The Italians have good food. No question, right? But I’m getting a little tired of the “Made in the
Last night, I went to an Italian farmhouse for a contadino meal. It was lots of fun: they roasted meat on a grate in the fireplace, and the wine flowed freely. I knew they’d try to make me eat all kinds of fatty meats, and – all right, that’s what I expected, I wanted to sample them, and then basta! (Enough!) Really, I wanted to taste them, and a taste is all I needed. But it’s definitely not all the Italians need.
The entire meal consisted of fatty meats. First course, cured meats: Ciccioli, coppa di testa, salsiccia curata, salame. Second course, cooked meats: salsiccia mata, salsiccia fresca, pancetta, ribs, and I’m probably leaving something out. The pig is 95% useable, and, believe me – they use it. In any case, there were – I’m counting – at the very least eight different kinds of fatty meats. As I said, a bite works for me. But everyone else there, including women and children, devoured entire plates of the “appetizers,” ate a full piece of each of the cooked meats, and then asked for “seconds”! (Or would it be “ninths”?) Incredible! And disgusting, in my opinion. But, amazingly enough, and perhaps assisted by Bacchus in my noble quest for tolerance and open-mindedness, I wasn’t feeling judgmental last night. If they want to eat a diet consisting entirely of saturated fat, great, go for it. (Just as long as they don’t make me do it!)
That is, until the entire conversation turned into the usual pedagogy about how Italian food is so much superior to American food and hence Italians are so much superior to Americans. (Note the P-implies-Q causality: food is so important here that it really is a “hence.”) I figured – ho! – that, at least this time (this is a conversation that I have – or that people have on me, really, every day) they’d launch the battle on the gourmandize front. But no! In fact, we moved quickly to the health front, and the entire room agreed that the “Healthy Mediterranean Diet,” (“consisting largely of fruits, vegetables, and pasta”), shamed what Americans eat every day, which is, obviously, three meals consisting exclusively of McDonald’s hamburgers. They also said, in these exact words, “Now, you seem very thin, but all the rest of Americans are obese. Right?” I repeat: I was the only person in the room who wasn’t at least 40 pounds overweight!
No one – except for me, and I was content to amuse myself, again with Bacco’s help, by having a director’s-version conversation inside my head – seemed to note the riotous irony of the situation: A roomful of fat, slow-moving Italians devouring five pounds each of the fattiest meats you could ever find were expounding on the superior health characteristics of their diet.
That reminds me that, also yesterday, when I was at the market, the man in front of me bought two kilos of oranges. Great, good for him! Then he started to make conversation with the fruit man. “I have a ‘subscription,’” he said. “Six oranges a day. Three in the morning, and three after dinner.” I really am not being critical of this practice: six oranges a day, way to go! I just use it to illustrate the fact that nothing here is done in moderation: if you’re going to eat oranges, you’re not going to eat an orange, you’re going to eat six. And besides, from the looks of the guy, I think he also had a “subscription” to cookies.
Then today I read an article in a running magazine that included this exact phrase: “A healthy diet should include lean meats (such as Prosciutto di Parma, DOP) . . .” If prosciutto is lean, I’d really like to know what fits into the fatty category. Apparently, though, if you know where it comes from (that’s the DOP label), it’s all of sudden perfectly healthy? It’s kind of like that other theory some people have: if you bake a cake, and eat the entire thing, but in small bites right from the cake pan, and never actually take a piece on a separate plate, it’s actually the same as not eating it.
And then, also today, I heard a radio advertisement featuring a famous soccer player. “Your health is too serious to play with. That’s why I feed my team a healthy breakfast every morning: fresh milk, in-season fruit, bread, and Nutella.” If you’re not familiar with Nutella, it’s like chocolate peanut butter; its ingredients, in order of appearance, are “sugar, peanut oil, hazelnuts, cocoa, skim milk, and a bunch of chemicals.” I agree that fresh milk and fruit do constitute part of a healthy breakfast, but would anyone ever consider it ethical to advertise, say, cheesecake, as a healthy snack because you serve it with two raspberries on top?
And then I read another publication, a health booklet published by the Italian Association of Dietetics and Nutrition, and I found the standard “health pyramid.” But wait a minute! The health pyramid isn’t actually standard. This was the “Italian Food Pyramid,” labeled just like that. In this health pyramid, they actually include cookies in the same (recommended) category as pasta, rice, bread, and potatoes. They don’t make any distinction between whole grain and refined-grain products, probably because whole grain products don’t exist here. And, also notably, “Oils and Fats” are more highly recommendable than “Milk and Yogurt.” I can’t be the only person who thinks such a recommendation is absurd. I’m a pretty big fan of the scientific method; is laboratory science in
I’m not saying that the Italians shouldn’t eat like crap. If that's what gets them going – and does it ever! – right on, they should go all out. But I am saying that they should look at themselves a bit more objectively, and that they should somersault right off that high horse they’re riding.
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