Child Obesity: No Food Culture is Safe

According to recent news, France also now presents a high rate of child obesity. This has probably not surprised French people, but has certainly challenged the Anglo-Saxon idea that the French, and the Mediterraneans in general, eat healthy and light food, while the British and the American diets are richer in fats and sugar. This is probably true, but it is equally evident that for the last fifteen or twenty years the two approaches to food have become closer to each other.

In fact, Anglo-Saxon food is still fattier, saltier and sweeter, and richer in additives, colours and preservatives. But today processed and preserved foods are also massively sold in countries such as France, Greece and Italy, usually associated with an uniforming Mediterranean diet. Actually, a unique Mediterranean diet does not exist, as what people eat in France differs greatly from what the Greeks or Italians do. Paradoxically, these three diets are more similar today, thanks to the global food coming from big retailers, than in the past, when these three peoples used to eat more traditional food.

The common traits of the Mediterranean diet (the abundance of vegetables and fish, a balanced consumption of meat and sweets, the frequent usage of olive oil, etc.) guaranteed lower rates of obesity for years. Today this difference is fading, and Mediterranean countries are also affected by continuously growing rates of obesity and child obesity, although less than Anglo-Saxon and North European countries.

The news is bad, but it also has good potentialities. The fact that we have all the same problem, and that no one may state a supposedly greater attention to health, means that it's time to do something all together. France is following England in taxing junk food. Perhaps, this may provide some good results, but it also has the weakness of only targeting the poor. Other measures may offer a less classist approach and perhaps better results. For example, labelling products by also visually highlighting the risky ingredients could be a good idea. In the past, some countries have experimented with traffic lights, geometric shapes, colours and other strategies to visualise the unhealthiness of a product.

In the meantime, it should be enough to fix bad policies that worsened in the recent past. For example, in Italy, Britain and other countries, the products packaged by the supermarkets such as bread and meat don't have to show their ingredients on their labels. Customers must look for 'the book of the ingredients', usually on the other side of a big supermarket or lost somewhere; otherwise, they cannot know whether the bread they want contains lard or the meat they are buying is added to with nitrite. Regulating on such a thing would be a first signal demonstrating interest in contrasting unhealthy food.

Viva il Cibo Made in Italy?

Carlo Petrini, fondatore di Slow Food, e Oscar Farinetti, fondatore di Eataly, hanno recentemente chiesto che le etichette del cibo in vendita nei supermercati in Italia riportino anche i paesi da cui gli ingredienti sono stati importati. Questo in reazione alle polemiche scoppiate quando si è scoperto che Eataly, supermercato di buon cibo 'made in Italy', vende 'pasta italiana' fatta con grano importato dal Canada e da altri paesi.

Tutto questo è sacrosanto, perchè più sappiamo del cibo che mangiamo e meglio è. Però colpisce anche che tutta l'attenzione si concentri sull'origine geografica degli ingredienti, che senza dubbio è importante ma non è l'unico problema. Per esempio, da qualche tempo, la carne e il pane confezionati dagli stessi supermercati che poi li vendono non hanno più gli ingredienti sull'etichetta. Spariti. Per trovarli bisogna andare a leggersi il 'libro degli ingredienti', che di solito si trova dall'altra parte del supermercato, che devi chiedere a qualcuno del personale o che, come mi è capitato in Inghilterra, dove vige la stessa regola, non si trova.

La sparizione degli ingredienti non ha suscitato le stesse polemiche della sparizione della loro origine geografica, ma è ugualmente, se non maggiormente, importante. Le carni, specialmente quelle lavorate come salsiccia, hamburger e wurstel, contengono spesso nitriti e altre sostanze giudicate in grado di causare, o almeno incoraggiare, alcune malattie. Se poi la carne coi nitriti venga dalla Germania o sia made in Italy a me personalmente sembra un problema minore. Lo stesso accade col pane, che a volte contiene strutto o altri grassi animali che sono più dannosi di quelli vegetali. Ma niente, il problema più importante sembra quello della provenienza, come se il fatto di essere italiano desse al cibo una patente di assoluta purezza e genuinità.

