Edited by Dr. Ermanno Cribari, expert in Agri-food Economics Communication and Territorial Development
Being together around dishes has staged, throughout the evolution of man, not only the common need to feed, but also the symbolic celebration of human relationships, the greatest descriptors of the cultural tradition of a place. If you look for "Mediterranean diet" on Google, over one million five hundred thousand results will appear. This is an immediate statement of how this popular set of eating habits , that the history and tradition of many peoples have coined on the shores of the Mediterranean from a few millennia ago, is.On the wake of the great demand for health from the typical consumer of today, more conscious and less homologated, the Mediterranean Diet is the first and undisputed health food model of the world. Its baptism occurred sixty years ago in conjunction with the largest epidemiological study ever done in the field of nutrition by the American physiologist Ancel Keys... the concept of Mediterranean Diet represents not only a set of products and recipes and a food style, but also and above all a millenary culture and a way of life that were born in the five lands of Southern Italy (Sicily, Calabria, Puglia , Basilicata and Campania). But what is this model? For thousands of years the people settled in southern Italy have eaten and lived in the same way, receiving from the Fertile Crescent (Levant, Egypt and Mesopotamia), first in the West, seeds and animals, except for the pig, the only native animal of Southern Italy. The fact that the populations of Southern Italy, unlike the Celts who lived in the north, lived in "fixed dwellings" was decisive for the transformation of man from predator to producer. In fact, the sedentary favored the cultivation of the fields from which agriculture began, the place from which the most important foods originate from furnishing the table of the Mediterranean Diet ... since then, and up to a fifty years ago, the man from the South of Italy has fed on vegetables, cereals, flour, milk and a little meat, using olive oil as a condiment and wine as a drink. And these are the foods that make up the building blocks of the infamous Food Pyramid, which in the nutritional field symbolizes, as it were, the Mediterranean Diet. But these are not just the ingredients of the world's most infamous lifestyle model. In fact, it is a complex of rules on which the life of the people of the South of Italy was built and acted in its entirety... and even today, in the inland villages * of Calabria, where time has stopped in the night of remote memory, the ancient eating habits and behavioral evolved through the human instinct applied in millennia of history survive.
* Which were only slightly touched by technological and commercial progress