from Seed to Spoon a naturalistic notebook

Cities are growing at a skyrocketing pace, and along with them, so is food demand. One of the great challenges we face is being able to guarantee everyone healthy, safe, good food, produced by a healthy ecosystem. We are therefore facing a crossroads: on one hand, we find pollution, the depletion of resources, the degradation of the landscape; on the other hand, we find health and well-being. The project “From Seed to Spoon” was born precisely from the need to show this crossroads to our children - the adults of tomorrow. We give them this notebook, which will accompany them to get to know surrounding Nature, and in order them to take good care of it, while taking the right direction. As a matter of fact, nature is not a trivial warehouse of products in the countryside or a plain city decoration. Nature is a living “infrastructure”, necessary for the health and well-being of each one of us. Taking care of nature means getting in exchange clean air and water, fertile soils, food, and even beauty: with nature, even the grayest of the cities or the most degraded countryside can brighten up with colors, scents and melodious sounds. Beauty is a very powerful tool: it is hard not to be subjugated by it. Hence the reason for a naturalistic notebook, a light and handy tool that makes of beauty its mission. Here we illustrate scientific concepts, perhaps lesser known to most, such as “ecosystem services”, “intraspecific biodiversity”, “habitat trees”, where the sweetness of art becomes the ‘spokesperson’ of science. In the following pages, check out the red-footed falcon or run your fingers over the rough patches of the pears or of the juicy apples, enter the silent beech forest or look up at the bell tower of San Giovanni in Parma: you can almost hear the cheerful cries of the swifts. It is the joy of life that surrounds us.