“Food is territory, roots, community, sociality, and identity: the keywords of happiness”

Food as the glue that binds human relationships, from the ritual of the table to the sharing of sociality, because eating well is good for mental and physical health, while the opposite is true of junk food. And those healthy foods, those typical products of often small areas linked to small towns that are at risk of depopulation and impoverishment, are potential victims of a vicious circle dictated by “mass unhappiness”. These are topics dear to WineNews, and we discussed them with Stefano Bartolini, professor of political economy and social economy at the University of Siena and author of the book “Ecologia della felicità. Perché vivere meglio aiuta il Pianeta” (Ecology of Happiness: Why Living Better Helps the Planet) (published by Aboca Edizioni, 2021), whom we met at the Slow Food Assembly at the FAO in Rome. The starting point was an assumption: “Happiness is the quality and quantity of human relationships, because people feel bad when they are alone”, says Bartolini, who points out that “food is territory, community, sociality, roots, belonging, and identity, which are all keywords for happiness”.
According to the professor, the concept of “mass unhappiness” is linked to a series of factors, above all “the deterioration of relationships we are experiencing”. Children used to “play together in the street”, he says, “now they stay at home alone in front of screens. We used to shop at the neighborhood store, now we shop at supermarkets. Then Amazon arrived. There is no longer any contact, those relationships that formed the social fabric of the neighborhood no longer exist”. The parallel with food is thought-provoking, to say the least. “The evolution is similar”, says Bartolini, “we have moved from agriculture to industrial farming, destroying the link between food and the land and the community. This has led to the ultimate aberration of junk food, which is cheap, unhealthy, and consumed by the poor”, citing the paradox of Africa, where “the main problem today is becoming obesity”.
There are exceptions. Bartolini teaches at the University of Siena and cites the local case: “It is the city with the highest percentage of people over 90 in Italy”, he says, “and this is because in Siena, the elderly do not live alone, thanks in part to the Contrade del Palio. The squares are like living rooms where people stop to talk, and the fact that it was the first city to pedestrianize its center has had a big impact on this”, explaining that “the most important risk factor for health is loneliness”. But the economist broadens the scope to the whole of Italy, “one of the longest-living countries in the world” also and above all “thanks to the Mediterranean diet”, expressing anger at the management of part of the NRRP in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic: “We had a historic opportunity to repopulate inland areas”, he says, “because with the explosion of remote working, there was enormous demand from people to go and live in places that offered a better quality of life, where they could escape the congestion, stress, and fatigue of city life”. Funds that could have been used to “improve transport and bring quality internet to the countryside and small villages. Instead, we are left with nothing and with money that has been largely wasted, even increasing the public debt”.
Aware that “Italy has a territory that is very difficult to maintain”, but that the only solution is “for people to live in inland areas, otherwise their depopulation will create immense costs and disasters”, the professor’s final reflection is dedicated to the concept of the common good, which belongs to everyone but which the state leases out to make it profitable, often at very low prices, so that it yields a lot for the operators who rent it, if we think of beach concessions on Italian beaches or public land in cities or small villages: “It is a huge discrepancy”, concludes Bartolini, “because it is a privatization at very low prices of a common good that is precious to everyone, whose benefits become private benefits. It is one of the consequences of the disaster of the Italian political system, which fails to look after the interests of everyone and is enslaved by pressure groups”.