Carlo Petrinithe only Italian to be chosen by Time magazine as a “hero of Europe”, the man who founded Slow Food in 1986 to rebel against the opening of a fast food restaurant in the center of Rome and who created an international movement for a “good, healthy and fair” food, has just launched an appeal for introduce nutrition education in schools.
It aims to reach a million signatures to convince Minister Valditara and for what it’s worth I’ll gladly put my signature on it. Talking about food to our students does not only mean helping them to stay away from the two excesses of obesity and anorexia which are frequent in adolescence, but also explaining to them how the world works, what are the economic mechanisms behind what we eat, including exploitation and injustice; and what were the technological advances that brought us this far, to the paradox of having one part of the planet that literally throws away food and another that is dying of hunger. It would be nice if these things were talked about in school. After all, every time we realize that there is a big topic to understand, we ask the school to deal with it: and so in recent years, students have also had civic education lessons, for example on the Constitution; sustainability education, talking about climate change and renewable energy; financial education, to understand how money works; digital, to discover the mechanisms of social media; and finally, in some cases, of sexual education, evoked every time a rape or a femicide reminds us that we are still a patriarchal society.
This vision of the open, transversal, contemporary school clashes with the daily practice of a school where the only thing that matters are the ministerial programs (which no longer exist), a school made up of watertight compartments, with each subject separated from the others, a school in which teaching and learning pass exclusively through the reading of a text although the new generations have grown up with videos. We would need a major reform that would start from the needs of students while in recent years we have limited ourselves to giving and taking away grades from children or exam subjects from kids. We seem to have forgotten that “education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire”. Even talking about food.