imagine that most London City managers or Wall Street brokers are good meat and animal food consumers consistent with the competitive world around them and the aggressiveness they need to survive in such an environment.

Just as the Zen monks of the Himalayan highlands consume more rice and vegetables in harmony with their active and meditative life rhythm simultaneously, which requires strongly balanced energy.

In the animal world, it is easy to understand the energetic difference between a lion and a gazelle and how the food needed to maintain their structure and nourish their physical and instinctive nature differs.

If meat gives us a vital yang energy, suitable for times when physical and emotional exertion are most significant, its contribution changes when we eat it with a broad-leaf vegetable such as salad, which, having the exact opposite energy, mitigates the power of the meat, resulting in a more balanced contribution.

Knowledge of the energetic and qualitative nature of food allows us to make a great leap forward in our diet, that by mixing them in a targeted manner and using them in a way that is functional to our needs. By knowing our needs and functioning dynamics, we can give direction, and influence their impact.

To give a few examples:

- if we want to dampen them, we can use foods with the opposite energy value

- if we want to emphasise them, use foods with the same energy

- if we want to balance them, we can work on the mix of energies

It is incredibly fascinating to arrive at this level of knowledge and self-awareness; it is similar to the difference one feels between travelling in a bus with the driver, a journey made up of obligatory stops and stops, as a total spectator, to a journey as an expert driver of an off-road vehicle, where you can go where you want, stop when and as much as you want, keep the speed you like.

Another yardstick evaluates food, the energy yardstick, which involves a very different reading, with equally different results: a food considered nutritious by the traditional approach may become inadequate for a specific individual at a certain time and even more inadequate when combined with other similar foods that do not balance or compensate for their energy.

The world of knowledge expands exponentially. It is as if a veil is removed in front of our bodies, offering us a whole new world to experience.

It begins an enthusiastic relationship with food, in discovering this infinite world of energy that can nourish us as we want, when we want and in the quantity we need.

It is a great power. Taking conscious food choices and consumption into our own hands is not just about managing health in terms of maintaining a disease-free state but about modulating energy to our own use, amplifying what we are, and directing us towards what we want to be.

And when you start using food with this new vision, another small 'miracle' happens.

Your body follows you, gets used to this new way of being nourished, goes along with you, develops its sensitivity and begins to communicate strongly with you and your whole being:

- asks you for the food you need insistently. How often do we tell ourselves and say to those close to us, "This period I need ..." "Today I really feel like ...". He gives you a powerful message because you have taken care of him and created a strong bond with him; you have an open dialogue, which becomes all the more intimate and profound the more you learn to listen to him and experiment with him.

It is a journey of discoveries and surprises, like a trip with a dear friend, which brings you back to develop a deep familiarity.

- It rejects food that it does not like, that harms it, that unbalances it. The rejection occurs on all levels, from the first impact with the digestive system that immediately perceives its heaviness, acidity, handling, and lack of freshness, up to the reaction of the individual internal organs, affected by the wrong food, which, in addition to expressing pain with their moans, however feeble, send their echo of suffering to the external parts connected to them.

And for everyone, the answer is different and personal. In my case, the excess of strongly salted cheese attacks my kidneys and causes me slight pain internally and on the outside, swelling and ringing in my ears. Excess dog gives me slightly inflamed gums.

The messages the body sends me quickly and immediately, play an extraordinary role of self-defence, of sentinel in charge of maintaining the status quo, the balance achieved.

On the other hand, when the body is repeatedly mistreated, the opposite happens. When the bond, the feeling, is not created, the body closes down, does not speak, communicates, or closes the relationship, as indeed often happens to a friend.

It resigns, becomes accustomed, adapts and tries to resist, to survive, to maintain a balance as long as it can, not without profound suffering, not only physical. 

This is the state of many people, perpetuated for years and aggravated by the fact that they cannot reverse the course because they lack the knowledge and awareness to do so.

Such a state can lead to various endings:

- The scream of the body is so loud that eventually it becomes impossible to ignore it, and conversions, enlightenments, and reconciliations with one's body and food take place, which often go hand in hand with revolutions and global changes in the individual's life.

