The food of health
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Author: Riccardo Astolfi
Publisher: Edizioni Enea – Gruppo Macro
ISBN: 9788867731626
Publication: November 2025
What if raising a toast were not a social obligation, but a conscious choice?
This book is neither a recipe collection nor a technical manual: it is a breviary to keep by your bedside, to open and reopen, training taste and presence.
Page after page, it dismantles the most persistent myths (“a glass is good for you,” “without alcohol there is no celebration”), proposes a new sensory vocabulary, and offers a map of the No/Lo families (no and low alcohol: kombucha, verjus, ferments, botanical infusions, etc.) to help you navigate real alternatives—not sad imitations.
It is everyday philosophy with its feet firmly planted in practice: how to say “no, thank you” without justifying yourself, how to inhabit conviviality with presence, how to seek pleasure without anesthesia.
You will find no rankings, ratings, or recipes, but exercises in attention, stories, examples, and tools to choose the right glass (even an empty one).
Sobriety does not take away—it adds.
Freedom first. Then, taste.
This is not a book against alcohol:
it is a book in favor of those who choose.
It is a poetic and political act
that speaks of new rituals.
To be read as one tastes
something unknown:
with curiosity and courage.
One sip at a time, page after page,
you will discover that celebration can begin
even without overflowing glasses.
And that, perhaps, the real toast is to yourself.
What will you find in this book?
- A new grammar of drinking: the sensory and cultural vocabulary of the No/Lo movement.
- A map of No/Lo families (kombucha, botanical infusions, ferments, verjus, evolved juices, contemporary alternatives) to navigate beyond alcohol.
- Practical tools for choosing the right glass (even an empty one): exercises in attention, presence, and awareness.
- Stories, imagery, everyday philosophy, and irony to rethink the gesture of the toast without renunciation.
- A guide to sober conviviality: how to inhabit celebrations, relationships, and social rituals without feeling excluded.
- The ten false myths about drinking and not drinking—debunked.
- Insights for building your own No/Lo routine.
- A political, sensory, and emotional invitation to rediscover taste as presence, not anesthesia.
RICCARDO ASTOLFI
He researches, writes, and ferments ideas and beverages.
Among the reference voices in Italy on No/Lo culture, he explores conscious drinking as a sensory, cultural, and political practice—from the laboratory to the table, from fermentation practices to the forms of conviviality.
He maintains an ongoing correspondence with readers through newsletters dedicated to critical gastronomy and taste cultures.
He is the author of Pasta Madre and Cucina Viva, published by Guido Tommasi Editore.
He lives in Bologna.
VIVI ferments
We are Jessica Callegaro and Lorenzo Locatelli, co-founders of VIVI ferments and the Cucinare secondo natura project,
Our products are the result of years of study on food, cooking and nourishment, understood as everything that can help us live better.
We discovered fermentation by playing in the kitchen or maybe it was the ferments that chose to domesticate us!
Fermented vegetables and condiments
Fermented vegetables are produced through a process of spontaneous fermentation in the presence of salt. The raw materials used are all organic or biodynamic. The salt used is also integral and therefore rich in mineral salts and trace elements and of organic origin.
The presence of spices and herbs gives fermented vegetables not only aromatic characteristics, but also the virtues and benefits possessed by all the ingredients used.