Study Unit 4: The Mediterranean Diet, Artisanal Food, and the Local Food Revival

The Mediterranean Diet

In this unit we will be exploring the idea of the "Mediterranean diet" and how this relates to program themes. We will be looking at how our thinking about diet and nutrition is changing, along with social movements to reclaim of small-scale production and processing of foods.  Not only does this give us better nutrition but sustaining vibrant local and regional food economies is also a source of resilience in the face of climate change and disruptions in the global food economy due to warfare, pandemics, and price volatility.

As we learned in the last unit, the idea of the Mediterranean diet is a relatively new idea in Italy, in lieu of the more traditional frame of la cucina povera. In March 2023, the Italian government nominated Italian cuisine for a designation as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. Therefore it has become a object of national pride that Italian cuisine has been recognized as a healthy diet. In recent books promoting the idea of the Mediterranean diet and so-called "blue zones," areas of the world where people live vigorously into extreme old age, Italy often figures prominently, especially Sardinia where the population seems remarkably free of artherosclerosis, even in men who generally exhibit a higher incidence of heart disease elsewhere. Understandably, we might want to be interested in exploring these dietary patterns as a template for "how we should we eat" to maintain health and well being.

My argument is that our contemporary diet has become so distorted by misguided health information and undue influence by the food industry, we have lost our way and struggle to regain a healthy relationship with our food. There is nothing magical about a diet that is Mediterranean. Rather the features of this diet are consistent with a peasant diet world-wide based on small-scale agriculture that is adapted to local ecological conditions. The features of this diet include a wide biodiversity of wild and domesticated plant and animal foods. We will be exploring the importance of wild and foraged foods with my local teaching partner Dafne. Italians are also regular consumers of herbal medicines and tisanes (teas). Herbs are rich in polyphenols that add a nutritional powerhouse to the diet.

Many of the recognized "blue zones" (named as such when epidemiologists used a blue pencil to draw circles on a map to locate zones of unusual longevity) are connected to peasant cuisines in different parts of the world. However, representations of this diet tend to underplay the importance of animal foods, especially fats, for reasons that can be traced to the recent history of nutritional advice in the United States.

The idea of  the Mediterranean diet was first popularized in the 1950s by Ancel Keys, the American nutritionist responsible for the "heart-lipid" hypothesis which held the consumption of saturated fats responsible for the rise in heart disease after the Second World War. Keys's "Seven Countries Study" correlated rising meat consumption after the war with rising rates of cardiovascular disease. However "correlation does not mean causation" insofar as he failed to account for "confounding factors" such as rising sugar, alcohol, and tobacco consumption. Keys's study became enormously influential, leading to 50 years of low-fat dieting, during which the American population has become increasingly metabolically sick. Retrospective studies have revealed the influence of funding from the sugar lobby in directing Keys's conclusions away from sugar and towards animal fats. His study originally included 20 countries, but he only included the ones that seemed to confirm his hypothesis. Recent studies would seem to confirm that sugar, especially high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), is responsible for setting off the inflammatory cascade at a celluar level that leads to chronic disease. We are now seeing studies of the role of sugar-induced inflammation in diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, and many cancers and autoimmune diseases. 

Ironically, the demonization of animal fats coincided with a change in our food system in which animals were being raised on a diet of industrially produced corn and soy which actually made their fat less healthy for us to consume! The economic calculation of the CAFO system is to fatten the animals up on this highly inflammatory diet and then slaughter them just before their organs blow out. The missing piece for us is raising animals on pasture, so they are eating grass and not corn and soy. 

Returning to the case of Sardinia, one of the central features of their diet is the consumption of pecorino Sardo (Sardinian sheep's milk cheese). The recent discovery that grass-fed dairy contains high concentrations of C15, an essential fatty acid that supports cell health may be the key to Sardinian longevity. An essential fatty acid is one that our bodies cannot produce on their own, we need to get it in our diet, either in full-fat dairy or in cold water fish, and the dairy has to be grass fed and, interestingly, the higher altitude the pastures, the higher the concentration of C15!! This makes sheep's milk cheese especially worthy of consideration, since the Sardinian shepherds bring their herds to the Italian mainland and herd them along ages-old shepherding routes that allow their sheep to graze on mountain pastures. If you take a walk along the ancient Appian Way outside of Rome (and I hope you do), you may well encounter a shepherd and his herd of sheep all within walking distance of the city limits!

