Over the past year, I took part in the Master’s in New Food Thinking (MNFT), a program that became much more than an academic journey. It became a space to reflect, to question, and to reconnect with parts of myself that had long remained unspoken or fragmented.
I began the year with quiet questions. Not the kind that demand immediate answers, but the ones that live inside you, shaping the way you move through the world. Throughout my life, I’ve often felt divided, scattered across experiences, responsibilities, identities. MNFT didn’t fix or resolve these questions, but it gave me tools, language, and space to begin weaving the fragments into a more coherent whole.
This reflection and the project that emerged from it are the result of that process.
Starting from the Ground
My final project, titled “Con i capelli sciolti” (with hair let loose), began by looking inward at my family, and specifically, the women within it. There are eleven of us, spanning generations. Our connections are built around food: through rituals, recipes, gardens, and kitchens.
I grew up in Ospedaletto, a small countryside town, in a house with a modest garden. It’s where I learned how to care for vegetables, how to make cappelletti filled with candied cedar, and how food can carry memory. It’s also where I learned subtly, through observation and repetition, what it meant to be a woman in my family.
With the birth of my younger sister two years ago, I found myself asking:
What do I want to pass on? What knowledge is worth leaving behind?
Food was the starting point. However, the project quickly evolved into more than just recipes; it became a reflection on learning, care, and relationality.
Food as a Relational Practice
One of the most transformative aspects of New Food Thinking program was understanding food design not just as a method, but as a relational practice space where research, intention, and play can coexist. It reframed food not only as sustenance or a cultural expression, but also as a medium for interaction, dialogue, and experimentation.
Through food, I began to see how learning happens in relationship, not in isolation. A recipe is never just a set of instructions. It’s a conversation between memory, technique, tradition, and improvisation. Cooking with others became a metaphor for a different kind of knowledge-making: embodied, collective, and open-ended.
On Identity, Order, and Mixing
This year also involved a deeper internal journey. I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive and Depressive Disorder, which helped me understand my long-standing relationship with structure, control, and repetition. I’ve always been drawn to taxonomy, categorizing, labeling, and organizing, perhaps as a way to bring order to the uncertainty of life.
But the Master in New Food Thinking experience challenged this tendency. I began to appreciate mixture over separation, fluidity over categorization. Just as in the kitchen, where unexpected combinations can yield the most decadent flavors, I learned that complexity in identity and in life is not something to fear, but something to work with.
There’s a line that stayed with me throughout the year:
I may still be an unripe zucchini, but I’m ready to be mixed with garlic.
Objects, Archives, and Communities
Beyond food, I found metaphors in the most minor things. I’ve always made necklaces from discarded beads, broken, mismatched, or forgotten. Each one is a collection of small elements brought into a new relationship with one another. They remind me of people. Of communities. Of how we build new structures from remnants.
In that sense, my personal archive, once a private collection of memories and objects, began to transform into an “anarchive”: something alive, relational, always in process.
Toward a Relational Future
If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that community isn’t a fixed structure; it’s something you cultivate and nurture. Slowly. Through food, conversation, and shared time. I’ve come to think of relationality as something both fragile and powerful. It’s the dough so tightly woven that there’s no longer a distinction between “you” and “me,” only us.
This approach doesn’t provide clear outcomes or roadmaps. But it offers a direction. A desire to continue feeding what has been nurtured: ideas, relationships, and questions.
I Am What I’ve Lived
I’m not just a student, or a cook, or a daughter. I am all of these and more:
A sister. A gastronome. A set of bacteria. An exceptionally organized animal.
A being shaped by others, by plants, by gestures shared around the table.
As I close this chapter, I offer a final image:
The eggs around my yolk are no longer mine alone. They are shared broken, scared, hopeful. Ready, and not. Alive, at the proper distance.
Thank you for sharing the table with me.