Francamente, a me non sembra, anche alla luce dei continui allarmi che riguardano il nostro cibo. Personalmente, tra una pasta fatta con grano canadese e una prodotta con grano della terra dei fuochi, preferirei la prima. E questo cavalcare il cibo made in Italy a tutti i costi, alla fine, mi sembra un modo semplice e a costo zero per rinfocolare l'identità italiana, in crisi non certo per colpa del grano canadese.

Hands off Suspended Coffee!

Il caffè sospeso was an Italian philanthropic practice which was really popular in the first part of the twentieth century, especially in Naples. The practice was really simple and consisted of buying one-more coffee than the coffees people actually needed. A lone person used to ask for two coffees, a couple for three, etc., telling the barista that one coffee was sospeso, suspended. The suspended coffee was momentarily not served, but saved for a poor person who would enter the bar soon. Obviously, il caffè sospeso was really popular with the Neapolitan homeless people, who used to enter the bars asking if, by chance, there was a caffè sospeso.

In Italy, this practice is still present, but has gradually declined in popularity. However, when it was supposed that we would never buy one-more coffee for the rest of our lives, suddenly suspended coffee became popular again. Not in Italy (at least at first), and not at the old bars and cafes, but thanks to charities and big cafe chains. In many famous cafes belonging to these chains, in fact, you can buy one-more coffee. Your name will be written on a blackboard that all the customers will see and the money you have given for one-more coffee will be passed onto a charity, which will use it to buy a coffee for a needy person.

It's quite easy to understand that the name is the same, but what today is called suspended coffee is something very different from il caffè sospeso. In one word, what has become lost is spontaneity. While in the past the bar mediated between the donor and the receiver, now the company encourages giving in a commercial context. On many Facebook pages, the company praises the donors, to persuade other people to do the same. Thus, the company uses this practice to attract new customers, to whom it promises praises. Thus, today suspended coffee is only a commercial strategy.

Moreover, spontaneity is also lost from the point of view of the receiver. In fact while in the past the needy person required to play an active role, deciding to enter the bar and ask for a suspended coffee, today it is the charity (or the company) that decides who is the lucky person. Other times, even more different from the original, one suspended coffee is activated automatically, each time a coffee is sold. Again, it is only a strategy to sell more.

What to say? Certainly giving and receiving has changed over the last thirty or forty years, and today the old mechanism of il caffè sospeso would be considered paternalistic. In fact, today the sharing economy offers us more adequate ways of giving. Moreover, many people might consider upsetting to see a homeless person into the bar. But what to do with the old practices? I would like that old habits such as il caffè sospeso disappear, becoming material for historians. Seeing their name exploited, and them turned into a further mechanism to make money, instead, is quite upsetting.

How Much is a Kilo of Identity?

Recently, at a local-organic-fair food market my attention was drawn by a little jar of sauce containing sardines. The man selling it was also the producer, and told me that those jars came from Campania, the Italian region where this product is “almost a religion”. When I asked how much, without any shame he answered '15 Euros' (about £12 and $16). When I instinctively asked why 15 euros, he answered: 'Because this is identity'. “This is pasta sauce!”, I objected, but it was too late. Starring blankly, the producer was explaining the entire production process, talking about Campanian families producing it with almost religious rituals, etc., and the conclusion was the undoubted link between high price and identity.

No one can exclude that food shapes who we are, but this has nothing to do with the price of a jar of pasta sauce. Instead, I believe that the high price of many organic foods has to do with frauds. Frauds regarding organic and local foods are growing every day. Not only do these foods cost insensately more than the other products, but also many foods sold as organic are actually industrially processed. Why are frauds growing around organic food?

