Over the last 20 or 30 years, we have seen a profound change in life styles that has affected not only our way of working, communicating and travelling, but also the way in which we produce, distribute and consume food.

Radical demographic changes – the aging of the population, the employment of women, the growing number of singles and the "minimisation" of nuclear families – have led to equally radical changes in our eating habits. Traditional family meals have been virtually "de-structured", whereas immediate and informal availability has become a substantial element of food demand. The time dedicated to the preparation of meals has steadily decreased and a growing number are eaten away from home.

Despite this detachment from the home preparation of food (or perhaps because of it), people are becoming more sensitive to the role of diet in health and more attentive towards the safety of what they eat.

Furthermore, the very concept of the quality of food is gradually but profoundly changing. Consumer expectations are no longer exclusively related to the "material" characteristics and performances of food products (their nutrititional and sensory properties, ease of use, ease of preservation, etc.), but are increasingly directed towards what we can call "immaterial" factors insofar as they involve the psychology, culture and reference values of the consumers themselves. As a result, dietary questions have become inextricably mixed with issues concerning the protection of the environment, biodiversity, the well-being of the animals in breeding establishments, the use of biotechnologies, the transparency of consumer communication, the implementation of quality assurance and product identification systems, and the use of legislative and technical barriers as instruments of international competition.

The question of ethics has erupted in the agro-food world, profoundly influencing legislative developments and production control systems. No longer seen simply as a means of expressing judgements or affirming the pre-eminence of one value system over the others, the ethical approach to agricultural and dietary problems has become a methodological tool that allows an integrated and balanced consensus to be obtained among the parties involved.

In this context, the speaker presents some of the current issues, such as transgenic foods, food safety and voluntary certification systems.

The relationship between technological innovation and the market has been overturned. Until the end of the 1980s, the introduction of a technological innovation almost inevitably led to acceptance by the market and consumers; today, consumers wishes and preferences are the driving forces of the market and hence of process innovation. The case of biotechnology is emblematic and documents the fact that the scientific and manufacturing worlds have been slow to understand this evolution and foresee its effects.

The presentation schematically describes the technological evolution of the agro-food system as a continuous integration and alternation between the innovations of production technologies (hardware) and the innovations of process control systems, including legislative and management systems (software).

Information technologies allow the management of increasingly complex systems. It is possible to track products along supply pipelines crossing countries and continents, as well as to optimise processes on a company or territorial basis by implementing integrated management systems covering product hygiene, safety and quality, environmental production, working safety and ethics.

The simultaneous awareness of the complexity of consumer expectations and the availability of powerful process and production system management tools explains why food production is becoming more standardised and more differentiated at the same time. An enormous variety of foods is now available to the public.

In the industrialised world, this evolution is continuing at an ever-increasing speed (and becoming increasingly swamped by the superfluous). In striking contrast with this is the fact that famine and under-nutrition continue to cause millions of deaths in the poorer parts of the world. It is said that future technological innovations will resolve the problem of hunger; but the truth is that it could be solved by the technologies that already exist if a serious attempt were made to implement new systems of territorial and global management. The problem of hunger is not primarily scientific or technical, but something that needs to be confronted at a political, administrative and management level. Information and training are more urgent than bread, and the problem of establishing development models is more important than questions relating to biotechnology.