Influencer farmers who prune branches and plant turnips, digital shepherds who milk the goats. Influencers who show off luxurious homes and seemingly glossy lives spent without working have lost their appeal. While content creators who live in the countryside and in the mountains gain more and more popularity, they get their hands dirty and talk about ancient knowledge that we have forgotten in the cities.
The break between city and countryside
Since the nineteenth century and with industrialization, millions of Italians have escaped poverty. From isolation to small urban centres, from the countryside to the cities, from the South to the North, from Italy to the Americas, millions of people moved house and this was a global phenomenon which at different times affected Europe and then the rest of the world. From a rural society we became an industrial economy in the space of a few decades, and then evolved into the tertiary sector. At the beginning of the twentieth century, agricultural workers still represented 60%, today they are around 1 million. In Italy there are 62 million of us, and 51 live in urban areas. We are Marcovaldo’s army, citizens in spite of themselves who have forgotten what nature is and who risk picking “mushrooms, real mushrooms, which were sprouting right in the heart of the city” from a flowerbed. Poisonous. We have lost contact with the rhythms of the seasons, wild animals, the woods, but also with agriculture, so much so that we look at the hills of the Langhe vineyards or tidy fields of sunflowers and call it Nature. We know a lot – almost everything – about how the food we eat is produced and what happens in a tomato field or on a dairy farm. The cheese arrives in the city ready, portioned, the vegetables in boxes, the fruit selected and polished. And so it becomes increasingly difficult to give a value to the food we eat, learning how it is made and how we want to invest our money.
A not very bucolic countryside
From the city, the campaign appears bucolic as in advertising, as in the memories of grandparents of bygone eras, or as frightening as a journalistic investigation on Reports. But thanks to the media, a new movement of peasant influencers, farmers, shepherds and cheesemakers is coming forward who have decided to use social networks and not only to stay and know what is happening “downstream”, but to tell their own story. first-person reality. Waking up at dawn, milking the cows, spending the summer in the pasture, sowing, fishing, harvesting. It is a flourishing of “old” professions that have found a new way to tell their story and enhance themselves. Ultimately, it is not clear why make-up and skincare enthusiasts can spend hours applying make-up on TikTok and a boy of the same age could not use Instagram to talk about a sheep transhumance, bringing their peers closer to a reality that, statistically, is unlikely they know.
A path (also) to economic sustainability
Digital communication through the use of social media is part of our lives, whatever work we do, but it is also clear that in addition to the desire to talk about ourselves, the use of tools such as social networks is a way to advertise, to raise awareness its services, but also to give added value to a sector that needs it to be economically sustainable. To escape the logic of intensive agriculture and livestock farming, truly understanding the work behind a wheel of cheese or a radicchio from the garden. Of course, the cross-section of these new influencers does not tell of the vast majority of what we find on the supermarket shelves, but of small realities, which perhaps we should stop calling excellence and which instead we should consider a new standard of life for them, for us of consumption.
