In three months time, 87 days to be precise, from the 21st to the 23rd of April, MiCo, the congress centre in Via Gattamelata in Milan, will host the 17th edition of Identità Golose. The congress has never taken place so late in the year, compared to its usual winter schedule. Looking at the calendar, this means the week after Easter, and most of all the event will take place in three days that were never explored since Claudio Ceroni and I organised the first congress in January 2005, from the 23rd to the 25th, from a Sunday to a Tuesday. Now Identità Milano will charm us from a Thursday to a Saturday, following a precise theme, The future is now, as I explained in the presentation you can find below.
Enough with asking ourselves only what awaits us, what we're going to face. We need to bring every possible future in ourselves, finding it in us because “The Future Is Now” and talking about tomorrow would condemn us to defeat. While the 20th Century has been defined as short, the 21st should be considered as the very short one.
The pandemic, and with it the environmental catastrophe, global superpopulation, and economic inequalities have led us to face huge responsibilities, which shrink the time and deny careless dreams, growing without being attacked by anxiety and pessimism because the horizon is far ahead.
“The Future Is Now” is the theme of the 17th edition of Identità Golose in April, in Milan, from Thursday the 21st to Saturday the 23rd of April. Now, and only now because Covid19 escaped our control, has upturned our existence, and forced us to fight it and win over it.
We cannot think that sooner or later we will return to a world the way it was, in every field, including the restaurant industry. We must imagine the new, we must think and test solutions that are novelties, we must give young people the possibility to test themselves. We must remind those who are deaf and blind that there is no future for those who decide to build walls and close themselves inside nations that reject any contact with the outside, and forget that the world as we know it is the result of migrations, influences, accepting, perhaps unknowingly, features that belong to people who are different from us.
This is how it has always been, and soon will be once again. What has changed is time, the one we have available hurries us. It forces us to act in the present.
