Salute e cultura alimentare globalizzata

Today’s meeting, held in the prestigious setting of the Orto Botanico of the University of Palermo thanks to Professor Paolo Inglese, will concern issues relating to nutrition and its social, economic, health and political implications. As a physicia, I must admit that health professionals tend to consider our sector of knowledge as if it were self-contained, capable of expressing all the cultural options and all possible training and practical information. This is clearly a delusion: in a world in which the quantity and complexity of knowledge that accumulates and the need to articulate the relationships within different areas and to put them into practice is increasingly greater, only a multidisciplinary model of communication will succeed in giving the quality of information that is necessary for training complete professionals.

The didactic structures, to which the legislation, the habit and, sometimes, the tendency towards cultural provincialism force us, often do not allow to provide our students with the infinite facets of useful information coming from different cultural backgrounds. The meaning of a workshop like this is to compare a series of skills that, in a degree course or in a graduate school, would not be possible to find all together. Unfortunately, we cannot invent didactic schemes outside of what the legislation forces us to do, but if it is possible, it is done in a very limited way. A workshop in itself is a free structure and, for this, Professor Silvio Buscemi should be congratulated for being able to combine professionalism and skills that come from completely different paths.