Il cotto, il crudo e il vivo nella cucina del Mediterraneo: una introduzione

The article critically analyses the alleged exclusivity of the “obsession with food” attributed by some authors to the Mediterranean area, showing rather the universality of this “obsession”. The author then addresses the close and inseparable relationship between food and identity – ethnic, social group (class or class), lineage, family, etc. -, at the same time going into a re-examination of the initiatory dimension of food – up to the connection with extra-social and transcendental dimensions - and of the correlated identity “food hunger = symbols hunger”, therefore on being fed and eating, dimensions present within the processes of socialization. On the basis of direct and lasting ethnographic experiences in the Horn of Africa, Central Asia and the Caribbean, as well as ethnographic and autoethnographic activities in the Mediterranean, the Author opens up to reflections on the so-called “cooked-raw-rotten” culinary triangle, that is, on the definition of the complementary “cooked-rawlive” triangle, well recognizable at least in Mediterranean societies.