Università Roma Tre

The course will be developed in two training directions. The first is aimed at providing the theoretical and methodological tools to develop a radial approach to the analysis of food and its legal components. The second will focus, on the other hand, on the study of the concrete dynamics underlying the specific processes of food production and fruition. Specifically, these dynamics will be probed so that students can grasp their religious and cultural implications and, at the same time, their impact on the concrete enjoyment of human rights.

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The course aims to provide students with the ability to grasp through a multidisciplinary approach the relationship between food and law. In particular, the category of "radiality" will be used as a hermeneutic tool to make students cognizant of the geographical and anthropological (thus also cultural and religious), political, medical, technological, and more generally spatio-temporal implications of which every food, every recipe and even every ingredient of it, are epitomes: and this from both a retrospective and a prospective point of view. However, the implications now indicated coincides with areas of legal regulation. It follows that every food encapsulates law as a constituent and determining ingredient, since food is a set of “radial relations” even before the "matter" or "mere thing" that stems from them. This course aims precisely to make students aware of this pervasive legal impact on food. The goal is to make them understand how the distribution of food on a global scale, its availability and even its material components are the result of political-normative processes in many cases laden with invisible injustice. More precisely, a kind of injustice capable of radically affecting, according to the different parts of the world, the actual enjoyment of human rights, primarily those related to health and human development, which are inextricably linked to "what people eat and are actually able to eat". A crucial purpose of the course is to highlight how the measurement of the degree of this injustice cannot disregard the anthropological figures inherent in the religion and culture of different peoples.

The course readings will be indicated during the lectures.