Abstract

Feeding, in its primary connotation of physiological answer to the need for survival, represents a «common social fact» around which men and societies organize their entire existence. Nevertheless, feeding is not only nutrition, materiality, organization of work or domestication of the environment. At the same time it is culture, ideology, relational nature, metaphor. This means that if alimentary habits generally refer and involve the entire body, on the other hand they affect a specific part of it: the head or, if you prefer, the mind. In this sense the function of food is not only to satisfy hunger or appetite: in fact other co-head finalities detach, both individual and collective and they are even more interesting. Therefore through the act of eating we can recover afflictions of our mind, satisfy solitudes, alleviate discouragements, string together alliances, reveal conditions of social privilege, exalt hierarchies of class and gender, underline events, carve out portions of geographical space promoting them to the position of the best of imaginable places in which we have the possibility to feel sated.