- The scream is dull and increasingly dim until the end, which inevitably comes unexpectedly. After years of apparent well-being, our body gives out along with our being and illness and sometimes death ensues. Hospitals are sadly full of such individuals who often suffer and die without knowing why.

All of this leads, in general to a clear sense of widespread malaise that has much of the physical, having upset the existing balance with a 'violence' that the new sensibility forcefully rejects, but which also has much of the emotional, due to the lack of feeling, due to the 'conflict' with our travelling friend.

In such a new reading of food, it is clear how one goes far beyond the chemical components to assess the energy elements of food in a refined way. Consideration is given not only to the fact that food is local, seasonal, fresh, and whole but also, above all, to how food combines with each other and what its pathway is.

It becomes essential that the fruit is sun-ripened and not artificially ripened because the sun's energy reaches us through the fruit. It becomes essential that animals live free and end their lives properly, that they live well, and that they die well. Otherwise, their stress and the toxins that come with it will be part of the energy we feed on, and we will be negatively affected by it.

From such a new angle, the world changes, and many hidden aspects become visible and enormously important.

FOOD FOR THE MIND AND HEART - 56

 'Life is a combination of dough and magic' (Federico Fellini)

Like any self-respecting friend and travelling companion, food speaks not only to the body but also to the mind and heart. Thought and affectivity are not only located in a specific spot but present in every single cell, nourished daily with food and its energy.

In this sense, nothing is truer than the expression 'you eat what you are and you are what you eat'; food becomes a tool to direct our lives, to support us towards self-realisation on all levels of our being.

With the food closest to our aspirations and our feelings, we emphasise what we are. If we are meditative, we tend towards vegetarianism; if we are an operative, we eat whole grains or animal proteins. 

Our being, as a whole, tends to consume that which gives it continuity, that which is close to its feeling with each day's contribution.

Knowing oneself and finding one's food balance means nourishing one's heart and mind correctly and consequently living better.

And this is all the more evident when you inwardly need a substantial change, to turn over a new leaf, to take a different direction. Such changes often go hand in hand with a change in the way you eat. 

The new person who emerges requires a different food that can, at the same time, interpret and represent the change. 

The new diet, consistent with one's own feelings, becomes the best 'coach', the best guarantee of success. It stands by you and nourishes you with what you need to face a process that is often not easy; it amplifies its effects.

Every simple food we eat impacts our whole being, contributing decisively to making us different people. It affects our thoughts and their direction, our mood and affectivity, whether we are calm or deeply irritable. For many, this role played by food may seem excessive, but it is just a matter of knowledge and sensitivity, of getting in touch with who we are.

Other side elements are important to allow food to speak to our minds and our hearts to create a healthy and friendly relationship:

- Where do we eat it, on the run, sitting in the car on a logical drive, or sitting in the shade of a gazebo with a sea view?

- The way we eat closely relates to our state of mind. Are we serene or stressed? Do we take the time to chew and taste, or are we in a hurry and just have to consume or swallow?

- With whom we eat it, yes in the good company of the people we love, food becomes a sharing, a moment of joy to remember. Or are we among strangers or perhaps among hostile people and can't wait for that meal to end and leave?

They are all very important concerning our relationship with food.

If we work in this direction, our being will speak to us, it will ask us, and food will be the answer: we will eat what we are or what we want to become, and we will be what we eat in a natural process of continuous exchange.

A well-nourished mind can make a difference and see the world differently, and what our mind sees and pursues with faith 'risks' becoming a reality.

FOOD FOR THE SOUL - 59

 'Solitude is to the spirit what food is to the body' (Seneca - Roman poet and politician)

If by now quantum physics has shown, in line with religious thinking, that we are energy, that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed, it is now easier to imagine that God, the Universal Energy that shapes and animates everything, is probably not outside but within us and perhaps within every living being.

The soul, the energy is the 'secret code', the 'algorithm' that allows the world to perpetuate and evolve and that intuitively seems, in its manifestations and in its small 'miracles' of everyday life, to go far beyond the result of pure biochemical combinations and reactions.

