After Carlo Petrini: the Table, the Hive, and the Future of Life
Words by Maurizio Gigola. Article published in collaboration with 'Filming for a better world'
Original article (and set of videos) published in the ‘brand new’ newsletter Filming for a better world by Maurizio Gigola
When I heard the news of Carlo Petrini’s death, I did not think first of a public figure, or of the founder of Slow Food, or of the man who helped change the global language of food.
I thought of a table.
I thought of Pollenzo.
I thought of sitting in front of him, face to face, tasting salsiccia di Bra, and listening to a man who had understood something long before the rest of the world found the words for it.
Carlo did not simply defend food. He defended time.
He understood that fast food was not only a question of hamburgers, speed, or industrial taste. It was a symptom. A symptom of a civilization beginning to lose its relationship with place, season, soil, work, pleasure, and community.
Against that speed, he placed a radical idea: Slow Food.
Carlo Petrini - L’utopia e la realtà
At first it sounded almost ironic, almost gentle. But it was not gentle. It was revolutionary.
Because behind that simple opposition, slow versus fast, there was a much deeper question: what we eat defines not only the trajectory of our health, but also the relationship we have with nature, with each other, and with the future of the planet.
That conversation in Pollenzo stayed with me because it was never only about taste. It was about civilization.
From Minnesota to the Mediterranean
I have researched this question for many years.
One of the pins I placed on my map was Minnesota, where Ancel Keys, working from the University of Minnesota, helped open one of the great scientific conversations of the twentieth century: why did certain Mediterranean rural populations, living with what looked from the outside like scarcity, live better and longer?
The first accusation was pointed toward diet, especially animal fats, proteins, cholesterol, and the emerging relationship between food and cardiovascular disease. The Seven Countries Study changed the way the world looked at the Mediterranean diet.
But over time, it became clear that the answer was only partly on the plate.
Yes, what we eat matters enormously.
But how we eat matters too.
With whom we eat.
At what rhythm.
In what landscape.
With what sense of belonging.
With how much movement, sunlight, work, purpose, faith, silence, conversation, and care around the meal.
Food is never only chemistry.
Food is biography.
Food is ecology.
Food is social architecture.
Food is spiritual grammar.
Alice Waters, San Francisco, and the Table that was missing
Later, in San Francisco, I encountered another decisive reference: Alice Waters, the great dame of Californian cuisine and the soul of Chez Panisse in Berkeley.
Her world was deeply connected to many of the principles that Carlo had made global: local products, seasonality, farmers, proximity, respect for ingredients, and a rejection of anonymous industrial food.
But in California I understood something else very clearly.
The issue was not only what we eat.
It was how we organize life around eating. I had a dear friend there, sophisticated, intelligent, passionate about refined food. He knew restaurants, wines, ingredients, chefs. And yet in his apartment he did not even have a dining table.
“You are a barbarian,” I used to tell him.
He laughed, and admitted it.
That small absence said everything.
In the United States, during my long stay, I understood an obvious but brutal truth: eating well is often a privilege.
And therefore health, too often, becomes a privilege. The table had disappeared from the house. Food had become performance, consumption, status, convenience, or obsession. But it was losing one of its most important functions: the daily ritual of bringing people together.
Ikaria and the intangible side of Longevity
Then I met Diane Kochilas, one of the great advocates of natural Greek and Ikarian food culture.
Through her, and through my own research, I went to Ikaria for a special study on longevity connected to work I was developing for the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.
Ikaria is known as one of the world’s Blue Zones, places where people live unusually long lives. But once again, the deeper lesson was not simply “eat this” or “avoid that.”
The lesson was intangible.
People moved naturally.
They ate real food.
They lived inside social networks.
They belonged to a place.
They had rhythm.
They had purpose.
They had herbs, gardens, friends, family, faith, naps, walking, work, memory.
The food mattered, of course. But the food was surrounded by a world.
That world was the medicine.
Diane Kochilas Inteview
What MEDIS shows us
This is why the MEDIS Study is so important.
The MEDIS - MEDiterranean ISlands Study, established at Harokopio University in Athens in 2005 under the leadership of Prof. Demosthenes Panagiotakos, was designed to understand the relationship between socio-demographic, biological, clinical, lifestyle, dietary, psychological, and social characteristics among elderly people living in Mediterranean islands.
From the MEDIS deck I reviewed, several data points are essential:
But what interests me most is not only the scale of the research.
It is the way MEDIS defines the pathways of successful aging.
The study does not look only at food. It looks at the whole ecosystem of life: education, financial status, physical activity, body mass index, depression symptoms, socializing with friends and family, excursions per year, cardiovascular risk factors, and adherence to the Mediterranean diet.
In other words, MEDIS confirms what Carlo intuited culturally, what Keys opened scientifically, what Ikaria reveals existentially, and what we are now trying to narrate cinematically: longevity is not a product.
It is a relationship. It is a relationship between food, body, land, community, movement, meaning, and time.
This is also the heart of One Health: the understanding that human health, animal health, plant health, environmental health, and social health cannot be separated.
Crete: The Mother of the Mediterranean Diet
“Chi semina utopia, raccoglie realtà”
We will be screening the gadrde of life , the 24 th of august at the UN building In New York
Today, with great happiness and a deep sense of responsibility, I am working on a new project in the region of Crete.
