La tavola: identità sociale, sapori e saperi

In the last 50 years, food’s panorama, linked to the mutations of our time, has suffered too many modifications. Infact, nowadays, it is not correct to speak about ‘’regional’’ or ‘’local’’ food. After the end of World War II, society has been overtaken by radical changes: increasing abandonment of the countryside, indiscriminate and uncontrollable development of the cities, socioeconomic alterations, migrations towards to the North of Italy, work and working rhythm’s modifications, ancientcrafts’ disappearance, food models and diets’ imposition by mass media, based on ‘’thin’’ and ‘’skinny’’ concepts. These were all crucial factors that quickly had created soil and agricultural landscape’s alterations, generating an erosion of the old food system, surviving for centuries. In particular, the change from industrial society to post-industrial society partly has took food away from his nutritive function. This change has placed food in a more symbolic zone, linking its daily experience to an universe of meanings and values, joined to other and multifaceted experiences. Apulia, with land and sea, hills and plain, drought and dampness, has expressed an articulate and very distinguished food system, in which there are a lot of local havens, symbols of peculiarity in foodstuffs, that in the historic ages and in the material culture had acted asmediator and had shared interesting dietary elaborations. Behind the food, a society, the rural one, a society thathas expired, bequeathing the famous ‘’Mediterranean diet’’, the Apulian food’s historical base. A foods and manners’ fusion has created, through and with the food, a cultural membership, like a symbol of an articulated, united and worthwhile coexistence. The long and slow time of the rural kitchen has been disturbed until it has completely disappeared; social rituals have been broken off, the agricultural calendar makes way for urban calendar, manorfarm’s ovens are shut off, fire and ember are only a distant memory and the big copper pots stay nowadays in the antiquaries’ big storefront.