Like intelligence and emotions, the soul also permeates our being in all its elements and is therefore influenced by food. 

The soul's well-being is related to our ability to connect and communicate with other souls, other living beings and the Supreme Being to draw from their energy. It is linked to our perception of the universe, our trust in its mechanisms, our perception of the significance of every living being, and our respect for the value of existence in all its forms.

The way we eat strongly mirrors our approach to creation, and food can enhance or depress this level of sensitivity.

It is with the soul that we perceive these levels of being, relating differently to everything around us, and this has a profound impact on our state of mind.

The soul is nourished by contemplation but also by the everyday, in the existential journey, where there are important moments and milestones.

We think of the value of mother's milk and the spiritual nourishment that mother passed on to us. We have no conscious memory of it, but our soul knows how important it was and knows that without that initial nurturing, we would have been different. We do not remember the taste or warmth, but our soul remembers; our soul knows. 

We think of the moments of joy in our family when we all sat around that table, with an atmosphere full of listening, attention, and love, eating food made with great care by our mother. That food, that moment, nourished our souls, and we cannot forget it.

And if we think of meals prepared with long rituals at festive times to be eaten together, perhaps after a religious celebration, as a natural passage, as a covenant pact between men and God, as feast after feast, as renewal of the act of faith. We nourished the soul with a sense of belonging and continuity.

To get to the plate of pasta you eat with your best friend, splitting it in two with the last 5 euros you have left over and the train ticket home, prolonging the last act of a beautiful moment of sharing. That food also unites two souls; you are not sharing food, but you are sharing two experiences, feeding off energy in a broad sense.

And isn't a nice spoonful of chocolate spread in a moment of sadness, which, among other things, reminds us of childhood joys, a cure not so much for our palate but for our soul? Is it not a ritual to say: now I want to take care of myself for a moment, give myself a break and then resume the daily grind, I want to 'sweeten' my soul?

FOOD AND HAPPINESS - 62

 "The whole of human history attests to the fact that the happiness of man, a hungry sinner, ever since Eve ate the apple, depends very much on lunch" (George Gordon

Byron)

If you eat in a balanced way by mixing your food wisely based on the 4 basic principles:

• Local food
• Seasonal food
• Cbro Integrale
• Fresh food

Your body will clearly benefit.

If you know the qualitative value of food and its energetic value and mix it wisely, your body gets used to it. It refines its sensitivity and begins to dialogue with you in an increasingly intimate, more attentive way. Then you can start to nourish your heart and mind as well; you can use it to amplify your strength or your courage, to support your joy or cure illness; it will be a tool in your hands, an important ally.

Just as mind control can control our destiny, food control can influence our health

If you know the value of the environment around you and are in tune with it, you will appreciate and respect all living beings.

If you tune into your inner being and connect it to the Supreme Being, to the universal energy, opening your soul to listen to other souls, this also becomes your reference with respect to what you eat.

If you recover your childlike spirit through food and the value of memories, affections, traditions, festivals, and rituals, you can give additional nourishment to your soul.

If you find symmetry between body, heart, mind, and soul, you can say with serenity that you are happy. Happiness is not made up of moments; it is a journey. It is a conquest of beauty and harmony within and, consequently, outside of us.

Food makes happines! It is one of the essential tools on the path to happiness and one of the most important companions on the wonderful journey of life.

Food enriches our most meaningful moments, it is what sweetens the small moments of wonder: a cup of chocolate on a cold winter's evening with your son for a moment of intimate dialogue, a glass of brachetto at sunset on the lake with your beloved for a moment of sweet complicity, the cake at your birthday party with all your friends around you, Christmas lunch again this year with all your family, a sip of fresh water at the spring in the mountains after a 4-hour walk, a fresh parcel of bread and mortadella still smelling fresh at recess at school while you joke with your friends, a plate of steaming homemade pasta with truffles after a morning's work, a tiramisu that really cheers you up, no less than a spoonful of Nutella eaten on the sly by your mum leaving the dirty spoon under the bed.

Are all these nothing but beautiful injections of happiness? And by making an indigestion of happiness by aligning our being, another wonder is observed. 

