MedEatReserch, The Social Research Center on the Mediterranean Diet, was founded with the aim of enhancing the food heritage of Southern Italy and is a promoter in high shools of a historical and anthropological – and therefore cultural – reflection on the Mediterranean Diet.
Currently in educational work in schools, food almost exclusively pertains to the logic of “fighting obesity”. The diffusion of a food education is necessary but in fact still rarely put into practice.
MedEatResearch, starting from the Mediterranean Diet, offers an anthropological and historical training opportunity: something apparently simple and catalogable, is in fact a tool for students to discover the temporal aspect of everyday life, the domestic, active and exemplary dimension, of the men, and in this case mostly of the women, of their territory.
School, with its educational agency, has the opportunity to start young people to a reflection on the relationship between cooking and resources, an “ecological” relationship, and a “local” relationship. With this first moment of discovery comes the hope of rebuilding, by learning from ordinary life and its long and unspoken tradition, a critical thought and a more appropriate position towards the relationship with resources, starting from food.
