There are as many futures as there are people and maybe even more if one considers that each of us face many options
Warren Belasco, Meals to Come

These are the words summarizing our first critical discussion with Miriam. Miriam Lueck Avery is the research director at IFTF and spent the first three days of this really promising 10-months path in Reggio Emilia with the students.

We are all potential change makers. Technologies are crucial in creating new possibilities, but only people have the opportunity to determine the future. And the more people are different among each other, the more we can create infinite change options. The reason is because when we talk about change, we talk about disruption as well. Disrupting for recreating, aiming to reach an ideal state align with a bigger system.

At this point the link with food came quite naturally. Food is relationship. Food shapes us and bounds us with our peers. That’s the reason why Miriam had immediately a deep focus on food experience, segmenting it in five moments: production, distribution, manufacturing, shopping and eating. The question is, what are the urgencies and challenges with each of these moments and how can we fix them?

Over the past 50 years we’ve gotten more out of less: we have been looking so hard for intensification in production, manufacturing standardization, efficiency in distribution, centralized shopping experiences and convenience than now we need to close a huge gap. What is the final price of it all? How far can we, the eaters, go to try to save time and money through our shopping and eating behaviors?

There is a physical human health limit to convenience, and it’s called obesity. We need to think about it. What are we going to gain from this convenience we are so hardly seeking? Nothing. We need to go from “on-the-go” eating to mindful food experience, decentralizing shopping and once again placing the human at the center. This is the role of seeds of disruption. We need to profoundly recognize what exactly we need to disrupt, by analyzing signals and formulating insights, in order to understand how to use technology to remake the future of food.

By Chiara Cecchini, FIP Student, Class of 2015