When food becomes well-being

Presentation of  the book: “When food becomes well-being“, a book edited by Paolo Corvo and Gianpaolo Fassino, Franco Angeli, Milano 2015.

The volume is an opportunity for reflection on the many scientific threads that bind the food and nutrition to the welfare and quality of life. There are a plurality of researches conducted in the field of sociology, anthropology and medicine which, taken together, contribute to outline how the food is one of the elements that today most influence in defining the quality of life of individuals and communities. Over the last decade, the studies about quality of life, on the one hand, and the complex of gastronomic sciences, on the other hand, have experienced a remarkable development in Italy, but still lacked the studies designed to investigate in detail the relationship that binds together the two disciplines.

The essays of the book are a series of theoretical and methodological reflections, combined with some significant experiences of researches on the field, that contribute to return to the reader an updated picture of how food and eating practices are intimately linked with social well-being, quality of life and its perception in the complex society of the present time. A plurality of points of view, certainly not exhaustive, but representative of the complexity of the issues on which social scientists and gastronomes are called to reflect and take action. Eating disorders, lifestyles in deep and rapid transformation, sustainability of choices about food are just some of the topics discussed by book and that do understand that the link between food and quality of life is not a ineffective academic exercise, but a real interpretative contribution for today and tomorrow.

Speakers:

Filomena Maggino Professor of Social Statistics and Multivariate Statistical Analysis at the University of Florence (full-professorship). Coordinator of the International II level master “QoLexity. Measuring, Monitoring and Analysis of Quality of Life and its Complexity” (University of Florence). Editor-in-Chief of Social Indicators Research journal (Springer). President and co-founder of the Italian Association for Quality-of-Life Studies (AIQUAV). Past-president of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS). Component of the following committees: Scientific Committee for the Measurement of Wellbeing established at Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT – BES project); Expert Group on Quality of life, established at Eurostat, European Commission. Expert Group on “European Research Area” Survey, established at the DG for Research and Innovation – European Commission. Expert Group, reviewing the questionnaire for the European Quality of Life Survey, established at Eurofound. Global Project Research Network on Measuring the Progress, established at OECD.

Giampaolo Nuvolati, Associate Professor at the University of Milan Bicocca (Italy) where he teaches Urban Sociology and has developed and coordinated several theoretical studies and empirical research on social indicators and quality of life. He has co-operated to many European research projects oriented to define and to measure living conditions in urban contexts (for example the Project “Urban Indicators” for the EU Committee of the Regions, the Project “Guidebook on Using Indicators for Social Cohesion”, for the Council of Europe; the Project “Urban Development Programs, Urban Governance, Social Inclusion & Sustainability” for the  EU – DG Research). In 2003-2004, he was member of the Italian Governmental Guarantee Commission on Statistical Information for the Program: “Statistics for Metropolitan Areas, Proposals for an Integrated System” where he studied and compared different approaches for analysing resident and non-resident metropolitan populations. He has developed studies concerning the relationships between spatial and temporal mobility, between services accessibility and quality of life in local communities, between sociology, urban spaces and literature (The flâneur in the city: from Baudelaire to the postmodernists, 2006).