Food cheaters rule where the direct link between people and food origins is broken, and a gap has to be bridged. Industrial food has broken this link, and in fact we know nothing about what we eat. As magicians, organic food producers promise us that by eating their foods we will find what we have lost. So, a jar of pasta sauce may miraculously give us the illusion that we are bridging this gap. Actually, this is not true. What is true, instead, is that a supposed identity is sold as a product, also at an expensive price, and people are eager to buy it to heal the wounds of consumerist society. But it's a paradox, because you can't recover from consumerism by remaining in the same logic. Instead, this system is only a further attempt of consumerism to make money. People who are not targeted by the mainstream market, are involved with an apparently different mechanism, actually working the same way.

What to do, then? Is our destiny already established and there is no chance of liberation? Whatever we do, are we condemned into the hell of capitalism, as many pessimistic sociologists say? I don't think so. Only, we should look at phenomena occurring out of the logic of consumerism. They are often hidden and ignored by mainstream media, but they do exist. One of them is the Italian GAS (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale). They will be the topic of one of my next posts, as they deserve more space than the end of a post. They have been surviving in Italy for twenty years, even though they have never be come popular. But they are there, and this reassures me.

The Mystery of Fracosta

A couple of days ago, while reading the menu of an Italian restaurant, I bumped into the word fracosta, which I'd never heard before. Fracosta was on the page of meat dishes, and I supposed that it was the part between the ribs, as fra in Italian means between, and costa means rib. Actually, things are not that simple. The meat producer Stefano Magini says in fact that fracosta is the neck of the bovine. The Carrefour website explains that it is sottocollo, that is, the part under the neck. The glorious Treccani vocabulary candidly admits that actually fracosta refers to various bovine cuts, such as entrecôte and shoulder. Garzanti vocabulary, however, says that it also means 'steak' in general.



I might go on, citing sources giving fracosta whatever meaning, but what is interesting is to try to understand why, if at a restaurant you take fracosta, you don't know what you eat. If we called meat cuts with their real names, fracosta probably wouldn't exist, or at least it would only refer to the parts between the ribs. In the other cases, we would eat 'neck', 'shoulder', and so on.



It is evident that when it comes to eating we have been tending to replace the physical parts of the animal with other, confusing names. Again in Italy, chicken legs are now called fusi, which is not a part of the body, but means 'oval form', the form of the chicken legs. In English, the animals change their names when they are on a plate. The pig becomes pork, the cow becomes beef, the deer turns into venison, etc. At the table, we detach the animal from what we eat, and hide the animal origins of meat.

 

 Actually, the table has only been the last stage of a long, historical process. In the 1930s and 1940s, slaughterhouses were institutional places in the city centres. All the city dwellers saw the animals enter these buildings and knew perfectly well what happened to them inside. Similarly, in the 1970s in Italy, Britain and many other countries, especially in the small towns, the butchers' shops were full of hanging dead animals, and the customers considered this a sort of guarantee of the quality of the meat they were buying. Today, slaughterhouses are non-places hidden on the outskirts of the cities. No-one sees the animals enter and, even, what happens there (the animal killing) is shown to us by alternative documentaries, while mainstream media totally cover up the scene. Likewise, butchers' shops are clean places in which we can hardly see an animal with the head, legs, etc. We don't want to see where meat come from.

I'm not a vegetarian, and eat meat once or twice a month. However, I can see that also we meat eaters are every day more concerned with the concept of eating an animal. It has been a gradual process, a matter of generation. My grandparents didn't consider eating meat 'a problem', as meat was an item of food like the others. Among my parents' friends, there were some people concerned with eating an animal. I have many friends who are vegetarians, and also many meat eaters cannot help thinking that eating an animal is different from eating a carrot. Many of my students are vegetarians, and almost all of them consider eating an animal a problematic issue.

In the end, fracosta and fusi are only two small clues of a bigger and very complex process that interests me and that will be a frequent topic of this blog. In the next weeks I will go back to this issue and also to those who decidedly oppose this process. But each trend, we know, has its counter processes.