Mayalen Zubillaga

 

            Envoyé Spécial is a French weekly news programme created in 1990. Broadcast early on Thursday evenings it alternates between the studio and filmed reports, with either portraits, investigations or analysis, all using a variety of contributors and all centred round current events in France or abroad. For this issue, broadcast in 1998, the team of journalists looked at the "Cretan diet", the ultimate version of the famous "Mediterranean diet" with which it is often confused and whose benefits were recognised by the WHO in 1994.From the point of view of the social sciences, the Cretan-Mediterranean diet, presented as balanced, frugal, traditional and close to nature is above all an ideal model for the spirit.

The idea that Mediterranean food could be good for your health appeared in the first half of the 19th century but it really came to the forefront of the popular consciousness in the 1950's following studies by a couple of American physiologists, the Keys. From their observations they concluded the following: keeping to a traditional Mediterranean diet gives better life expectancy, while considerably reducing the risk of heart disease. Following the Keys' findings there were several other studies carried out  in the west, such as by Professor Serge Renaud. In the 1990's, he used the Cretan diet at the Lyons hospital. Created by American nutritionists, the model was rapidly made fashionable by the media, until it was taken up by the people of the Mediterranean themselves.

Presented as a diet which is part of an unchanging, thousand year-old tradition, a golden age dating back practically to the Garden of Eden, it totally ignored the fact that ways of eating have evolved enormously over history. For example tomatoes, today the symbol of Mediterranean cooking, were not introduced to the Mediterranean until the 16th century and took a further two hundred years to take hold (end of the 18th century in Italy, the 19th for Provence), like peppers and ordinary beans. In the same way this model does not not take into account geographic variations and completely ignores the Mediterranean's southern countries: if there is a factor common to all the different Mediterranean ways of cooking, it is their diversity. Finally the supposed frugality of this diet is presented as a a cultural characteristic, a choice based on inner wisdom, whereas in reality the various models on offer, such as the Cretan diet, come from regions where poverty is the norm and where, for most of their history, people had no other choice than eating little.

             However, the Cretan diet responds to a preoccupation which has taken hold of the United States and western countries in general: while for thousands of years men have worried most about first of all finding then preserving food, in today's situation of over-supply they have choice – and this merely adds to people's anxiety! In this context frugality, asceticism, temperance and simplicity become perfect moral aims which are found, moreover, in the Mediterranean monotheisms. The Mediterranean-Cretan model is based on the central idea of eating mainly vegetables, considered to be “fairer”, “more ethical” and “natural” in our current representations, than animal products. Beneficial for the body, the Mediterranean diet is thus also good for the soul and because of that it is a perfect example of “incorporation”, that is a belief expressed more or less consciously by all the people on the planet: we are what we eat. The worried, distraught eater faced with our modern “nutritional cacophony” thus finds in the Mediterranean diet a model which is even more reassuring because it has the unanimous approval of the scientific community.

 HUBERT Annie, « Autour d'un concept : 'L'alimentation méditerranéenne' », Techniques & Culture, n° 31-32, 1999.

Bevilacqua Salvatore, « Un « régime méditerranéen » bon à penser », Anthropology of food [Online], 7 | December 2010, Online since 25 décembre 2010, Connection on 15 mai 2012. URL : http://aof.revues.org/index6600.html.

Fischler Claude, « Pensée magique et utopie dans la science. De l’incorporation à la ‘diète méditerranéenne’ », Les Cahiers de l’OCHA, 5, p. 111-127, 1996.