If "we are the way we get what we eat", what happens when people move from an area to another? How behaviors, beliefs and, in general, all the aspects of "immaterial" cultural heritage are affected and modified in migrants? How the impact on another environment, sometimes completely different than the country of origin, influenced the life of these people?
Digiting on Google "migration food", over 140 million results appear: most of them are concerning famine as one of the causes of migrations; the others are about the eating habits migrants carry on with themselves. Therefore, a recent lecture at University of Birmingham was just about the contribution of migrants to the culinary tradiitions of hosts countries. Since that, the matter can be focused both as an humanitarian issue (on the regions of origin) and a supply problem. This last point, morever, has been fixed by modern trade that can transport fruits, vegetables, meat and fish all over the world.
Thought, the problem is not a problem. But going around the cues of British supermarkets, in the last weeks, I felt a sensation of passivity: not only what you choose to eat often comes form abroad, but also you don't understand, in this way, the relationship between food and environment around you. This alienation is not only a distintive character of migrants, but it's a common feeling in the modern societies: you buy food, but you don't mind where and how it comes from, it's there, catch it up!
But what would be the impact of a such trend on the environment? Dividing subsistence and landscape carries to a dual consequence. In fact, if in a cultural perspective this gap prevent people to know the space around them, it is also represent a problem about environmental management. Countryside abandonment is only one of the components; more serious is a merely conservative attitude (forgetting the utilitaristic-transformative value of a landscape) or a disruptive behaviour in the name of an uncontrolled progress.
It is being losing the so called Indigenous Knowlodge (I.K.) as ensamble of traditions and techniques which had been stratified in centuries. This process are making us strangers in our land, and it is more and more difficult for us to cope with the environmental issues. We live in a place, but we don't know how this place works!
Epochal transformation, in the past and in the present times as well, are often characterised by mass migrations and people displacements. A new perspective in the study of these issues can be useful for two main reasons: in first place, it helps to change the common view of migrants often considered, in all epochs, as invaders and land usurprers; in the other, can be the key to understand and sistematically cope with environmental problems, in a time of great and global changes, in a sustainable way.
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