The raises an important point to consider: How do animals metabolize the world for us? Before the domestication of animals, we relied on hunting wild game. We can't eat grass, but animals do, and in the process they make available to us the nutrients from an important resource in the web of life. Our relationship with them is truly entangled in terms of maintaining our health and well-being. The American diet has been severely deficient in animal fats that have an important role to play in maintaining our health at the cellular level. In fact, cholesterol is a major ingredient in our cell walls and in the structure of our brains. Due to misguided dietary advice, the current cohort of college-age students has been systematically starved of the important building blocks for health since birth (all that low-fat dairy) and the concern is that we are seeing evidence of premature aging at a younger age. The good news is that this can be reversed. Your time in Italy will be a great opportunity for you to explore the world of Italian fats, especially cheese, and see what a difference it makes in how you feel and how you live in your body. The part of Italy where we will be is famous for its fresh pecorino, prima sale (cheese made without being aged in salt brine) and it is amazing. Italian cuisine also places an emphasis on small fish (sardines and anchovies) as a source of umami and healthy fats.

Episode One of the Netflix Series Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat focuses on the importance of fats in the Italian diet. This is an important corrective to how the Mediterranean diet is typically described in discussions of nutrition. The readings by Leitch and Meneley will also give a deeper understanding of the role of animal fats and olive oil in the Italian diet.

The essays by Iglesias López and Dan Buettner will illustrate how the Mediterranean diet is more than just a diet, rather it is an entire orientation for a different mode of life that takes into account the importance of physical activity, respecting our circadian rhythms, and sociality. Buettner's essay was published in the New York Times in 2012 and is one of the most downloaded articles in the newspaper's history. His recent book on the "blue-zone diet" has made this a topic of very current discussion.

Artisanal and Local Food Economies

Of course, we can't all live in Italy and eat Sardo pecorino, except as a precious imported food. In the 19th century, California recruited Basque shepherds to immigrate to the US and travel with herds of sheep to mountain pastures, but it is now a dying way of life. The documentary Sweetgrass is an evocative film depicting the last of these annual sheep migrations in the early 2000s.

We don't have many deeply rooted food traditions in the United States. Ironically, the expansion of industrial mono-cropping farm growing only corn or soy has made our agricultural areas a de facto "food desert." Native American communities have been at the forefront of re-establishing local food economies through reclaiming their ancestral diets to undo years of colonization and disruption of their traditional food systems. The documentary film Gather is a stunning exploration of these  movements in indigenous food sovereignty. And historians of African-American cuisine have made us more aware of the contributions that people enslaved from Africa have made to the development of South regional cuisine, as illustrated by the Netflix Series: High on the Hog. We also have chefs and farmers who are inspired by local food traditions in other parts of the world to create new cuisines based on the resources of the local environment.

In Europe, including Italy, the struggle is to preserve long-standing traditions that are perceived as "endangered" by globalization and industrial standarization. We will be exploring these movements in the context of the Slow Food Movement, an organization originating in Italy as a counter to the globalization of "fast food." In particular, we will be exploring olive oil and salumi (the generic term referring to all salt-cured meats, including salami). Salt-cured meats are a product of fermentation and are used to add umami (savory flavor) when used in small quantities to almost all Italian dishes. Artisanal (small-scale) cured meats using traditional methods are much healthier than the industrially produced equivalents. The artisanal version is based on animals raised on pasture and a long fermentation process that doesn't suit the quick turnaround of profit in the industrial system. 

Italy is a nation that is rich in local food traditions and prodotti tipici (products typical to a region, such as pecorino Sardo). Each small town is famous for a specific product which is annually celebrated in the form of a sagra (a word derived from the Latin word for sacred) to attract people from all over Italy to travel to that place. The Slow Food Movement publishes guide books on local products for people wishing to engage in food tourism across the gastronomic map of Italy. 

Much of these local products are made by skilled practitioners with skills very much connected to the senses as a form of embodied knowledge. We can envision a division of labor among three modes of food processing: home cooking, artisanal production, and industrial manufacture. One of the points of reflection I am encouraging you to make is how you might want to rework this division of labor in your own food practices in the interests of a greater intimacy in understanding your food and the costs and benefits of how you source what you eat. This will be an important part of your project for the gastronomic exploration, which will result in a class presentation in our last week in Rome.