The University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded in 2004 by the international non-profit association Slow Food in cooperation with the Italian regions of Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna, is a ministerially recognized, private non-profit institution. Its goal is to create an international research and education center for those working on renewing farming methods, protecting biodiversity, and building an organic relationship between gastronomy and agricultural science.
The university forms gastronomes, new professional figures with multi-disciplinary skills and knowledge in science, culture, politics, economics, and ecology of food, working to apply them to production, distribution, and sustainable consumption. UNISG students, hailing worldwide, gain dynamic experiences in artisanal and industrial food production, thanks to complimentary education in both sciences and humanities, sensory training, and hands-on learning during study trips across five continents.
The “Strategic Plan” is a critical document that outlines the university’s planned development over three years. It expresses the institution’s fundamental mission and the characteristics that distinguish and qualify it within the Italian and international academic landscape.
The “2018-2020 Strategic Plan” of the University of Gastronomic Sciences reflects the results of the university’s first 13 years of life, defining its specific educational and scientific vocation and its highly international nature. Most importantly, it indicates the directions for future development that the university has set for itself. These are expressed through specific objectives for education, research, and the third-stream mission.
The University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo is the first university in the world to accept Pliny’s ancient challenge, positioning it within the contemporary context of research, science, and culture on a global scale and guided by a systemic vision because gastronomy is everywhere. It does not concern only certain foods, specific ways of cooking and consuming them, certain traditions, or certain places in the world. Every product of the land, the seas, and the forests can be gastronomy. Every cuisine, from the simplest and most domestic to the most refined, can be gastronomy. Every mode of consumption can be gastronomy. Gastronomy is the study of everything related to food, understood as a cultural and scientific value. Gastronomy has to do with all living things, whether plant, animal, or human. It is passion and love for life, wherever it is realized about the primary and eternal need to eat.
Gastronomic sciences participate in and promote a complex, systemic, and inclusive model of knowledge. This is not structured according to the dualistic paradigm of rigid opposing categories—like body/soul, perceptible/intelligible, praxis/theory—but according to the model of relationships and coevolution, involvement, and parity of value. Gastronomy is not just a nutritional necessity but also a desire and pleasure. It simultaneously studies and comprises technical abilities, know-how, invention, and creative imagination. In gastronomic sciences, knowledge is both science and culture at the same time.
In Pollenzo university’s vision, gastronomic sciences place theory and praxis, contemplation, and observation, books, hands, mind and body, writing and orality, gesture and word on the same level, both by right and in practice. The interaction takes place as much on the plane of the natural sciences as the humanities, following a holistic and critical model in which the whole set of relationships inherent in the study of food define a domain that is greater than the sum of the individual disciplines, to produce new interdisciplinary and cross-cutting languages, rigorous but flexible, suited to meeting the epistemological, ethical, social and political challenges of our time. We must provide adequate responses to the emergencies that characterize our present to construct a better future for all the planet’s inhabitants.
Social and economic injustices, the ecological crisis, and the scarcity of available natural resources have for some time been the cornerstones of our present emergencies, and they also call the issue of food profoundly into question.
The University of Gastronomic Sciences fosters the assurance and continuous improvement of quality in all the areas of activity through which it implements and develops its mission.
To this end, the university has developed a structured and integrated system of rules, mechanisms, and procedures. These are intended to guide the actions and behavior of all the actors involved at different academic and organizational levels of responsibility within the university towards the pursuit of the institution’s objectives.
The Italian national system for evaluation, quality assurance, and accreditation of universities operate following European standards and guidelines to assure higher education quality. The system is based on internal evaluation within each university, external evaluation, and accreditation of campuses and courses.
The system of self-assessment, regular evaluation, and accreditation (Autovalutazione, Valutazione periodic, Accreditamento, or AVA) represents the set of activities, following legal provisions, that involve the introduction of a system of initial and regular accreditation of courses and university campuses regular evaluation of the quality, efficiency and results achieved by the universities and the strengthening of the system for universities to self-assess the quality and effectiveness of their educational activities and research. The Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems (Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca, or ANVUR) has the task of establishing the national system.
