Theme of the Year

The theme of the year 2011

In the grand landscape of present day cuisine, fruit seems to take a secondary role, perhaps because it appears at the end of the meal, all too frequently in competition with other foods (cheese and dessert), or because it is eaten outside meals, in mid morning or mid afternoon, or sometime made into juice. In the human culture, however, fruit has always played a primary role; every corner of the earth has fruit trees that man learned to use during his long evolution. Every single fruit has its history, sometimes even legends, but one thing is sure: man needs not only fruit, but a large variety of it (“nourishment biodiversity”). Today, the kinds of fruit that we eat are severely reduced even in comparison with fifty years ago, and only a few varieties are industrially cultivated in order to satisfy specific commercial needs.

The present problems of a fruit based human diet, which the Academy’s Study Center Franco Marenghi has identified, are essentially twofold: the almost complete disappearance of food biodiversity and the reduction in healthy “extra-nutritional” features. The highly diverse kinds of fruit that were used in many culinary and gastronomic traditions are by and large forgotten today. For this reason, in 2011 the Study Center has decided to focus on fruit based cuisine with special emphasis on those preparations where fruit is a qualifying ingredient. It should be added that such recipes, once adequately rediscovered, fit quite comfortably into post-modern cuisine, where harmony goes hand in hand with sensorial contrasts, those of sweet-salty-sour, where fruit becomes an important element of tradition’s renewal. In our times, we find fruit as a component of situations and traditions that just a few decades ago appeared unchangeable and that we are now called upon to document and interpret in order to safeguard traditions, by favoring their improvements.