Life and work. A reconciled dyad

“We are what we eat”: this affirmation can be naturally explained, even if its value it is not so obvious. In fact, Roberto Cipriani, anthropologist and nutritionist, in the afternoon of Friday, March 4^th, 2016, in the estabilishment of Stafer, held a training course: he discussed health and wellbeing at work. In this view, we can remember the words of the American anthropologist Marvin Harris, when he affirmed food is “good to eat” when it is “good to think”: also this statement, as the previous one, includes a reflective spirit so much profound to appear totally simple, not to say obvious. On the other hand, behind these words, concepts and knowledge rather innovative and for nothing trivial are concealed. Nutrition is the most generous matter in the progress of human thought: food is the fertile ground where human culture celebrated the urgency to recover tradition as well as the necessity to “go beyond” and innovate. Beyond these considerations and the identification of this training event as an important social moment, we can paraphrase Harris (“healthy food is the one leading people to wellbeing”) and claim food is not only a matter of habit or convention, but is rather a way of life, a forma mentis, a factual mindset where multiple areas participate: social, environmental, cultural, healthy and many others. Food, exactly as all the human instruments for living, is firmly included in a systemic perspective. For this reason, in a company speaking about nutrition is equivalent to “talking about wellbeing for people’s living”. In this way, we highlight how everything is interconnected and intercontextualized: work is not different from other contexts in which man is dimensioned. Consequentially, talking about food with a nutritionist in Stafer can be considered an innovation almost reaching provocation in the opinion of many, but it is instead a way to reconcile nonexistent differences between food and company: food is ourselves, company is our life. Real innovation consists in removing everything creating classifications and distinctions, differences and demarcations, not to say delimitations, which creep among persons limiting their re-existential structures: both physical and mental ones. The world we explore everyday presents a myriad of symbols and systems to codify and interpret and it is precisely starting from this powerful act of presence we can identify ourselves from others, even if we are part of an everything which is world and life: the garden we cultivate everyday and from which a generative thought germinates projecting man in the harmony of simple things. It is recalling simple things that food plays an important role in the company, too, which is the place of life, where we can decide to give life to food not only by talking with a nutritionist, but also cultivating it in a garden, recalling that “culture of life” able to connect any context and person in the present and, at the same time, in that “Everything and Everywhere” which our friend and director Thomas Torelli masterly illustrated in his recent and extraordinary movie “Un Altro Mondo”. Not casually, his next movie will talk about food.