Together with Ploigos, a cultural NGO based in Heraklion, we are developing TrofiHub, a digital platform that brings together key local stakeholders around food, heritage, territory, and future.
The image at the center is an hexagon.
At the center: Trofi.
Food as physical nourishment, yes.
But also as moral nourishment.
Spiritual nourishment.
Cultural nourishment.
Around it: the actors and elements of intangible heritage. Farmers, cooks, elders, researchers, communities, diaspora, rituals, recipes, landscapes, stories, institutions, and young people who must inherit more than information. They must inherit meaning.
TrofiHub is revolutionary because it does not simply define the Cretan lifestyle. It activates it.
It does not put heritage in a museum.
It makes heritage move.
This platform will connect digital narration with the production of a worldclass documentary miniseries of six films, which we are developing under the title The Table of Time.
We will be screening the garden of life , the 24 th of August at the UN building In New York.
The purpose is not to repeat that Crete is already a pillar of the Mediterranean diet. It is.
The purpose is to decline that truth into living stories.
Crete is not only a destination. It is not only a diet. It is not only a beautiful island.
Crete is one of the deep mothers of Mediterranean civilization.
A place where food, myth, agriculture, faith, herbs, mountains, sea, hospitality, migration, and health have been speaking to each other for thousands of years.
From the Table to the Hive
This is where my current work meets another journey: Buzz of Transformation and The Garden of Life.
Bees have become for us the perfect living metaphor.
They connect flowers, soil, weather, biodiversity, food, agriculture, and human survival. They are pollinators, but also sentinels. They tell us if a territory is healthy. They reveal whether our relationship with nature is still alive.
The United Nations reminds us that more than 75% of the world’s food crops depend, at least in part, on animal pollination. FAO notes that pollinators contribute to 35% of global crop production and support 87 of the 115 leading food crops.
But again, data is not enough.
A number informs.
A story transforms.
That is why we film.
That is why we are present today with a trailer at the Glass Building of the United Nations in New York, inside Animals for Social Justice, curated by Alessandra Mattanza.
And on August 24, we will present the final cut of The Garden of Life, the first work in a series of projects we are developing in dialogue with institutions and networks such as Apimondia, FAO, and the United Nations, among others.
The Garden of Life begins in Crete because Crete allows the table and the hive to meet.
Food and pollination.
Longevity and biodiversity.
Ancient knowledge and planetary future.
The personal and the systemic.
Crete: the Garden of Biodiversity
Why Carlo Petrini matters now
Carlo Petrini understood all this before many others.
He understood that food is political, but not only political.
It is poetic.
It is ecological.
It is economic.
It is spiritual.
It is relational.
He understood that defending a local cheese, a seed, a sausage, a farmer, a table, or a recipe was not nostalgia. It was resistance against the flattening of the world.
When I sat with him in Pollenzo, tasting salsiccia di Bra, I felt that his intelligence was not academic. It was embodied.
He had the rare gift of turning common sense into vision.
And today, after his death, I feel even more clearly that the work must continue.
Not by repeating his words.
But by extending the field.
Into cinema.
Into digital platforms.
Into health research.
Into One Health.
Into Crete.
Into the hive.
Into the table.
Into the future.
Gratitude
“Chi semina utopia, raccoglie realtà”
Carlo Pertini
None of this work is solitary.
I want to thank the collective of directors and storytellers who are giving body and vision to this path: Raphael Sbarge, Berndt Weltz, Diane Kochilas, and the wider network of filmmakers and collaborators who believe that cinema can still serve life.
I want to thank Haris Roditakis, Jordis Alsina and the whole Ploigos Team whose work and vision in Crete are essential to the development of TrofiHub and the Cretan narrative ecosystem.
I want to thank Alessandra Mattanza, who opened a meaningful institutional and artistic context for our work in New York.
And I want to thank the entire Adrama team, because Filming for a Better World is not an abstract purpose. It is daily work. It is production, trust, risk, persistence, and the stubborn belief that images can still change the way people feel and think.
The Future is around the Table
When Carlo spoke about Slow Food, he was not only opposing fast food.
He was opposing a fast life emptied of meaning.
Today we need to go further.
We need to understand that how we eat is how we live.
How we live is how we age.
How we age is how we belong.
How we belong is how we protect the planet.
From Ancel Keys to Ikaria, from Alice Waters to Diane Kochilas, from MEDIS to TrofiHub, from Pollenzo to Crete, from the table to the hive, one truth becomes clearer every day:
Food is not a sector.
Food is a system of life.
And cinema, when it is independent, honest, and deeply rooted, can help us see that system again.
This is my purpose.
Filming for a Better World.
Not only making films.
Building bridges between memory and future.
Between the table and the planet.
Between what we eat and who we become. Sources referenced: ANSA and international reports on Carlo Petrini’s death; UNEP profile of Carlo Petrini; TIME on the origins of Slow Food; MEDIS Study deck provided by the user; FAO and UN World Bee Day data on pollinators; Mediterranean diet / Seven Countries Study sources; Diane Kochilas materials on Ikaria and longevity.