Integral WELLbeing for human flourishing: healthcare and food from an ethical and legal perspective (I-WELL)

I-WELL is an interdisciplinary research project, whose main goal is to investigate the legal as well as epistemological and ethical conditions which allow a person to achieve an integral well-being, both individual and collective, from a food health point of view. As a matter of fact, even when availability and access to food are satisfactory, the body absorption of food nutrients is related to the consumption of clean drinking water, as well as to environmental hygiene, primary health care and primary education. Furthermore, where physical and economic access to food is assured, ecological factors will determine the long-term sustainability of food security systems. In this context, the I-WELL project aims to develop a legal and philosophical foundation of an integral wellbeing guided by food and nutrition, as a driver of change in order to promote a more sustainable future.

In actual terms, the project aims at demonstrating:

• the positive role of a relational epistemology and ethics in deepening the idea of food health;
• the generative relationship between sustainability and integral well-being in practice;
• the importance of best practices, codes of conduct and guidelines in reaching the goal of a more sustainable perspective on food health.

The research is currently focused on the development of “best practices”, still not adequately addressed in ethical and legal fields.

Thus, the project intends to give a concrete contribution to the present challenges related not only to health but also, more broadly, to sustainable development and “food health”, which is recognized as the relationship between well-being and nutrition. In order to achieve said goal, our proposal is to take into consideration both the notions of complexity and integrated development in light of a systemic epistemology, as well as the notions of nutrition, care, and health, in order to draft new guiding principles and appropriate communication techniques able to promote food related “best practices” both globally and locally at the same time. In particular, the project will concentrate on some key aspects of the communication processes regarding food health within the public sphere, and the ethical principles underlying them. It will focus on the relationship between experts and society, on the character of advertising and some controversial phenomena of social media food representation. Such analysis will contribute to the elaboration of an appropriate ethical model that can foster an effective and correct food communication in the digital environments. Thanks to this new philosophical and legal model, this project aims at the development and implementation of both ethical and legal codes of conduct for producers, restaurateurs, consumers, and communicators all over the food supply chain in order to promote the abovementioned integral wellbeing.

Progetto PRIN 2022 PNNR