The Food Innovation Program 2.0 is arriving, a comprehensive educational platform that offers a selection of unique and innovative initiatives, targeting students and professionals, designed to inspire and empower a new generation of creative and responsible food entrepreneurs and food innovators. Elisa Bedin, former student of the program is one of them:
Well, if you look online about what’s the Food Innovation Program (hereafter called FIP) is, you can read about the program, the lectures, the surprises of the new edition, as well as the memories of the students of last year.
Speaking of which, I’m exactly one of those, who decided to join the Program in March 2015, and now I’m a research fellow at the Future Food Institute in Bologna.
If you ask me which are the main take away, discoveries that I’ve learned, I can tell you – between the joke and seriously – that I’m now having breakfast with scrambled eggs and sandwich bacon; or that the Italian cuisine is certainly excellent, but also other countries have their own gastronomical secrets.
On one side, travelling abroad is a fantastic way to get to know new cultures; on the other, the traditional multiple ways of selecting, preparing and cooking meals, is what gave to Italy the grandeur during the centuries. The diversity in the regional cuisines, the exquisite number of certified products with denominations of origin is a witness of the passion and the pleasure of the hundreds of people that live the space of the kitchen as a place to experiment.
Moreover, what is most important is that the only way to be familiar with other gastronomical cultures, is to share the food around the table. In fact, in Reggio Emilia – where there was the HQ of the FIP – we had the space called Officucina: a mix of kitchen equipment and a long table.
Here’s the space where the students from all over the world used to have meals together. The key take away of the Program I think is this. How food can bring everyone around the table is a marvellous surprise. That’s the unique moment when traditions and innovations come together and the commensality can spark.
