Food as a key to the world: the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo
There is a small village in northern Italy, in the heart of Piedmont, land of wine and food excellence, where food is studied in a way unlike anywhere else in the world. Not cuisine. Not food technology. But food in all its complexity: as an ecological system, as a cultural language, as a tool for social transformation. The University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo (UNISG) was founded in 2004 from a radical idea by Carlo Petrini, the Slow Food movement founder: that food deserved its own university.
Not a cooking school, not a food management course, but a full-fledged academic institution built on the conviction that those who truly want to understand future food systems must be able to combine biology and anthropology, economics and ecology, history and design. It is the only university in the world with this vision. And today, as China increasingly and urgently questions what we eat, how we produce it, and what consequences it has for our health and for the planet, that vision speaks directly to a generation that is no longer satisfied with yesterday’s answers.
The connection with Slow Food -the international movement that has redefined the relationship between food, territory, and responsibility -is not decorative. It is at the heart of the method. At Pollenzo, students learn that eating well does not mean eating luxuriously: it means understanding the supply chain, respecting biodiversity, and valuing producers. These are principles that deeply resonate with what the
new Chinese generation seeks, both inside and outside universities: authenticity, quality, awareness. The programs range from a Master’s degree in Food Industry Management — designed for those who want to build careers at the top levels of the global agri-food sector — to the Food & Planetary Health program, which addresses the major challenges of our time: food security, climate change, and public health. There are international master’s programs in World Food Studies, New Food Thinking, and Food Communication.
And the Executive Master in Food Medicine, dedicated to the therapeutic role of nutrition, a topic that directly connects with the Chinese tradition of medicine and nourishment as care. What truly makes UNISG unique is not only its catalogue of courses. It is its method. Students learn in fields and cellars, along supply chains and in markets, in restaurants and sensory laboratories. Study trips — included in tuition — take them to explore food systems in their real contexts, in Italy and around the world. The Pollenzo campus, housed in an 18th-century complex recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, includes its own wine bank, a food lab, educational gardens, and a restaurant where learning continues even at the table.
The student community comes from over 100 countries. Studying every day alongside people who bring different food cultures — from Asia to Africa, from South America to Europe — is a form of learning that cannot be replicated in any other classroom. For those coming from China, choosing Pollenzo means bringing home a perspective that no traditional program can offer: the ability to read food systems with an integrated lens, to engage with producers, institutions, and markets worldwide, and to build an original professional profile in a sector that will become increasingly central in the future. Food is already politics, already culture, already medicine. Those who learn to govern it will hold something more valuable than an academic degree.
