(RE)GENERA

I was born and raised in Milan. I spent most of my summers in our countryside summer houses, in the Southern regions of Calabria and Basilicata. There, I instinctively learned the techniques and traditions related to small agriculture and food without really questioning or realising the values that those traditional, local activities embodied. While strolling through the country roads we used to pick and harvest wild fruits, like berries or figs, that then we used to make home-made preserves or cakes to eat all together around the table for breakfast. It was like being a small “farm-to-table” shop, the ones that today have become so cool and trendy.

In the last few years though, such small family traditions and activities have been fading over time. Mostly because it’s been harder and harder to find those wild fruits along the bushes on the roads, which have been slowly destroyed by the incresingly intensive ways of doing agriculture and by the less and less favourable climate conditions.

Without the fruit, it started making less and less sense to us to walk together through the country roads. We make less of those preserves to share together at the table, making more and more necessary to head to the supermarket and buy those industrial jams for us too. We forget and know less and less how to prepare things ourselves, or how to share knowledge about food traditions across generations.

Thereby, the mere lack of wild fruit affects our everyday too. It affects, directly and indirectly, our more or less in-depth knowldge of the territory, the extent to which we care about it through the food choices we are forced to make. It deeply affects what we choose to eat and so our health. The lack of wild fruit, to us, also affects our cultural heritage as well as the way we build our relationships through what used to be everyday actions of shared moments.

As we are facing soem of the most dramatic and irreversible climate disasters, it becomes clear that how our carelessness and exploitment of the soil has intrinctly entered our daily lives, also in the small scale and and in our family realms.

Governments now more than ever need to act to, if not avoid at least limit as much as possible that the consequences of the climate crisis will hit us irreversibly.

And us too. We need to re-think the way we produce and consume our food and go back to the way pre-industrial farmers were taking care of their land, health and the people around them, through organic, nutritious and local food.