Food Innovation is a Global Mission
It’s touch-and-go in Italy before I take off again. It has been a whirlwind month, without even a pause. First stop: the Netherlands, from Amsterdam to Maastricht and then Wageningen. We saw incredible spots where technology meets gourmet cooking, where the fight against food waste turns into an entrepreneurial opportunity, and where culinary “pop-ups” flourish in urban co-cooking spaces. Then it was off to the United States. First Boston and New York, then a trip to the mecca of innovation-lovers like me: Silicon Valley. Google, Airbnb, Facebook, IDEO and many other icons of innovation welcomed us inside their general headquarters allowing us experience first hand the starting points of the disruptive ideas that so greatly impact our daily lives.
This “we” that I’m referring to isn’t the “royal we” leftover from a stroke of narrative egoism: it’s truly a community that is on the move. Coaches, storytellers, staff and above all the talents of the Food Innovation Program, the Master which the Future Food Institute, together with the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and the Institute for the Future of Palo Alto, conceived in order to cultivate the best food-talents of tomorrow. The Master, already in its second year, started in September and includes a research phase: the Food Innovation Global Mission. The idea to organize a genuine Mission was inspired by EXPO. During the first edition of the Food Innovation Program the international research dimension was aided by the Universal Exposition that literally brought the entire world to our country. Without this once-in-a-lifetime event, we felt there was a gaping void that needed to be filled and so we decided to continue this experience of deep cultural exchange and global mapping of the latest innovations by creating this Global Mission with the purpose of discovering the most important innovations inside the food system, sharing the experience with diverse people who have different perspectives. At the end of the trip, the hope is that each of our young talents will have assimilated ideas, thoughts, flavors, and colors, mixing them constantly with their colleagues to create a genuine bazaar of projects and visions.
60 days. 14 students. 12 nationalities. 8 countries. The mathematical sequence of our Global Mission unfolds like so, from one continent to the other, always on the hunt for innovation that is revolutionizing the global food system. We Europeans often forget — or we take it for granted — but around the globe borders between countries still exist: some of our students had to acquire visas for each country we have visited and will visit. Others won’t even be able to complete the entire trip. Above all, the purpose of the Global Mission is for students of our Master to observe the worlds so different from theirs. Only then, we believe, will they be able to appreciate diversity as a value that both is taught and transmitted — a value that builds, that serves to enhance, rather than divide.
The study and research that happens in the field, thanks to the aid of our project partners, allows the young talents of FIP to experience food-making on site. Our stops include some of the most interesting gastronomic corners of the world: Singapore, China, Japan, South Korea, the UK and, of course, the Netherlands and the United States. Naturally on the list is also our beloved Italy. Each talent has a project and a mission to accomplish. Each one has that hunger for ideas and discovery that are rarely retained with age.
To meet Food Heros. To identify Food Icons. To explore the Food Rituals of the world. These are the main goals of this trip. The most important thing we’ve packed in our suitcases is the belief that the future isn’t a vague and distant idea: the future is now and needs to be explored as in-depth as possible, and to disperse it to the corners of the world who have missed the innovation train.
Globalization has inevitably widened the scope of the global business vision: nobody in today’s world can be allowed to think of a physical market limited to boxes of national products. Excluding the web of anti-global political rhetoric that is progressing in the West, most people in the world enthusiastically greet the collapse of walls and barriers between populations. This doesn’t mean that there are not risks, dangers and negative consequences that occur in the process of enlarging the playing field. Today, every business must understand how to valorize the local territory within which its idea — its project — was conceived. And not out of fear for some presidential candidate with a too-blonde wig and an anger button on his forehead, but because that is what the people want and ask for.
People appreciate globalization for the way it allows for a broadening of horizons. Opening up our so-called national boxes means bringing products, ideas, ingredients, goods and foods from the market of one village to that of another. From east to west, across the world, to globalize an idea doesn’t mean to alter the character, or dilute the essence in a clumsy attempt to speak the language of business. To make an idea, a project, or a product global means to study each aspect of it and to make it speak it with gestures that are able to communicate to anyone willing to listen and learn.
The Global Mission of our Food Innovation Program is all of this and more: the aim to understand the global to give value to the local. It is to explore the world to understand a village. It is to experience innovation in order to communicate it through a universal language: food.
Let the adventure continue!
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