The culture of taste, the theme of the 2019 edition of Italian cooking week in the world, has become a food education project involving children, parents and teachers from 50 Italian schools around the world. And this project is now narrated in a video in which children from 3 to 18 years old from nine schools in Beijing and Tirana, from Pointe Noire to Fort Worth, from Sao Paulo to Istanbul, illustrate their relationship with flavours.
At the invitation of the Foreign Ministry, the Fondazione Reggio Children – Centro Malaguzzi Foundation has promoted this initiative, which was then carried out by Pause – Atelier Dei Sapori.
All participating schools received a unique screenplay constructed with questions on taste and flavour that triggered reflections on the knowledge of food, the relationships that are built around food and the extraordinary variety of Italian cuisine and its ingredients, a large open-air laboratory of scents, flavours, aromas, harmonies and contrasts. The children have acquired an awareness of the work and time needed to prepare food that arrives on their table and have explored the emotional ties that food often evokes.
The materials produced by the schools have thus formed a sort of inventory and collective biography of taste, in a video that appears as a mosaic of voices.
While at the Italian School in Tirana the children discovered how wine is created from the grape harvest, in Sao Paulo children and adults talked about recipes and the ‘family taste’, each of them bringing a dish prepared at home, in Congo they explored ‘friendly tastes’, while in China they built a herbarium and in Tehran an atelier with a chef on cappelletti-panzanelle was created.
