What will you eat?
I would like to thank Michelangelo Pistoletto for launching this initiative I’m very pleased to take part in. With the Third Paradise, Pistoletto has in fact been inviting us for years to reflect on this perceptive divide between the human species and the rest of nature we keep entertaining; as if there were a “us” and “something else”. The scar I would like all of us to carry on our physical and social body after this pandemic is an increased awareness that we need to overcome this perceptive divide. We are nature and nature is us. The virus has upset our economies, societies and lives, striking when we were already fragile and restless about environmental and ecological balances. I therefore think that it is our individual and collective responsibility to have this level of increased and heightened awareness.
What can we do? Here at MAXXI we have decided to start a reflection on the ecology of creation, i.e. to challenge the world of art, creativity, photography to make their own the themes Pistoletto sensed a long time ago. There are then concrete behaviours each of us can adopt: there are quite a few suggestions in the song by Subsonica, I’ll choose one, “what will you eat?”
We need to feed on food, but also on emotions. Let’s feed ourselves with brave, radical and at the same time gentle thoughts, which help us develop the part of our brain leading us to collaborate and cooperate rather than compete. And talking about actual food, let’s eat less meat: I’m not a vegetarian, but I’ve considerably reduced the amount of meat in my diet. We only have to look at the whole supply chain, for example at the deforestation to grow cereals to feed animals (themselves treated with oestrogens and antibiotics). They were all unhappy before landing on our tables. Here it is, a concrete choice all of us can make is to reduce our consumption of meat and make sure that the one we do buy comes from animals properly reared.
