food for thoughts

Food and thoughts are strictly connected and yet too often we forget to reflect about what we are eating. Food keeps us healthy but in many ways, it's making sick an always larger portion of the population.

Before meeting with Lucia Andriolo, psychologist and psychotherapist we had never heard of mindful eating.
We too take sometimes for granted our amazing food even though in Turin we are blessed to have access to fresh, local, natural and seasonal food. Artisan producers are virtually everywhere and the food we crave is really just non-Italian specialties we can't replicate in our kitchen, like American bacon and tropical fruit.

Sitting down in front of a meringue on a custard, Lucia told us how she has always been captivated by how our mind works. This is what made her into a certified psychologist with a particular interest in psycho-neuro-endocrino-immunology. Basically, she likes to have the big picture of how the mind influences the body, the symptom manifestations and how disease can be reversed or soothed according to a specific context. At the same time, she likes to observe what happens in the micro-picture: the patient's background, the analysis of the symptoms, how they started and what brought the patient to that point.

meringue enjoying some custard by Margherita Frari at Associazione Qubi'

As food has a big impact on our lives, Lucia is also very much interested in neurogastronomy a new science that puts together chefs and scientists to explain how we perceive food through our 5 senses: textures, flavors, looks, sounds, smells and how we create food memories.

Keeping an eye on the scientific method, Lucia is interested in conveying a less technical approach of psychology, and this is how she has inserted a session of mindful eating in her sensorial aperitif presentation.

For Turin Epicurean Capital 2017, Lucia will show us how our 5 senses react to food and she will guide us through how our reactions are generated. To wrap up our food experience, she'll guide our 30 minute mindful eating where we'll explore all our 5 senses with one "super food" that will stimulate our sight, our smell, our touch, our taste and our hearing at the same time.

Mindful eating has originated from the Zen and Buddhist philosophy to allow us to reach food awareness, to understand what we need to eat and how we need food: two concepts we often forget about.

No wonder Lucia Andriolo is the president of the Piedmont chapter of the Italian Society of Psycho-neuro-endocrino-immunology (SIPNEI Piemonte).

We could have talked with Lucia for hours, listening to her explaining how in the end it all boils down to our vulnerability to stress and how the inappropriate cures we received during our early years started us on certain behavioral cycles.
Eating too much or too little, having a voracious sweet tooth or craving savory foods, everything has its reasons in our personal history, how we codified it and how we have re-elaborated it.
Some things can be tracked back to just one individual but others can naturally have more social and cultural roots.

In Italy it makes especially sense as Italians are so protective of their recipes and ingredients and particularly in Piedmont, where people are so food conscious to have founded the Slow Food movement to preserve native crops, traditional recipes, preparation methods and authentic flavors. The very first Eataly was opened in Turin too to allow people to have access to high quality and genuine foods.

Food is nourishment for both out body and soul and Lucia Andriolo shows us how by breaking down each sense and isolating different food experiences we can achieve food awareness.



Lucia Andriolo's sensorial aperitif for Turin Epicurean Capital 2017 is on June 22 at 7pm at Associazione Qubi' in Via Parma 75.
Cost: 20E

Limited places, reserve by June 20th: officine.eat@gmail.com or +39 347 251 0052