The circular economy applied to food goes far beyond the reuse of waste: it is a new paradigm of production, purchase and conscious management of resources. Questioning all those established habits that make us rather an obstacle to sustainable development.
In the contemporary project of a linear economy based on extracting, producing, consuming and disposing, humanity is called to go beyond those instrumental reasons that lead it to maximize profits by adopting a predatory and unbridled attitude that destroys the common home.
Globalized, increasingly long and standardized food supply chains have long since severed those relationships between ecological and social units that made food production resilient. We have allowed a series of linear logics to prevail over systemic scenarios and from this juxtaposition suffering has arisen on various levels.
Specialization has prevailed over the overall vision, productivity over quality, performance over well-being.
The British anthropologist Gregory Bateson said it well in his 1972 book “Towards an ecology of the mind”: «The great problems of the world are the result of the difference between how nature works, that is, as a system, and the way it works. that people think of, which is mostly linear.
A path from the linear to the circular
Therefore, the linear economy that influences and, in turn, is conditioned by our cultural model, is the daughter of linear thinking (currently only 8.6% of the world economy is circular – reports the Circular Economy Gap Report 2022), which still believes that the health of humanity can be separated from the health of the planet (the opposite view is called the OneHealth). From observing this opposition, a different attitude towards the best supplier of raw materials known to mankind must emerge.
By returning attention to biodiversity, communities, the quality of relationships, the substance of behaviors, the circular economy for food, as a new political-economic-cultural paradigm, must be placed at the center of any decision-making process. decisions the regeneration of natural resources. capital on which human, cultural, social and economic capital depends, respecting planetary limits and at the same time offering a fair space to civil society.
The 10 R’s of the circular economy
For these reasons, “circularity” cannot be associated solely with the issue of waste, since doing so could favor a manipulative approach to waste, a situation that could paradoxically lead to an acceleration of planned obsolescence. Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Renew, Remanufacture, Redevelop, Recycle, RecoverFrom the most important to the least revolutionary, the 10 Rs of the circular economy encourage us to redesign our way of producing, buying and managing a resource, questioning all those consolidated habits that lead us to be an obstacle to sustainable development.
TO modus operandi which is part of the cultural framework of the 3 Cs of the Circular Economy for Food, Capital, Cyclicity and Coevolution (for more information on the subject see www.circulareconomyforfood.it), embodies the necessary intergenerational pact that we are all called to sign: we are a single interconnected system and we must understand how to learn to dream as an organic whole.
With the In Cibo Civitas project we look for regeneration actors in the territories
The circular economy applied to the food system is at the heart of the “Circular City Selfie” mapping carried out within the In Cibo Civitas project. Carried out by Slow Food Italia in collaboration with the project partners and thanks to the scientific supervision of the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, it promotes research on the realities that have developed a circular business model in the food system.
The subject of the mapping are startups, public and private entities, individual initiatives of an innovative nature that represent experiences of good practices of Circular Economy for Food located in the territories involved in the project: Municipality of Turin and province, Municipality of Cuneo and province, Castelbuono (Pa ) and the province of Palermo, the municipality of Forlì, the municipality of Cesena and its province, the municipality of Borgo San Lorenzo (Fi), the municipality of Florence and its province.
The best cases identified in the territories will be promoted as better practices and included in a Slow Food Editore publication. The deadline to apply is June 2.
Franco Fassio, f.fassio@unisg.it
