Abstract
According to the Biblical story the life of mortal Man began with an ambivalent nutritional behaviour wavering between desire and fear of desire:
Which with desire, inclinable now grown to touch or taste, solicited her [Eve's] longing eye.... What fear I then, rather what know to fear under this ignorance of good and evil, of God or death, of law or penalty? (John Milton, 1667: Paradise Lost)
To a large extent the search for food has decided the individual's religious, social, historical and political destiny and likewise his or her fantastic and imaginative destiny. I describe a small community in Central-Southern Italy where the depredations of history and the memory of long periods of famine have given rise to relationships of diffidence.
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