The different levels compensate each other; they come to each other's rescue: if I also eat a food that is not entirely healthy but within a moment of happiness, fellowship with friends or an essential ritual in the family, my body welcomes it with joy and mitigates with my heart, mind and soul the potential adverse effect on the body. 

That is why we must have our own rigour, our own conscious course of action, but also be able to transgress, to indulge in moments of lightness, pleasure and nourishment of the heart and soul so that food does not become a cure but is always a joy. 

That is precisely why it must be varied and colourful, not repetitive and colourless. It must tickle our emotions and imagination; it must enrich our life and not make it sad and repetitive.

Happiness is easily associated with beauty, and food must also be beautiful; it must be appealing; you must make yourself desired.

Eating with the eyes' is nothing other than the search for beauty that is to be introduced into our bodies, which is to become part of us, to make us more 'beautiful'.  The palatability of food prepares us for its consumption; it becomes one with taste to the point of making us perceive different foods the same depending on whether they are well presented or, on the contrary, carelessly presented. The beauty of food nourishes the mind, heart and soul.

The beauty of food does not mean puffy and perfect apples, well-packaged and phosphorescent food; it is something related to the actual quality of the food, which does not remain unnoticed, which on the plate expresses contagious energy and freshness, love with which it has been cooked, care with which it is presented harmonising taste, shapes and colours. Food becomes art and, as such, timeless beauty.

We are a unique whole, an exceptional being connected to the environment and the universe on a physical, energetic, emotional and spiritual level; if we listen and tune in, if we seek beauty, we can encounter happiness very naturally, and we will slip into it simply by eating our food every day, lovingly performing our task. 

MY LIFE AND FOOD - 66

"Learn to cook, try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, don't be afraid, but above all have fun" (Julia Child)

I was born into a middle-class family; my mother was a teacher and my father was a state official. My family's dream was of a nice house in a newly built neighbourhood entire of stylish furniture, Persian carpets and state-of-the-art appliances; holidays ensured every year, lunches at the best restaurants for anniversaries, two cars and a mink coat for my mother.

In terms of food, the concept was clear: one wanted to enjoy, without excesses, the new wave of modernity and not even return with the thought (except in moments of nostalgic memory) to what had been, albeit minimal, compared to others, the renunciations and 'economies' of childhood.

At the end of the 1960s, shops began to populate with new products; the first convenience stores were born, with the concept of the great advent of the supermarket already in power within them.

Those were the years in which the nutritional principles of the peasant civilisation with its traditional products were quickly being replaced on family tables by convenience store products associated with a brand name.

In my family, too, there was an appetite for novelty and anything local, integral, seasonal and fresh was seen with a double eye:

- On the one hand, it was something old, something outdated, something belonging to a past whose part associated with scarcity one desperately wanted to overcome.

- On the one hand, it was something deeply authentic, which created nostalgia and memories. Still, in the transition from country to city life, the opportunity for immediate enjoyment was lost. The products found in the city were not considered authentic and so something new was preferred to them, which at least guaranteed new discoveries, new sensations and certainly easier and quicker handling for my mother.

My fridge was always full, and there was never a shortage of some food that we were all quite fond of: from chocolate biscuits to buondì and fiesta snacks, from Danone puddings, Kraft thin slices to the wonderful Algida croissants and the equally wonderful Nutella.

Of course, there were soft cheeses, from caciotta to robiola, meat of all kinds, which was never to be lacking, and milk, served warm with biscuits every morning as an obligatory step before going to school.

Together with the presence of vegetables and, above all, fruit whose flavour each year was more and more distant from that of the tomatoes I picked in the countryside at my uncle's in Tuscany when I was a child, with their irregular shapes, firm flesh and flavour that, combined with a drizzle of oil and salt, conveyed to you all the energy of the sun that had ripened them, these were the foods that I had in front of me and ate without questioning whether they were 'right' or not.

Every day, for lunch and dinner, a complete meal was prepared consisting of pasta, meat or fish or cheese, vegetables, fruit and dessert, as a reward for the daily effort.

Milk always bothered me, and I quickly moved away from breakfast, switching to bread and sliced meats; I always liked savoury better, alternating with a few slices of bread with jam, preferably cherry jam or whatever passed the convent.

