Identità Milano 2013

February 10th-12th at MiCo - Milano Congressi. The revolutionary value of respect

Pier-Angelini, the dish of Massimiliano e Raffaele Alajmo symbol of Identità Golose 2013

Our journey, at Identità Golose, continues down the road taken during the 2010 edition when, in the congress centre in Via Gattamelata, “The luxury of simplicity” went on stage, focusing on the essentiality of cuisine, also in light of the rising economic crisis. The concept was restated the following year as we understood what was in front of us wasn’t a passing crisis, a sort of “stop and go”, but a total distortion, so much so that when we’ll savour wealth, once again, it will not be that which we have so far known. We will not return to the splendour of the Zero Years (and the years before), when the daily imperative was splashing money around, surprising and rejoicing while searching for the sensational, an uncontrolled self, an acting with little conscience, without asking oneself what lied ahead.

Indeed, many who have acted in this way cannot be directly blamed. They remind me of those who, when putting off on a boat, are captured by the current, and if they don’t have enough strength to escape it, they prefer to accept it, to follow it in the hope that it will lose its strength, sooner or later, and leave them. Something of the sort happened to most, blinded, stunned by the bad examples that arrived (and still do) from the worlds that count and hold the destiny of the planet, the economies and politics, the finance and religious fanaticism. The bad examples that are dragging everything and everyone down.

Today, there are no doubts on the width and depth of the crisis and, while with Identità 2012 we went “Beyond the market”, both the economic and the food one, in order to react everywhere and with every idea and means to the disaster, with the ninth edition of the congress, it is time to look at the absolute heart of what we are going through. We need to understand how we can transform a society based on insane consumption, abundant for few, and deceptive for most, into a more substantial and horizontal society, with a larger control from below. In other words, we need to find a way to give a future (and in a way, a present too), to those who today don’t have one, and can’t even foresee one.

We, at Identità Golose, believe it is urgent to place, at the heart of every action, a value too often forgotten: respect. Respect for nature, for raw materials, for customers and their money, and the respect of customers for chefs and restaurateurs who are freelancers and face their risks. There’s also the respect for ourselves and the ideals that were ours in the beginning, and that often, growing up, we have forgotten, “because everybody does so”, and one compromise after the other we have arrived where we are now.

And there’s also the respect for a truth that is not only our own, but that of others too. We cannot preach, look for and love fusion cuisine in its most various forms, feed on it, exchange tips on techniques, not only and not always on ingredients, without being “fusion” in our daily life. There are no more self-sufficient people or countries, not even the Scandinavians, with their artic revolution.

The exchange is continuous and global and needs to be studied, trained, digested, understood, since laws do not stop migrations, and without truth, without respect for the truth and the desperation of others, one ends up being overwhelmed.

This is no longer the time for lies and silly games with food, for tricks that are now pointless, because they lack in substance, farsightedness and decisiveness. In the same way as you can’t beat the crisis by taking an aspirin, so in the restaurant scene you cannot propose, once again, patterns that by now are worn-out. Of course, we will always have oases of happiness and extremely rich people going around the world, able to afford astronomical bills, but how long can a market last, when hopped up by the happy few who today perhaps choose Italy and tomorrow will move, who knows where, on a whim?

The real challenge is generating a new wealth with food and good eating and making sure that this is well distributed, in an equal way. Let’s start by respecting one another with vigorous concreteness.
 

Paolo Marchi

 

  | published on 02-08-2012 in 2012 PRESENTATION