The soul in a plate. Food as identity/social value

Food has always been not only the essential element for life, something appropriate to meet a fundamental biological function, but also a sacred symbol, a fantasized desire to make holy, or rather to be consecrated in its etymological meaning through collective rites developed since the earliest times of humanity. Trough the representation of food signs, through petroglyphs, graffiti, drawings and graphemes, individual and collective projections became concrete, unfulfilled food needs were highlighted and the foundations for their satisfaction were laid, by exorcising hunger. It is hunger, i.e., an innate drive to survive, that binds all living beings universally: lack of food creates life and establishes social relationship. Man's history and social behaviour have evolved and have been increasingly affected by the scarcity of food and the need to search for it, ever since the formation of the first communities. The extent and form of society, personal relations and interactions have been equally limited and subject to solving the food problem, the fear of hunger. In this logic, food and wine phenomena are also revisited and should probably be interpreted as an attempt to reconstruct the relationship between food and land, or as the willingness to seek one's roots, traditions and community identities despite globalization processes also in the food sector, for which there is increasing awareness and that offer uniform lifestyles and consumption patterns. In this context, the demand for food - pristine, sustainable, tasty and possibly based on traditional production methods and techniques - is essentially a search for one's roots, for a more rewarding social life that is in some ways in contrast with the identity standardisation, the massive process known as McDonaldization, in the various forms in which it occurs. If I eat something, I often want that food to represent me, a symbol of my culture and my social life. Such customisation of taste is basically the revenge of subjectivity against collective massification.