I loved cheese, less so cold meats; vegetables were not my forte, but I ate some, especially cooked ones.

The meat was never my cup of tea, and those pieces of liver or thin, flat slices cooked in oil or pizzaiola had become a nightmare over time. The roast chicken cooked on the spit by my father (definitely more gifted than my mother at the cooker) or the pork chops and sausages cooked on the grill directly over the fireplace were different.

Pasta, as a good Italian, was the undisputed staple and what took away your hunger, but my real passion was sweets.

Ice creams in winter and summer, puddings of all kinds, snacks at school and in the afternoon with Fiesta and Buondì Motta chocolate in pool position, Perugina chocolates, fresh cream or cream pastries every Sunday lunchtime to make a holiday different. Around the age of 13, I even learned from a friend's mother how to make tiramisu myself to satisfy my craving for dessert.

My mother was not a skilled cook and especially disliked cooking. My father was better than her, recognised as such by everyone, and rather demanding and table. This put my mother, on the one hand, in tension, as if she always had to give a performance to be appreciated and escape commentary; on the other hand it had the opposite effect, all tension fell away, and cooking became a repetitive and empty gesture, a duty to be fulfilled every day, with effort along with many others. 

It is clear that this dual state of mind was reflected in the end result, which resulted in acceptable but lovelessly prepared meals.

Mealtime was when the family came together and was often characterised by tensions and arguments between Dad and Mum over matters of routine or principle. It was not the ideal time to deal with them; they were undoubtedly not easily 'digested', but it was their cliché, not even planned: when they sat down to eat, they came out naturally. 

This made the meal less enjoyable for everyone, in the absence of the serenity and sharing that nourishes beyond food, and certainly quicker, with the desire to get away from unwanted and often repetitive tensions.

In the context described, from childhood to adolescence, I developed my own dietary pattern of pasta, little meat, a lot of cheese, a lot of bread and a lot of fruit and dessert at the table.  Poor breakfast and several intermediate meals comprise strictly sweet 'snacks' including Nutella, chocolates, chocolate biscuits, ice cream and the like.

This strong call for sweetness, which probably also involved affection, combined with cheese and fruit could hardly be said to be too balanced, especially from an energy point of view.

When the time came for me to grow up and align all my levels of sensitivity, when I began my external emotional life, and when I began to question life and death, this imbalance began to become a certain obstacle. I was not aware of it, but my inner weakness, also caused by years of eating incorrectly, was emphasised now more than ever by pursuing that diet: I really was what I ate (ice cream, sweets and cheese), and I continued to eat what I was.

Combined with the typical processes of adolescence, this dynamic led me, as an apparently model boy: polite, well-balanced, intelligent, good at school and performing in sports, to experience an inner discomfort that manifested itself with two phenomena that were new to me and decidedly impactful:

- The loss of sleep. I began to suffer from insomnia and spent my nights tossing and turning, waiting for the light to come on. This caused me permanent tiredness to which I quickly became accustomed; my organism had recalibrated itself by adapting to this unexpected lack of rest, but certainly not without stress and suffering.

- The onset of continuous muscular disorders. I was playing football at a good level, and by the time I was 18, I was in the maturation and peak performance phase. Up until then, I had had very few injuries, but they began to come with some frequency until I suffered a tear in the frontal adductor of my right thigh that could not heal. A calcification had formed that wouldn't dissolve, and after a phase of ultrasound and rest, the injury reopened as soon as I returned to shooting.

 

Decreased sports activity, caused by injuries and fatigue, had led my diet more and more towards fruit. Since I tended to gain weight and I wouldn't say I liked this, I had eliminated my evening meal, which had turned into a large fruit basket, and this certainly did not help me overcome my imbalance.

They were clear signs of a lack of harmony inside and outside of me, which affected a bit of everything and certainly also food, with which I did not have a healthy relationship, which certainly did not help me feel better.

I don't think my parents remember that period as being special for me; everything basically seemed quite normal, and my life proceeded, and my mind and body did everything to proceed in a 'normal way'. 

