How will you eat?
During the Covid pandemic, what was tormenting me most was the thought of what would happen in the restart phase post-lockdown. I was concerned about the level of competition the relaunch of businesses would trigger. Worrying in particular about small businesses. And I can say that I wasn’t wrong. I’ve found out today that throughout the two-month break, Mark Zuckerberg and his team were working on finding a solution specifically for them, in fact. Small businesses and the producing/selling of what we need.
The name of Facebook’s project is Shops. The idea is that any small company can easily start an online shop on the social network. “Facebook Shops are free and easy to create. [] When you set up your shop window, it will be visualised on your Facebook and Instagram accounts to start with, and soon on Messenger and WhatsApp as well [ ] we will soon launch new live shopping functions on Facebook and Instagram that will allow you to buy on Live in real time”.
Everything can be dealt with from afar and in real time. But they are off topic. I’m not sure I should be confident that there’ll be a change in direction towards a sustainable and responsible balance. I think it’s important that we refuse services offered by Facebook and Amazon. Why do I think that? Because we have to favour physical proximity, between people, between the city and the countryside, between who produces and who consumes, between who takes care of the landscape and who enjoys it. I am an optimist by nature, but we need a substantial effort to bring us together rather than separate us.
An effort that focuses on the community, even if small and selective. I don’t like to think that everything will come directly to our homes the way it was – due to extenuating circumstances – during the lockdown. I don’t like that, because that has got nothing to do with balance, with a sustainable and responsible prosperity. I prefer to think that city streets will become cycle paths and that delivery men will be replaced with more intelligent services.
Throughout the Covid-19 emergency, with their project Stare Vicini (Stay close), Good Land, for example, experimented with a click and collect service based at the San Orsola Hospital in Bologna: you’d buy on line, but you’d collect at your place of work, i.e. the hospital. Delivering is never sustainable.
The question “How will you eat?” concerns my work. I am responsible for communicating the values of Good Land, an association engaged in rural regeneration by promoting the territories through the production and sale of food products good for people’s health and for the environment.
How we will eat will depend on how much we want to feel terrestrial and not Martian. We need to feed ourselves both physically and mentally, and I think it’s important to identify its intimate value. In his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist and scientist, wrote “We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself”. My wish is that the austerity expecting us would make room for a new awareness of who we are and of our place on planet Earth.
