Food Design as a Strategy for the Global Community

Abstract

The paper aims to identify the role of Design Culture in adopting food and gastronomic practices as strategic tools to enhance dialogues between different cultures. The research analyses the cases in which contemporary Design Culture adopts food as a possibility of social inclusion, understanding of the global flows of people, transformation techniques, and novel rituals. Food and food cycles can be interpreted as "language", as well as an opportunity to create circular business activities based on the rediscovery and on the strengthening of the links between territories and communities in a globalised scenario increasingly attentive to the experiences of fusion between cultures. Design culture can become a mediator, a facilitator and a promoter of solutions and models of integration between cultural components we commonly consider "strong" and "weak", "host" and "settled", "traditional" and "modern", "slow" and "fast", "typical" and "atopic". Thus an "open" scenario is outlined in which projects and researches oriented to the diffusion of more sustainable and "community centred" food cultures are renewed and take on new meanings. New cultures emerge which, while keeping their cultural roots, evolve into a transcultural society. The Design Culture is called to recognise and co-design these new “food acts” of the contemporary transcultural societies