Food as a form of care: designing social innovative processes and practices

Food in Italian culture is traditionally considered a form of care for others and, by definition, conviviality, and these concepts extend beyond the stages of preparation and consumption. If we also include the stages of cultivation, production and processing, the concept of care potentially expands far beyond caring for people. While the scientific and grey literature on food and social innovation is rich and extensive, there is still room to explore the relationship between food and care, especially regarding the contribution of design in making food a tool of care for people, the environment and cities. Building on these premises, the paper moves from the case of a social innovation policy in Milan to construct a preliminary conceptual interpretation of the relationship between food and the notion of care, exploring how design contributes to strengthening this relationship through shaping strategies and services and of empowering people with entrepreneurial and creative skills, nurturing an innovation culture in society at large. The study builds on the analysis of 7 cases incubated within the program The School of Neighborhoods, promoted by the Municipality of Milan and designed by a consortium of partners including the Polimi Desis Lab of Politecnico di Milano. With the purpose of laying the basis for a conceptual framework to be adopted in ONFoods (a project funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan in Italy with the aim of taking a substantial step toward the sustainability of food systems) the authors introduce an interpretation of the cases in which food is a way to: i) care for diversity and inclusion; ii) care for the neighborhood; iii) care for the environment; iv) care for the quality of work. The discourse around the case studies benefits from having been developed in a vibrant urban context in terms of food policies that help shape and expand the city’s capacity for experimentation and innovation. The paper discusses the contribution of design in reshaping the notion of care through food, both in supporting the presented social innovation projects as well as in infrastructuring the scouting and incubation process that led to the generation of public value.