Food in the spotlight — The butterfly effect

This week I was reading Bill Gates Notes titled “Reasons for optimism after a difficult year”, but despite the reasonable points raised by the author, I cannot avoid indulging in what was worrying him the most: the declining trust in science and institutions as a major barrier to tackle big challenges. This is a concern that I completely share and expressed to many friends in the food industry well before the pandemic, which made this problem even worse. Coupled with the perverse logic of some social media algorithms, that tend to propose material over which you already formed your consensus (even if the news are fake), the lack of trust in the institutional centers of knowledge is a deadly cocktail for our society and democracy.

What was very peculiar is that even the old Bill, despite his age and wisdom, concluded as follows: “This is usually where I’d lay out my ideas for how we fix the problem. The truth is, I don’t have the answers. I plan to keep seeking out and reading others’ ideas, especially from young people.”

I do not have the answer either.

From a political perspective, I cannot do anything but agree on the fact that the lack of leadership nowadays is a daunting problem; but on the other side, I see how in most countries the selection process in politics cannot do anything but bring up the mediocre…