The house doctor, to whom I had mentioned without too much emphasis during a flu-related visit, had no particular explanation because, on the surface, it did not appear that I was ill, but in reality, there was a dull ache. It was time to grow up, take stock, shed the ballast, and fly; it was not an immediate process.

My body, heart, mind and soul demanded attention and needed to connect.

I had received no nutritional education of any kind other than my father's general statements that it was important to eat a bit of everything. I was at a turning point but did not know where to start; I had absolutely no key to open the first door of a new path.

This state of 'laboured limbo' lasted for over two years and could perhaps have lasted much longer or faded into illness. 

I had no key, but I had my own tenacity, and I knew I would find a solution sooner or later, and that happened. My search, more inner than rational, drew attention to a sign hanging in a side street in the city centre.

Printed in a rather handmade manner and half detached from the rain, the sign invited people to attend a Yoga class. It was 1986, and for me, who had lived among accountancy school desks, football pitches and the small square in my neighbourhood with friends, albeit enriched by numerous trips and holidays, the word Yoga evoked something exotic and fascinating. Still, I didn't know what it was about, but nevertheless, on that occasion, it strongly attracted me.

I memorised that address and a few days later I was at the door of that 'alternative activities' centre where there was a small sign saying 'The Whole Grain'.  When the doorbell rang, a slim, smiling man, Giuliano, opened with a particular diligence and energy. After welcoming me and lingering for a moment with his gaze on my face, without hesitation and with a straightforward approach, considering that he had never seen me before, he said: 

"It seems to me that you are a person who exaggerates with fruit, and this is not healthy for you".

This point-blank sentence, uttered by a stranger and simultaneously so exact, resonated with me with great truth and created great curiosity.

After an initial moment of embarrassment, I replied:

"How can you tell? 

"Easy, it's obvious from your face, your features?" He retorted.

"What do you mean?"  I continued with growing curiosity as one who feels that he has a very important piece of information at his fingertips and does not want to miss it.

"I have studied facial diagnostics, and I see fruit in your features, in your eyes. Although an important food in itself, we must not abuse it especially in winter, it cools us down, weakens us, acidifies the liver which controls our muscles'.

At the word 'muscles' I asked him bluntly: 'I play football and these days I have a lot of problems with my legs, and in fact, I only eat the fruit in the evening'.

"There, you see?" said Julian to me with a satisfied look. "Everything comes back. You have to stop eating fruit completely for 15 days, and you will see that the muscle problems will disappear."

The dialogue ended like that, without much scientific explanation; it was as brief as it was enlightening. I did not ask him anything else, and deeply impressed, I thanked him and left. I had gone there for yoga (of which I asked him nothing) and had received much more. I returned home with that sense of someone who has discovered an unexpected truth and is desperate to put it into practice.

That instantaneous dialogue, that 'chance intuition' for which I will always be grateful to Giuliano, who has become a friend over the years despite the age difference, lit the fuse of change in me.

I did not eat fruit for 15 days, and my muscular problems disappeared. I overcame the calcification and was back playing in no time. I had successfully experienced my first major change in my skin.

I returned to the Integral Bean, and Giuliano recommended some books on healthy eating based on macrobiotic principles. My hunger for knowledge and evolution was great and I devoured them in a few days, starting to create my first food culture, very different from the one I did not have.

The principle' you eat what you are, and you are what you eat' immediately struck me about my new readings. It had opened me up to a new vision of food, not chemical but energetic, related to the body, mind, and heart. 

They were new and fascinating principles that resonated positively with me and engendered in me a very valuable feeling, a desire to learn and, above all, to experiment directly as I had already done successfully. I did not want to read about new things; I tried to apply them to see the results. Food guided me towards awareness, responsibility, and the ability to decide how to live.

I had come from years of profound imbalance; I was full of refined sugar to the tip of my hair I was already losing, and I had to reverse course. As in any revolution, a perpetuated excess must initially be matched by an opposite excess that gives a clear message of change. I had discovered a new way to food inspired by the principles of healthy and balanced eating, which was basically in harmony with the values I had inside.

From being a super glutton, I began to be a macrobiotic, albeit with some transgressions.

