In praise of complexity: From gastronomy to gastrology

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 and the way in which the disease is propagated involves a clear risk for the hospitality industry. This industry, particularly in countries whose economies depend largely on tourism, has been forced into implementing many different kinds of measures to guarantee safety and hygiene. This has involved a great logistical challenge and has radically changed the gastronomic experience, making it more complicated. From a point of view that is less focussed on the resolution of the “urgent”, the situation we are experiencing may constitute an opportunity to reconsider the cognitive and institutional framework in which gastronomy has developed until now. This paper proposes a new paradigm called gastrology, which is a departure from the social imaginaries of gastronomy, with its common sense definitions, burdened with normativity. COVID-19 is a challenge to the scales in which we think about the world. The pandemic teaches us that, for example, the micro and the macro -the propagation of the virus in the form of aerosols and the global economic crisis, or the microbiome and climate change-are intimately related. In this multiscale context, gastrology is an attempt to resignify gastronomy as a boundary-object: a convergence of all those scales that range from the planet to our intestine. This paradigm will require the confluence of multiple scientific disciplines that are disposed to abandon their certainties and rethink themselves as a consequence of contact with an object of study that is as complex as gastronomy.