A Moveable Feast

A separate report was published in 1954 by an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, Ancel Keys, and his wife, Margaret. They loved to holiday in Italy, and they chose Naples as a place where heart disease was said to be low, and studied the Neapolitan diet. Later, a team headed by Keys produced the Seven Countries Study (1980), covering Greece, Finland, Japan, Italy, Holland, the U.S., and Yugoslavia. This confirmed suspicions that it was blood cholesterol, resulting from a meat-and-dairy diet, that was responsible for many health problems. People with ideal diets and better health ate lots of plants instead. It was concluded that “dominance of olive oil in the diet” reduced heart attacks. “It would be hard to do better,” wrote Keys in 1975, “than imitate the diet of the common folk of Naples in the early 1950s.”

The very thought of olive oil, it is now quite difficult to remember, had long been enough to reawaken in an Anglo-Saxon a nostalgia for toad-in-the-hole. “Swimming in olive oil,” people would recall with a shudder only a few decades ago when they came back from a trip to Italy or Greece and tried to sum up their response to the food. And classic French cuisine, as close as gastronomy could get to the fine arts, was built on butter; olive oil was a low-lier cooking medium altogether.

But now, in North America in the 1980s, books began to pour from the presses about the Mediterranean Diet. Olive oil – reconceived and nicknamed “liquid gold” – was shown in study after study to be a kind of magic panacea. It is good for the bloodstream, helps children grow, slows aging, fights cancer, improves the skin. And people on the Mediterranean coasts, who rejoiced in olive oil at almost every meal, seemed to be committed to living on their other good foods, brightly coloured and intense of flavour, all in the hierarchy laid down by the Pyramid. They were not only healthier on the whole; they also seemed, to the wistful eyes of many northerners, to live splendidly happy lives. They had plenty of sun and sea, family togetherness around the table, siestas and fiestas and history. They were Mediterranean. It was a word to conjure with.

Its connotations derived from novels and travel literature; from British grand tours; German Romantic exhilaration on crossing the Alps at last to find lemon trees; paintings, by Italians mostly, that had once taught northern Europeans, and then Americans, what it was that was beautiful. Even today, when people visit Italy they don’t discover it, they recognize it. Italy can still, despite a great deal of sprawling concrete and hysterical graffiti, represent that original ideal beauty. Its food was now admitted to participation in the general distinction. Not only healthy but delicious! What more could one ask? Yes, there was another thing. Food, today, should be quick and easy to prepare – unless you are rich enough to pay for someonelse’s time and trouble. Given dried pasta and a few more aids from modern technology, Italian food could fill the bill once again.

It will be noted that, quietly, Italy had become the model, rather than Crete. Italians had emigrated to America in huge numbers, and done well there. They knew America – what it wanted, how people thought and bought. By the time the Mediterranean Diet had matured as an ideal structure and given birth to a Mediterranean Pyramid, Italians were ready. Olive oil, businessmen saw, was going to be big; American consumption of it has indeed quintupled since 1982. Things Italian, especially foods Italian, had worked their way up front, and Italians made it their business to keep them there.

Other Mediterranean countries – fifteen of them – also grew olive trees: 90 percent of the world’s olive oil comes from around the Mediterranean. None, to Americans, had the clout and the visibility of the Italians. Spain grows more olive trees than anywhere else – five million acres of them. But most olive oil in America is Italian – or rather, arrives there in Italian bottles.

The Spanish, piqued, are beginning to get their act together, and are energetically promoting their culinary image as well as their oil. Greeks, finding their oil unfairly downplayed, are resentful. Eastern and Southern Mediterranean countries have public-relations problems. The French – well, their olive oil may be extremely fine, but they export little of it. And the French are awkward anyway, have had their culinary day, and the trouble with their haute cuisine is that it is just too haute. They also eat all that meat and butter.

The Pyramid is the Mediterranean Diet’s flag – simple, definite, and proud. It is a marvellous selling tool for olive oil, and for other Mediterranean products too, telling people what they want, and showing merchants what to stock and sell. It is attractive to North Americans, and now also to northern Europeans, who have reason to fear contaminated eggs, febrile chickens, mad cows, and similar nightmares. Northern Europeans too are becoming obese, and developing cardiovascular disease and cancer. (Obesity, unlike the latter two conditions, is a distressingly visible warning, even for those who aren’t suffering yet.)

But in the Mediterranean itself, the Diet remains a puzzle. Firstly, in Latin languages “diet” mostly means something you do painfully and temporarily, to lose weight; in English it can also mean a way of eating that is habitual and (in this case) joyful. Should the Diet be called Mediterranean Cuisine instead? But that sounds a little elitist and appears to slight the health component.

Spaniards are baffled by the Diet, not least because it is Americans, mainly, who are telling them what it is. It is certainly not what they themselves eat. The fact is that the Spanish adore meat, and eat unconscionable numbers of eggs. It is wise when ordering a vegetarian dish in Spain to request explicitly that no ham be added, ham being thought to lend Spanish decorum to any dish. Moreover, Spaniards are being bombarded by advertising (much of it from multinational corporations) exhorting them to consume more milk, although traditionally milk was for babies and breakfasts.