The Mediterranean 'heritage' Diet

By Author: pangsiyan
Total Articles: 130
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Due to the incredible power of the internet and an editor who can't quite grasp the concept of 'holiday', I'm writing this under an umbrella in France. To be more precise, I'm writing it from a cafe terrace overlooking the Pont Du Gard. Many of you will have been lucky enough to visit this place, many more will have seen it in pictures or on video. It's a staggering piece of Roman civil engineering, built by enslaved Gauls and richly deserving of its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It stands to reason. Like so many other monuments and natural features the combined bridge and aqueduct is part of our international history and culture; it belongs, in some way, to the whole world, and we should all help look after it.

Strange, then, to be told in such a lovely place that the Italian government is pushing to apply UNESCO World Heritage Status to "the Mediterranean diet". Yes, if the vote goes through in November this year, fresh fruit, veg and grilled fish will join the UN's special list of "intangible cultural heritage".

Our first problem, I guess is defining the Mediterranean diet at all. Tomatoes, ...
... olive oil, aubergines, grapes, grilled fish and great earthenware jars of wine dark well, wine, are all things that mimsy food writers have developed into a bit of a cult, but I'm not entirely sure that's good enough. What are we going to do about the equally fascinating cuisine of the north African coast where there is little wine drunk and large amounts of lamb eaten? While we're bandying foodways should we chuck in the fantastic mezes that feature heavily in diets from Greece right round the middle eastern end of the med? This is going to be a tough one.

It's ironic that it should be the Italians attempting this act of insane redefinition. "Italian cooking" after all, is a concept largely imposed by unifying revisionists like Pellegrino Artusi on a land where the cuisine is so singularly diverse and fiercely regional that you can still get stabbed in the neck for putting the wrong sauce on the wrong shaped pasta.

Given that we - ie the rest of the world - are going to have some difficulty defining what constitutes a Mediterranean diet, perhaps we might also question how much we benefit from it. Though organisations like the Medical Research Council's human nutrition research unit see advantages in elements of the diet, there are equally vocal advocates of the Japanese diet, the paleolithic diet and even the so-called "Norman Paradox" - figures which show that those following the traditional diet of northern France, laden with butter, cream, animal fats, pork and alcohol have bafflingly long life expectancies and low levels of heart disease. My own particular favourite is the less well known "Inuit paradox" wherein people with a diet containing no vegetables at all live long and healthy lives, their vitamin requirements being obtained from seal meat and whale liver.

Finally there is the vexing issue of enforcement. I realise the UN does less actual fighting these days but can we expect to see blue berets in restaurants keeping the peace by driving half-tracks between those who want oil and vinegar on their rocket and those who might favour salad cream or even some chips?