Address

Abstract

The implementation of strategies that are industrially orientated in food production is causing a rapid and dramatic modification of the approach to agricultural issues. We are witnessing a sort of shift in paradigm, an abrupt and considerable change in duties and a re-organisation of the way of thinking about agricultural products, which are now simply considered as industrial “goods”. Such “goods” are deprived of their status of living organisms, when cultivated or bred, and their intrinsic biological nature is denied, when processed, transformed, sold and consumed. The perception of food as something full of nutritional requisites and biologically-related added value is, nowadays, fading away.

You will remember that one or two of the wise among our forefathers — wise in fact, although not in the world’s esteem — had ventured to doubt the propriety of the term “improvement” as applied to the progress of our civilisation.

— The colloquy of Monos and Una by Edgar Allan Poe