Quality of Feeding and New Lifestyles

• Published in: Agriculture and agricultural science procedia Vol. 8; pp. 257 - 262
• Main Authors: Misso, Rosa, Mariani, Mauro Mario
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 2016
• Subjects: feeding; food quality; lifestyles; market failure; well-being sustainability; market failure; well-being sustainability; lifestyles; food quality; feeding
• ISSN: 2210-7843; 2210-7843
• DOI: 10.1016/j.aaspro.2016.02.101

The quality of feeding, understood as a nutrition founded on quality foods and on the varied and balanced contribution in the diet of an adequate level of nutrients, fibers, vitamins and minerals (low in fat and sugars), is one of the pillars on which a society should establish strategies for keeping in time and space its well-being. The focus on the quality of feeding, however, is susceptible to a double approach: individual and collective. The individual approach, confining attention to the quality of feeding to the type of lifestyle that everyone follows, delimits the relative costs and responsibilities to a personal scope. The collective approach would instead returns the quality in the context of the externalities of a socio-economic and environmental process to be managed with appropriate forms of governance, able to extend the responsibility “over the person” and redetermine the development and the distribution of the costs of quality of feeding. In this second case, a healthy lifestyle becomes the result of a process of promotion and guidance aimed to nest sustainable behaviours and to activate virtuous circles on the base of which lifestyles then, in turn, may become the key to the sustainability of well-being in certain territories. In view of this, the present paper aims to highlight the key role of quality of feeding as a determinant of the sustainability of the well-being and solicit the attention of policy makers on the need to implement appropriate governance strategies able to retract obvious market distortions through the support and promotion of healthy and natural lifestyles.