Gastronomy is Not About Haute Cuisine

Issue Vol. 2 — Urban Food Systems and the Loss of Connection

1. Food as a Commodity — and the Loss of Human Connection

Food should be treated as a human right: something everyone should access with dignity.

But in many modern societies, it is treated more like a commodity - something to buy instead of something to be shared. Knowledge about food was once passed down through everyday life — from grandparents, neighbours, and local communities. People learned how to cook seasonal ingredients, preserve food, avoid waste, and to sit down together, sharing a meal while talking about the day. Food was never simply about nutrition. It builds relationships,  carries culture across generations, and connects us to place and seasonality. It’s part of everyday life, how people come together, without really thinking about it. So in that sense, food is something we share. Even if it doesn’t feel that way.

Source: adapted from Vivero-Pol (2017), reproduced from course materials

Under neoliberalism, food has increasingly come to be evaluated through profitability. Knowledge and everyday practices that were once shared within communities have gradually been absorbed into the market economy, and food — once part of everyday life — has increasingly become something to purchase as a service or commodity.

As a result, access to good food has come to depend less on mutual support and more on individual purchasing power, while many of the meanings and values once embedded in food have been pushed to the margins.

And you can feel the gap this creates: corporations tend to overlook food’s public and social role, while the public sector doesn’t always deal with how the market really works. This is why food ends up caught somewhere in between. 2. UPFs and the City Have you heard of ultra-processed foods—often called UPFs? The NOVA food classification system divides what we eat into four groups: unprocessed or minimally processed foods, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods, and ultra-processed foods.

Source: compiled by the author

Even if we recognise the negative associations around terms like ‘junk food’, ‘fast food’, or ‘UPFs’, the differences between them are not always clear. A product can be labelled ‘organic, for example’ — made without pesticides or chemical fertilisers—and still be ultra-processed if it’s heavily industrial and full of additives. One of the simplest ways to recognise a UPF is to ask a basic question: ‘could you make it at home?’ Michael Pollan once wrote, ‘Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.’ And it is true. Even our grandparents’ generation often reacts instinctively to these kinds of industrial foods - ‘You eat that?’ ‘That sounds awful!’ Their reactions can be surprisingly telling, they say something. Of course, living abroad and discovering different food cultures is deeply valuable. But perhaps the evolution of food culture isn’t just about technology endlessly improving and optimising what we eat. It might come more from encounters, between people, and between cultures rooted in different lands. At the same time, foods now labelled as UPFs didn’t appear out of nowhere. Many foods we now associate with being unhealthy— hamburgers or pancakes, for instance—originally began as dishes prepared carefully by hand. It is easy to forget that they came from everyday cooking. The problem lies in how these products are now developed by large corporations, mainly for increasing  profit. They are engineered to reach the ‘bliss point’—the precise mix of sugar, fat and salt that makes them hard to stop eating. The issue is not only health, but also how present they are. Well, they are everywhere, and available at any time. And as they spread, traditional ingredients, local dishes and entire food cultures are slowly pushed aside.

‘Convenience’ and ‘saving time’ are not the same thing.

UPFs remove the time spent cooking—and with it, the time spent thinking about someone else. Food becomes shaped more and more by cheapness, speed, and mass supply. It is also important to distinguish between processed foods and ultra-processed foods. Processed foods are often seen as the problem, but the issue is not simply the presence of additives. In many ways, the history of food is also a history of processing. Edo, for example, grew into a large consumer city, and with that came major developments in logistics and preservation. Seasonings like soy sauce and miso became part of everyday cooking. They were too labour-intensive for most households to make themselves, but they supported urban food culture. In this sense, processed foods carry generations of knowledge and skill.

These issues cannot be reduced to individual health alone.

In cities shaped by deep inequality, lower-income communities are often pushed towards UPFs because they are cheap, convenient and always available. What emerges is a kind of paradox, where poverty and obesity exist side by side. In Taiwan, for example, childhood obesity has become an even greater concern than in the United States, partly because of after-school fried street food and sugar-heavy drinks. At National Food Collection Day, organised by an Italian food bank, the pattern was clear. Most of what was donated was shelf-stable: pasta, tomato sauce, canned goods. Fresh, high-quality ingredients were rarely there. What does this show? For many low-income communities, calories are reaching people. But quality — and dignity — are not. Yet innovative approaches are already taking shape across the world.

In South Korea, ‘Green Food Zones’ limit the sale of junk food within a 200-metre radius of schools. Several countries in Latin America have introduced black warning labels for foods high in fats, sugars and salt.

An extremely appetising French biscuit package alongside a Nutri-Score rating of E, the lowest nutritional grade for food products

3. Reimagining the City Today, around 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and this is expected to reach nearly 68% by 2050. Food is no longer separate from the question of the city, but firmly part of it. This is not simply about producing more food because ‘there isn’t enough food’. The world already produces enough food. The question is who can access what kind of food, and under what conditions. Cities were once closely tied to the land around them, sharing responsibility for how food was produced and distributed. A city was never only  a place of consumption. It also helped keep food systems in motion. Today, that connection has loosened. Production and consumption are often far apart, both in distance and in how they are organised. Food is produced in one place and sent elsewhere, while many people in cities rely on industrially made products. Cities have shifted towards consumption. In everyday urban life, there are more ‘food choices’ than ever. Food is available at any time, and delivery services keep expanding. But at the same time, many people know very little about where their food comes from, how it travels, or where it goes after it is thrown away. The chance to handle ingredients has become rare. Cooking takes less time, or disappears altogether. Waste is easy to ignore. Food systems were once circular: production → consumption → waste → soil → and back again. Cities and rural areas stayed connected, and waste could still return to the land. Today, the system mostly follows a one-way track: production → distribution → consumption → disposal. What matters here is that food waste is not simply ‘wastefulness’; it happens when the cycle breaks.

Cities should not only be endpoints of consumption, but could also bring these broken flows back into connection, slowly, over time.

Waste must be turned into resources. Consumption must become a chance to rebuild relationships. Procurement must slowly reconnect cities with nearby regions.

This is where collective spaces for eating become important: food markets, community kitchens, public dining spaces, school meals and workplace canteens. Through eating together, people can begin to move from passive consumers to more active food citizens who care about the wider food system. What this points to, in the end, is a need to rethink food itself—from commodity to commons.

Movimento Metropolitano aims to provide high-quality meals at affordable prices for everyone. But it is not simply a place that sells food.

It asks a broader question: “what does ‘eating well' mean in the modern city?”

Through food, it tries to reconnect people with one another, and cities with the communities around them. For many of us, food is part of the urban fabric that holds everyday life together.

【References】

・Sage, Colin L. (Ed.). A Research Agenda for Food Systems. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020.

・van Tulleken, Chris. Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food… and Why Can’t We Stop? Cornerstone Press, 2023.

・Pollan, Michael. Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. Penguin Books, 2009.

Follow our journey @movimento.metropolitano.