Danny’s Community Kitchen in Mussomeli leverages food to regenerate abandoned village
Since the late 1800s, Italians have been leaving rural communities seeking employment and better socio-economic conditions in either the more industrialized cities or abroad. Today, more than 5 million Italian citizens live overseas, and more than 80 million people outside of Italy claim Italian ancestry. While this incredible diaspora, the largest voluntary emigration in recorded history, has led to the global dissemination of Italian food and culture, it has also left a plethora of abandoned communities in its wake. As a result, 70% of Italy’s towns now have fewer than 5,000 residents.
These towns, many of which have cultural, artistic, and architectural roots extending back a millennium, were first born through agriculture. Traditional, small family farms were the genesis of both these communities and Italy’s now enviable gastronomic excellence. But as family plots subdivided over time, economic conditions worsened, and the industrial revolution lured workers to the cities, these farms, and this agrarian lifestyle, were left behind. But this phenomenon may now be changing.
Several enterprising ideas have been launched over the past few years with hopes of enticing people to return to these villages. Some towns are selling empty houses for the symbolic price of 1 Euro, some are even giving abandoned houses away free — if the new owners agree to renovate them. Some towns are offering payments or tax incentives to people taking up residency. But one innovative approach addresses not only the abandoned properties but also food insecurity, unemployment, and economic regeneration.
The healing power of food
The Covid-19 pandemic still crippling global economies and healthcare systems a full year after its discovery has had a compounded effect on these rural communities. Inhabited primarily by older populations and often located further from healthcare facilities and other forms of institutional support, the seclusion of these communities has intensified vulnerabilities, specifically access to nutritious food. But this crowdfunding project has a novel way to address the nexus of these issues — community kitchen.
Community Kitchens, groups of people who come together to prepare free or affordable meals for a specific community, have been around for a while. This one however will provide the additional benefits of job training and economic empowerment. This beautiful idea will bring youth from across Europe into this forgotten hill-top town in rural Sicily, connecting them with a Mediterranean community steeped in agricultural tradition, and providing hands-on culinary training so that they may continue to disperse both Italy’s rich culinary heritage as well as the know-how and benefits of the Community Kitchen model. And it does all of this while preparing nourishing meals for vulnerable community members and supporting the economic regeneration of a once abandoned village.
Everything intersects through the power of food. Food is life, energy, and nourishment; it is the vehicle of values, culture, symbols, and identity. And in the case of this project, food is a means to employment, security, and economic empowerment. If we are to solve the challenges of our time, we need more ideas like this. We need to look at our problems not as isolated issues but rather as interconnected and intertwined to people, place, and the planet. When we adjust our mindset and approach to one of Integral Ecology, we open the door to bigger, more sustainable, and more impactful solutions.
In a world torn apart by this terrible pandemic that is bringing the global economy to its knees and upsetting the certainties of many, and where climate change will complicate even more the battle for social justice, there is an even greater need for new models of development, new systems of thought, a new way of conceiving man’s presence on earth and his interaction with it. From an entropic crisis such as the one we are experiencing, one never comes out the same. It is up to us to understand what this being different consists of and what direction to give to this new and more than ever necessary restart.
With Future Food Mediterraneo, we are also designing a campus where one can learn a new kind of sociality and live the concept of integral ecology, of which the Mediterranean Diet is a concrete example. Everything is connected — environmental protection and human health, regeneration of the territory and citizens’ well-being, social justice, and climate change and we want to aggregate all those brave explorers who see in the regeneration of rural areas and small villages the starting point to build a more thriving society.
We are not alone, the movement is growing and a positive wind of regeneration is sweeping across the Mediterranean involving brilliant minds, visionary entrepreneurs, and activists.
Danny McCubbin, pioneer and powerhouse in the social gastronomy movement, after having been for 17 years with Jamie Oliver, after playing a crucial role in the School Dinners and Jamie’s Fifteen apprenticeship program as culture manager, helping to bring Jamie’s food ethos to life across the business; ambassador for Italy’s San Patrignano, the world’s most successful drug rehabilitation community and believing in the healing power of food is now devoting heart and soul to an ambitious new project.
I look forward to visiting Danny’s Community Kitchen in Mussomeli (Sicily) and hope this project inspires more equally innovative and integral approaches to transforming the world for the better. Perhaps these forgotten villages will be re-born into the cities of the future — once again connected to the land and community.
👉 Please consider supporting this valuable project here 🇮🇪.
