The Italian agri-food industry between global and local: food habits before and during the pandemic virus Covid-19. – The pandemic generated by the virus known as Covid-19 is an expression of an unbalanced relationship between man and environment on which geography is called to investigate and also to redefine the spaces of intervention. It will be useful to propose the adoption of a trasncalar point of view that, if in one way widens the horizon to the entire globe in a contagion and in a need for collaboration that do not recognize nor can allow us to raise limits, on the other hand, it becomes a metaphor and a warning to create a new ecology and new social political relations to weave as much at a global level as at a local and personal level.
From the forced isolation – due to the rules of social distancing adopted in many European and non – European states – paradoxically emerged a glocal dialectic to interpret. As can be seen from observing what is happening in the Italian agri-food sector, on one hand we are forced to open our economic spaces recognizing the indispensable contribution of immigrant labour for the cultivation and harvest in the fields. On the other hand we are led to close the horizon of our primary needs without being able to address the question to our trusted provider and/or topographically closer even through the network that puts us in contact with the entire rural world. The authors, also thanks to the results of the direct survey, conducted on the purchases and the alimentary habits of the families during the pandemic, underline the opportunities of growth and valorisation of the Italian agricultural and food sector.
New rurality and geographic food. A "filosofale" formula for Abruzzo. – Geographic food is an expression that indicates the deep relationships between territory and eating costums. More precisely, in regard to the current post-modernity, it defines the need of recovering the cultural identities in the sphere of the concepts of place and collective tradition. Such need, which derives in a reactive way from the tendencies of uniformity produced by the mass consumption, can be considered always more as the way of escape deriving from the bottom that works against the processes of globalization and industrialization of the cultural products. Including those related to the field of food and eating customs.
In Abruzzo, the places of contemporary rural context do not seem to escape from such phenomenon. It is clearly proved by the rediscovery of old culinary habits in relation to the farming and pastoral past, the recovery of the agricultural biodiversity, the commercial achievement of local and traditional products, which is noticeably manifested through the country festivals, the proliferation of the country style wine and food places and the increasing diffusion of the farm holiday procedures.