Food, Culture and Balance: Why Nutrition Cannot Be Reduced to Ideology
At SDA Bocconi School of Management, I joined a roundtable with Michelin-starred Chef Davide Oldani and Professor Nicola Sorrentino as part of the Gruppo Cremonini Academy programme.
The discussion brought together three different perspectives — cuisine, medicine and public policy — around one central question: how should we think about food in a society increasingly divided by nutritional ideologies?
My contribution focused on the role of animal proteins in human evolution, the story of Lucy, the limits of food simplification, and the importance of equilibrium as a cultural principle.
Key Takeaways
- Animal proteins have played an important role in human evolution, physical development, and social organisation.
- Food is not only nutrition: it is also culture, identity, pleasure, knowledge, and responsibility.
- Contemporary food debates are too often dominated by false oppositions such as animal versus plant, natural versus processed, or pleasure versus health.
- The main challenge is not to eliminate complexity, but to help people understand and navigate it.
- Equilibrium is not passive moderation. It is the active ability to combine evidence, tradition, innovation, enjoyment, and personal choice.
- Effective nutrition policies should empower citizens rather than reduce food to labels, warnings or ideological categories.
Three Perspectives Around the Same Table
Discussing nutrition policy with a Michelin-starred chef is an excellent reminder that food cannot be understood through data alone.
Chef Davide Oldani brought the perspective of cuisine: technique, ingredients, creativity, accessibility, and pleasure.
Professor Nicola Sorrentino brought the medical and nutritional perspective: health, prevention, and the relationship between food and individual wellbeing.
My own contribution focused on public policy, food culture, and the need to defend complexity from ideological simplification.
These perspectives are not competing. They are complementary. Health policies become weaker when they ignore culture and pleasure. Cuisine becomes incomplete when it overlooks health and responsibility. Public policy becomes ineffective when it treats people as passive recipients of instructions rather than individuals capable of learning and choosing.
Lucy, Human Evolution and Animal Proteins
The story of Lucy helps us understand why food is much more than a list of nutrients.
Human evolution was shaped by access to energy, protein, tools, cooperation, and increasingly complex forms of food preparation. Animal-source foods contributed to this process by providing dense and highly bioavailable nutrients within changing ecological and social systems. This does not mean that every person should eat in the same way, nor that animal proteins should dominate every diet. It means that their historical, nutritional, and cultural role cannot be erased by contemporary slogans.
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Animal proteins remain part of many balanced dietary patterns and of the culinary traditions of communities around the world. The relevant questions are therefore not ideological — “animal or plant?” — but practical and contextual:
How much? How often? Which foods? Produced in what way? For which person? Within what overall diet and lifestyle?
The Problem with Food Ideology
- Public debate increasingly frames food through simple moral categories.
- Natural is presented as good, while processed is presented as bad.
- Plant-based is presented as progressive, while animal-based is treated as backward.
- Restriction is associated with health, while pleasure is viewed with suspicion.
These oppositions may be effective in communication, but they are often scientifically and culturally misleading. Real diets are shaped by portions, frequency, food quality, nutritional needs, physical activity, metabolic conditions, traditions, affordability, and personal preferences.
A food cannot be evaluated intelligently outside this wider context.
When food policy ignores these variables, it risks replacing education with classification and personal responsibility with administrative prescription.
READ PAGANINI NON RIPETE 315: WE DO NOT NEED A CLASSIFICATION FOR THE UPFS
Equilibrium as a Contemporary Cultural Principle
Equilibrium is often misunderstood as compromise or moderation for its own sake.
It is something more demanding.
Equilibrium is the ability to hold together values that are frequently presented as incompatible:
- health and pleasure;
- tradition and innovation;
- individual choice and collective responsibility;
- scientific evidence and lived experience;
- animal and plant foods;
- nutritional goals and cultural meaning.
It does not require every choice to be identical or perfectly balanced. It requires individuals and institutions to understand trade-offs, adapt to context, and avoid turning one variable into the whole story.
In a culture that rewards certainty, polarisation and easy answers, equilibrium is a form of intellectual discipline.
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From Food Rules to Food Literacy
The future of nutrition policy should not be built around fear, guilt, or simplistic labels. It should strengthen food literacy.
People need better tools to understand what they eat, how much they eat, how often they eat it, and how their choices fit into their wider lifestyle. This means combining nutritional education, transparent information, cultural knowledge, and increasingly personalised support. The goal should not be to design the “perfect diet” for everyone. It should be to give individuals the knowledge and freedom to make better decisions for themselves.
The roundtable at SDA Bocconi confirmed something easy to forget: food connects biology, culture, pleasure, economics, and identity.
No single discipline can fully explain it. That is why dialogue between chefs, physicians, scientists, and policy experts is so valuable.
The battle against food ideology is not a battle against health, sustainability, or innovation. It is a battle against the idea that complex human choices can be reduced to a slogan. The answer is not simplification. The answer is equilibrium.