My family accepted with extreme tolerance and a bit of healthy humour. Although I did not understand the reasons behind it, I was not hindered in any way and could start introducing and cooking new foods on my own.

Having suddenly and radically changed my food, starting with a clear result, had given me a strong double awareness, opening me up to a new vision of myself and the world:

- Food had a strong influence on my health, and, more importantly, I could consciously direct it towards that goal

- I had changed the way I ate up to the age of 20 in a short time and without too much trouble; I could also change all the other aspects of my life if I really wanted to; the expression 'want is power' was beginning to take on a particular meaning for me too.

Julian and his few words were what I was looking for, and 'fate' had brought him to me. I now had a new opportunity for global change, and I could not miss it. Food had been the starting point and had become my profound ally. Now that I had rediscovered it in a new guise, I had to get to know it more and more, experiment and use it effectively, and that was exactly what I wanted to do.

In just two months of renewed nutrition and new energy, I emerged entirely from the limbo of insomnia as if by magic. 

Since that pivotal period, which marked a real turning point not only in terms of food but definitely in my existential life, I began to have a completely different relationship with food, to consider it as a travelling companion, the primary guardian of my health. I substituted short-term pleasure that of a double tiramisu, which was not an exception at the end of my restaurant dinners for that of feeling good in the long term, of seeking not pleasure but happiness, of rediscovering the discreet but full taste of a chickpea soup that I had previously not even tasted.

I ate according to macrobiotic principles for six years, then lived abroad for a couple of years, changing my food back to more 'traditional' in relation to the climate and the rhythms of daily life. 

Then I ate only plant foods for years, then went back to eating meat. I eliminated milk and cheese for years, then went back to eating them in a small part, and then eliminated them again.

Since I have been married to Monia, she is the creator, the one who gives me love through the cooker and several calories, which, again, out of love, I cannot refuse.

It was a path of continuous experimentation, a 'continuous laboratory' as life is in all its aspects, where, on the one hand, I understood the effect of food on my body, mind, heart and soul and used it to help me give my life the direction I wanted. If I needed to be more meditative and creative, I decreased yang food, if I needed to be more active and attack life I used yang food.

And I have witnessed the exceptional change that the body undergoes when you start to listen to it; it also opens up, a dialogue is created, it gives you messages every day, more and more refined, it makes you understand its needs, and you have the pleasure with all your parts to satisfy it, to come into line with it.

If he used to absorb the two tiramisu in pain but without protesting, he was resigned to such aggression, now if I eat even one, he tells me good-naturedly, 'watch out, it's not the top, I know that sugar makes you happy and that this cake is super-duper good, but don't overdo it, take me and especially you into account'.

It is thanks to this dialogue, to this journey that began many years ago and which is made up not of theories, movements of thought or, fashions or, diets or labels, but of daily experience, of everyday adventures, that thanks to food and with food, with the environment from which it comes, with other human beings, with what it represents in social, symbolic and affective terms, I have found a profound harmony that can be called happiness and that is made up of rules and the pleasure of being able to overcome them with gentle transgressions, of colour and the joy of eating and living.

It is a harmony that I have to nurture and care for every day, it is easy to go back.

I wanted to briefly tell you my story with food not because there is anything exceptional about it, it is a simple story but one where small miracles have happened, and I hope they can be an inspiration to you.

I feel a profound sympathy for the suffering of others, and I feel a profound suffering to see so many of us suffering because we are unable to dialogue with our own being and our own food, to connect them in order to regain harmony, health and happiness as life goes by fast and inexorable

I hope that these lines can be a contribution, a small grain of sand in this direction, because food makes happiness and it is a wonder that we all have the right to discover. When you eat good food and you are happy even if you don't know why, you are already on the right track.

 

A big thank you to you who made it to the end, I hope your curiosity bears fruit.  If you enjoyed this ebook, I would appreciate your review so that others like you can read it.

If you would like to communicate with me and I would be very happy to do so, you can contact me at the e-mail address on my website www.cioccolatinidifelicita.it.

I want to give you a special bonus, if you buy another one of my books you will get a 30% discount