Italian cuisine and song in the chair at the UN: Niko Romito and Achille Lauro speak to a thousand young people

Italian music and cuisine to look to the future of the planet. For one day the Glass Palace in New York, seat of the United Nations, saw the tricolor creativity of two talents prevail, the self-taught cook from Abruzzo Niko Romito and the Roman singer Achille Lauro who met more than a thousand students, many Italians, in occasion of «Gcmun Talks», The Arts for Global Citizenship #AGCNewYork23, a new format for thinking about and practicing global citizenship education together with young people through the different languages ​​of art. An institutional venue that thrilled the two unusual speakers called on stage to encourage the new generations towards innovative ideas and the development of Pathways for Transversal Skills and Orientation in schools in the Belpaese, as envisaged by the Imun project created by the NGO United Network in collaboration with the UN which has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Education since 2016.

«Haute cuisine has the strength to change the entire system and only haute cuisine can support research. Useful not only for creating starred dishes, but for changing catering on a larger scale, thus bringing innovation to all levels of catering. Results which, moreover, can be disseminated, democratised, made accessible to a wider public and very distant from haute cuisine» said Niko Romito, soul of the restaurant, three Michelin stars, Reale in Abruzzo. For the chef «haute cuisine will be able to make a fundamental contribution and trigger changes that involve the whole system, if we stop thinking of it – Romito underlined – as pure entertainment and begin to see it as an avant-garde that allows us to look further afield. Haute cuisine will be able to serve the whole system if the creativity that is put into play becomes a useful creativity and, never like today, a sustainable creativity. We have to stop thinking about haute cuisine as opposed to industrial food, the key to sustainability, at all levels, is interdisciplinary dialogue».

In this first edition of the Gcmun Talks, made possible thanks to the support of the Permanent Representation of Italy to the United Nations, the organizers Lorenzo Micheli and Riccardo Messina involved chef Niko Romito who recounted his journey, emphasizing the importance of study and research, the keys to innovation, not only in the kitchen, which have allowed him to develop his rich universe of projects. The chef explained, in particular, how his experiences and his vision led him to deal with public food and the democratization of good and healthy cuisine, one of his main interests for the future, together with education.

At the end of his speech, the students were involved in two performances of collective art and artificial intelligence to create a work projected on the screen. From art to art, and after lessons-performance between the school desks of Milan and Rome in the wake of the last single What will be, Achille Lauro gave a speech on the role of music as an art that unites and on the importance of investing in one’s passions. «It was a great honor for me to cross the threshold of the United Nations Headquarters – his words -, such an important and symbolic place for peace and international relations and to be able to talk about music as an art form that unites peoples I believe very much in young people and I know that they can truly change the world; it is also thanks to them that I have reached this point».