In the city of Milan, Italy, the first restrictions on the activities and movement
of people took place on February 24 and the national lockdown was decided on March
8. Since Italy was the first European nation to officially recognize the presence
of Coronavirus (while it is now clear that the virus has been circulating in Europe
since at least January), there has been very little time to prepare individually and
collectively to deal with impacts of the lockdown and without being able to compare
with other experiences of countermeasures to counteract the effects of the virus on
access to food.
In this situation of rapid change, individual solutions and neighborhood micro-networks
have often made up for the sudden lack of what allows a product to reach citizens:
knowledge, organization, transport, communication, etc. What happened in Milan and
in other Italian cities is the rapid growth of organizations based on families of
the same condominium, parishes, associations and informal networks that have autonomously
managed to collect needs, to contact food producers or processors and to co-organize
distribution and payments.
These social organizations have guaranteed the supply of food by implementing approaches
that are complementary or alternative to the usual ones and this also in the case
of people or social actors who previously did not specifically dedicate themselves
to food. The strength of social ties even beyond issues strictly related to food,
shows how these ties can fulfill some tasks that, in our societies, are assigned to
the market. This approach has proven to be able to respond to even a very strong shock
in a much more flexible way than most market players. It should also be considered
that these experiences developed outside any kind of public support and having, in
fact, almost only supermarkets as the only consolidated channels of food supply that
were legitimized by the norms or that were able to maintain standards of social distancing
and adequate logistics.
Many of these social experiences cannot replace the entire current socio-economic
organization and they are not necessarily optimal in terms of costs and employment,
but they have also been a solution for those many shops (bakeries, vegetable shops,
butchers, etc.) which constitute a widespread basis on which a large part of the Italian
culinary tradition rests but which are not linked to networks of organized consumers
and which often depend on a macrologistica that they do not control. In fact, many
small and medium-sized stores have slowly reopened after many weeks, relying on these
networks of citizens, and the ability of the “demand side” to organize parts of the
food system has allowed the maintenance of a certain vitality also on the supply side.
Those who managed to face the situation in a better way are the people who previously
made individual choices in favour of sustainable lifestyles (rationalization of consumption,
reduction of waste, recycling, local purchases, limited intermediation, etc.) and,
above all, those who were already part of networks organized for the purchase of food
such as, for example, solidarity economy networks, Community Supported Agriculture,
consumer cooperatives, local consortia, etc.
All this teaches us that, for access to food, lifestyles are not to be traced only
to the sphere of the “private” or the “individual”, or to be separated or opposed
to the public or to the market dimension, but they are part of the structural aspects
of our society and economy and, as such, they should be recognized and valued as part
of public policies and in the different forms of what we call “the market”.
The question that arises now is how to multiply the positive effects of solutions
that have shown themselves to be flexible and which, in addition to satisfying the
need for food, have allowed us to respond to other needs that are connected to food
(sociability, health, wellness, etc.). I am thinking, for example, about the combination
of different policies and services such as: an increase in digital services as part
of supporting new forms of sociality; a set of services and neighborhood-scale structures
connected to sustainable mobility systems for the redistribution of surplus food to
people in difficulty as part of the local welfare; recognition of solidarity-based
networks, microcredit; local food hubs, etc. All this to be thought of through the
integration of waged and voluntary work and new forms of social impact enterprises.
To do this, active rules and policies are needed to move from the mainstream market
towards social solutions that have proven to be more adequate and flexible, in a “new
alliance” between sustainable lifestyles and the so-called “structural policies”:
even beyond Coronavirus.