Aromatic flavours of the countryside, mingled with happy memories of conviviality and sharing dishes like antipasti remain the exclusive food style of the Mediterranean Diet which UNESCO defined as the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2013.
The Mediterranean Diet takes you on a sensory journey around the ancient world and the peoples of the Mediterranean Basin. Their respect of seasonal rhythms and local terrain in cultivating sublime tasting heritage vegetables like artichokes, peppers, tomatoes and olives led them to imaginatively conserve their most colourful flavours until their next harvest.
The first promotion of these diverse and delicious foods to Northern Europe was by the Benedictine monks, described by many as the first slow food movement; however, its modern day popularity grew after Ancel Keys, an American scientist, published his study on the Mediterranean Diet in 1945.
He found that despite southern Italians and Greeks consuming 40% of their calorific intake through fat, their low incidence of heart disease was due to their mainly vegetarian diet that was high in cereals like rice and farro alongside pulses such as lentils and beans. Their consumption of a huge amount of olive oil, but relatively low amounts of saturated animal fat, a large amount of Omega-3 rich deep-water fish and virtually no processed or hydrogenated fats provided a healthy boosting way of life that the rest of the world aspires to replicate.
Today our modern restrictive and calorie-counting interpretations of ‘diet’ are worlds away from the original Greek, where it denoted lifestyle and choice, a way of living from a cultural landscape that we frequently romanticise in the UK.
Confined at our desks, we daydream of sitting in front of a wood-fired stove drying saffron, paprika, mushrooms, or hunting for truffles, but most of us have neither the time, heirloom seeds, smallholding, or foraging skills to be able to conserve the freshest vegetables to last until next year’s fresh supply.
The much loved Mediterranean foods that L’Aquila shares remain the preserve of the age-old communities that created them, the Mediterranean Diet providing a sense of economic sustainability and identity as well as the healthiest ‘diet’ of the western world.