More food, less food. More cooks, fewer chefs. More wine, less sommelier. And what if by reclaiming our language we also regained a sense of proportion in the world of gastronomy which has not yet emerged from the bubble in which it found itself more or less twenty years ago?
Of course, Anna Prandoni, journalist and writer, curator of. does not make it a question of linguistic sovereignty Gastronomikathe daily newspaper on culture and the food and wine industry Linkiesta. However, it is certainly no coincidence that the always over-the-top narration of what we eat and how and why is fueled by foreign words which nevertheless create a distance between the speaker and the listener, the same distance that seems to exist between the narration and the reality.
Prandoni tried to bring order to the discussion on gastronomy using common sense. On the contrary, The Good Senseas is the title of his book recently released by Linkiesta Book (158 pages, 15 euros). Common sense means avoiding taking sides with one of the parties in arms in the eternal struggle “between modernity and tradition, between extreme biodynamics and intensive agriculture, between hyper-creative cuisine and obsessive recovery of fermentation traditions, between natural and conventional wine, between vegans at all costs that eat quinoa produced by deforesting forests and carnivores that feed only on Chianina”, as Prandoni writes on the back cover, evoking stadium curves of food.
The volume is constructed in nine chapters, each of which is based on a more/less bipolarism. The first (More food ethics, less industrialization) reflects on how the choice of what or where to eat cannot ignore considerations on how much effort goes into a certain food and whether a restaurant pays its suppliers and employees fairly, pay taxes, respect hygiene rules. Because in the end “if food is cheap it is either not good or it is the result of the exploitation of human labor”. The second chapter (More producers, less supermarket: cultivating doubts to grow new certainties) proposes a manifesto that should be “shared by all people who decide to talk about food and wine in an ethical and contemporary way” and which can allow us to redesign contemporaneity. The third chapter, More local, less global (with the exception of ideas), deals with the false myths of traditions, starting from the Italian case, reaching the conclusion that cuisine must be a synthesis between cultures that becomes something different “that borrows from first two the best and rethinks it, renewed”. The other chapters delve into the themes of science as opposed to arrogance, of knowledge as opposed to Tripadvisor’s spannometrics, of well-done communication as opposed to hustlers. Then there are reflections on cooking on TV, too devoted to entertainment and not enough to work, on comfort food that must transform into comfort kitchen and that other bubble within a bubble called wine.
There are many themes, they are treated with the attitude of a polemicist who raises doubts and unmasks hypocrisies. This is certainly not an investigative book, but a catalog of ideas that espouses a single thesis: that moderation is the only way to return to giving food and its narrative the weight it deserves. Moderation which does not mean refusing to take a position, but taking it with intelligence and discernment, without adhering to parishes or tribes.
“We are ready – concludes Prandoni – to go beyond the factions and meet together on the ground of common sense: what will allow us to progress and arrive at a new agricultural, social, cultural model, authentically healthy for man and for the earth, good in the most authentic and shared meaning, durable and non-sustainable. To finally return to food, forgetting food.”