It seems like in the last ten years food has become such an important thing in our life. Food is everywhere and everyone is talking about food. Everyone is a critic, everyone is a foodie, new restaurant are opening every day, everyone is going out for dinner, books are published all the time, and chefs are considered to be great artists rather than cooks.
But if I look around, if I look at people, if I look at our lifestyle, I wonder: are we still eating? Or are we just talking about?

I think about eating as a form of art that has gone lost.

There is a misconception that eating (like loving, or living) is something natural. Everyone thinks about him/herself as able to eat, able to understand taste, what they like or not, as it would be something genetic, something we always had inside. I think eating as a form of art, or craft, something we have to learn and sometime we even have to be educated to. I think about eating as a lost form of people culture, what in Italy we call “cultura popolare”, which was the culture born from people, from the bottom of the society, while now culture (even food culture) is imposed from above and tells us who we are, what we have to think, what we have to buy, and finally what we have to eat.

I was born 40 years ago in this beautiful decadent country we still pretend to call Italy, a place I always missed from the very first day of my life. Having grown up in the eighties, I clearly remember the change of culture in my country, but I still perceived the beauty of my past, something was still there, but it was also leaving us.

I always loved eating. When I was a child dinner’s time was the best part of the day. Today children think about eating as a boring thing. I would rush to wash my hands and seat in front of the plate with a big smile on my face, and eat and devour everything until my belly would explode, keep pushing to see if there was a bit of more space left.

I ate everything and there were no guilt or worries. There was no food that was bad, because there was no food that wasn’t real. There weren’t many supermarkets and my mum used to go out to buy groceries every day of her life as she still does today. There still were little shops in our neighborhood, we lived above a bakery, there was a shop that only sold milk and milk candies, and vegetables came from Signora Domenica’s country house.

Every Sunday we would have a Sunday lunch, which was the nicest, longest and better lunch of all the lunches of the week. My mum, not being tired of working and rising three children, find the time and power to cook this lunch on Sunday because it was something it has to be done. She would have never thought that she was too tired to do it or don’t feel like it. Our dinner was always a three courses dinner. My brothers and I were all very skinny because we fight all day and scream at each other and play football and in summer we spent all day at the beach eating panini with frittata from a big chiller on the sand. And there were no tablet around, and videogames were at the local bar and we had to put a coin in it…

I understand that many things are better now than in the old days, but I still miss the old days because maybe they were harder times, but they were also shared times. I remember when I went Amsterdam, to the Van Gogh Museum. The painting that impressed me the most was : “The potatoes eaters”, a dark painting of a poor family eating a plate of smoking potatoes and tea. Although sad, the painting has also this kind of warm feeling of this family seated around the table after a hard day of work. Now we live all alone in our world, worried of being healthy, being fat, being cool, being allergic, being impotent… Everything that seems wrong in our life seems to depend somehow by what we are eating. Some people think they can change the world, even make it better, deciding what they eat, and they miss how beautiful the world is already, has been and will always be. They don’t understand that eating surrounded by people we love is such an important part of our happiness that we can’t avoid it and that there is nothing healthier than being happy.

But being happy is a decision too, is a form of art we need to learn and master. It is a revolution. It is something nobody will teach you, because our culture doesn’t need happy people. It needs unhappy, frustrated people who watched their life going by, and fill up their emptiness with junk or organic food, buying one or the other according to their own age, guilt or money. But eating, loving, living deeply and with passion is what we need to get back to. Turn off the phone for a moment, watch each other in the eyes and eat.