One bowl of beans, a piece of bread, a jug of wine ; and onions to flavour the three: it is the poor meal of a peasant, consumed on the table corner. But are we sure that it is a poor meal because it looks that way to us? This picture was painted at the end of the Sixteenth Century by Annibale Carracci, a period of scarcities and epidemics, so for a peasant of that period a meal of this sort was perhaps not at all poor.

Without food it is not lived. But food is also an occasion to meet and a way to make festivity, a well-being and abundance symbol. For this the artists have often inserted it in the images that they have created. Today, there are also cooks who use the food in order to create images.

From Omero to Boccaccio, Leonardo to Kant, Tolstoj to Neruda, Calvino: through the testimonies of ancient literature, and medieval, renaissance, baroque to the beautiful European literary passages and contemporaries. The historical shapes develop of the of the alimentary culture, uses and customs of the men to table, pleasures and displeasures you meet and crashs have made of banquet a speculate image of the society.

Food is also important in the life of the men that has a fundamental role in the Bible. In the New Testament, as an example, there are at least four moments where the instruction of Jesus is connected to food: the wedding of Caanan, when Jesus transforms the water into wine; the multiplication of the bread and the fish; the last supper and the supper of Emmaus.

Behind flavours, the smells, hide so much meants; behind the taste to seat at the table, but also to be behind the stoves, it exists a driven in weft of symbols and languages that constitute the various outline of culinary science.

Our body, our psychology, education, culture, atmosphere, and history, are fundamental elements in order to travel over again and to understand the route of the pleasure, since conditions not only the preparation and the presentation of the food, but also the visual, olfactory perception and the choice of some flavours in place of others. Ignored elements exist then often but not little important which the desire, the creativity, the desire, the imagination that transform foods and their preparation in a true one and just language. Who loves to cook generally discovers, search, studies, ago experience, second acts its acquaintances, and tries, thanks to the fantasy, to create in order to favour the necessity to communicate be of mind and passions. We would not have to scandalize therefore, when we feel to define the culinary an art.

The history of the feeding, therefore, is a rich history of surprise, alimentary civilizations that they change, a world of tastes, flavours and scents still all to discover. A world that possesses its history naturally, its uses and customs, its artists, its legends, traditions, and because not, its heroes, scientists, philosophers, musicians and poets.