The Mediterranean diet |
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Collection title
Geo & Geo
First broadcast date
12/15/2008
Abstract
Ancel Keys, an American scientist, pioneer of modern nutritional research, revealed the originality and excellence of the Mediterranean diet to health.
This diet is to be conceived as a whole, a lifestyle described by the ancient Greeks as a culture of body and mind. A healthy life depends on a healthy diet.
The secrets of life and memory of Ancel Keys, who died at the age of 101, are kept in Pioppi in a museum dedicated to him.
Landscapes and products of Cilento, Campania.
Broadcaster
RAI - RAI Tre
Audiovisual form
Documentary
Secondary themes
- Landscapes and environment
Credits / Cast
- Cannizzaro Piero - Author of original work
Map locations
- Italy - South Italy - Pioppi
Original language
Italian
Additional information
B / w photographs of Ancel Keys, a young researcher, in his laboratory.
Context
The Mediterranean diet
Mayalen Zubillaga
Broadcast in 2008, this documentary refers to the American physiologist Ancel Keys, one of the first scientists to have praised the diet known as Mediterranean, whose good properties were recognised by the WHO in 1994. Well, from the point of view of the social sciences, the Mediterranean diet, presented as balanced, frugal, traditional and close to nature, is above everything else an ideal model to improve how you feel.
The first mention that Mediterranean food might be good for the health appeared in the first half of the 20th century, but it came to the forefront of people's consciousness in 1950 with the work of Ancel Keys and his wife, who drew the following conclusions from their observations: keeping to a traditional Mediterranean diet would enable you to enjoy longer life expectation by reducing the number of coronary problems. Several other studies were then carried out in the West and the media soon made the diet fashionable, until finally it was taken up by the Mediterranean people themselves! Here Carmine Battipede, creator and director of a museum dedicated to the Mediterranean diet and to Ancel Keys, promotes the benefits of the diet. We are in Italy, and that is not a random choice: Italian cooking is often claimed to be, with the Cretan diet, an exemplary version of the Mediterranean model.
Presented as a diet steeped in an immutable thousand-year-old tradition, it ignores how cooking practises have evolved over time. For example tomatoes, symbol of Mediterranean cookery today and often shown in this documentary, were only brought to the Mediterranean in the 16th century and took another century to get solidly established (for Italy, the end of the 18th century). In the same way this model does not take into consideration geographical variations, particularly forgetting the southern countries: if there is a common factor to Mediterranean cooking it is diversity. Carmine Battipede praises red wine whereas wine, with pork, splits Mediterranean cultures down the middle.
Elsewhere this diet claims that the countryside is the only true source of Italian-Mediterranean cooking, forgetting the fundamental role played by urban centres in the management, consumption and spread of Italy's gastronomic glories. Nostalgia for a rural way of life is quite recent: until the 1950's the rural population of Italy had an austere and monotonous diet, from necessity. The so-called frugality of the Mediterranean diet, presented here as a wise choice and cultural characteristic is in reality linked to poor regions where for hundred of years people had no choice other than to eat simply and little.
This vision, though, responds to a problem preoccupying the United States and many other Western countries: while for thousands of years Man's first concern was to find food and then try to preserve it, today we are over-loaded with choice in a nutritional cacophony mostly spread by the media. Making us highly stressed as a result! In this context frugality, asceticism, temperance and simplicity set themselves up as perfect moral choices. In the United States and Switzerland, the eating habits of Italian immigrants were for a long time considered with hostility and distrust, before being somehow ennobled by the Mediterranean diet. In addition, this diet is based on eating vegetables, said to be "fairer", "more ethical" and "more natural" to our current way of thinking than animal products. Thus good for the body, the Mediterranean diet is also good for the soul.
Bibliography
DICKIE John, Delizia ! Une histoire culinaire de l'Italie, Buchet Chastel, 2007.
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.
