How we got to the complete foods

A short journey inside human food evolution

In the last years it is known that the so-called “complete foods” are gaining more and more complete market share with growth levels, year after year, with three figures.
A country like ours (Italy), which has no part of the most important, if not the most important in the world in terms of culinary and gastronomic culture, cannot but play its part in the game of food innovation.

The goal is to direct this inevitable evolution towards the search for eco-sustainable foods, but at the same time able to guarantee the right human well-being deriving from the use of a healthy and tasty food.
Because history teaches us that the evolution of man is intimately linked also to the whole evolution of his diet.

In the Paleolithic man was a hunter / gatherer: he ate what the environment could provide in his daily wanderings. So seeds, tubers, roots, fruits; but also small animals, bird eggs and what man has found in his daily progress, always careful not to turn himself into the food of other great predators, such as large cats or wolf packs.

With the domain of fire, man has eaten cooking food, thus being able to make a first improvement over the previous period, even if cooking meat has eliminated some problems of hygiene and digestibility.

But it was the passage of agriculture that allowed man to produce greater quantities of food than those used by the collector / hunter. The farmer is almost immediately supported by the farmer and the wheat flour and more often the barley flour have become part of the daily diet. As for meat and fish, conservation has always been a problem, especially in hot places; drying, smoking and salting have been for centuries the possible answers to the need for conservation of animal proteins.

Obviously the breeding of cattle, as well as sheep and goats, is allowed to humans to access the man and his derivatives (cheese, butter, yogurt). Another effect of the transition to agriculture is linked to the discovery of beverages such as beer and wine, which only the farmer, as a sedentary man, used from fields planted with vines or cereals.

With the passing of the centuries, which saw the power evolve also based on the location of the different civilizations (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Phoenician, Etruscan, Greek, etc.), with the fall of the Roman empire we reach the Middle Ages, in which phenomena of widespread poverty and famine have created serious problems for a large slice of the population and pushed towards a predominantly vegetarian diet, based on legumes that provided different types of flour. But in the Middle Ages, new foods began to be introduced, such as eggplant and sugar cane from India.

With the subsequent discovery of new continents new foods have arrived, such as potatoes, tomatoes and corn, which becomes a staple food for many farmers in the form of polenta.

But it is the potato, which has its origin in Peru and Mexico (cultivated since the time of the Aztecs and the Incas) which arrived in Europe around the sixteenth century, which has contributed most to solving many situations of food shortages (ie in the Eighteenth century Ireland). Despite many initial suspicions (maybe we will write an article about how in the whole history of man food innovations are initially with distrust on the part of many, starting precisely from the history of the potato) the potato then became established in European cuisine. It is nutritious, rich in starch, but has a relatively low caloric content (80 Kcal per 100 grams, against the average 270 Kcal of the bread and about 350 of the semolina pasta …) and thanks to its versatility it is a vegetable product to which Many forms of preparation and recipes have been dedicated.

And we come to the present day, also marked by the need to alternate convivial food (with family and friends, typically on weekends or evenings) with a food that is easy to eat, but healthy and nutritious: in fact, being able to feed quickly while you it copes with the inevitable daily movements to fulfill its daily work commitments, it allows us to carve out some time to dedicate to ourselves (perhaps going to the gym or swimming).
The “complete food” were also born to give an answer to these new needs, and Bivo is the Italian proposal for the complete food market that represents the spearhead of the new and modern world of foodtech.

Bivo is the first and for now the only Made in Italy proposal.
As in past centuries, even today “man is what he eats”; and given that Feuerbach’s motto is still valid it is our duty to avoid “junk food” and to feed on food with a low glycemic index but with a complete amino acid profile, possibly without ingredients of animal origin, without preservatives and which , after eating, they guarantee excellent digestibility and a gradual and constant energy release over time. And that’s why we created Bivo.