Portside

It’s the most famous diet in the world.

It might also be the most misunderstood, I think, as I scarf ink-black spaghetti al nero di seppia, savor a Lamezia red and drizzle olive oil on Calabrian ’nduja meatballs. Cerulean blue waters bob below, flecked by the basil green of nearby Sicily and the Aeolian Islands. I chew fast so my dining companion can deliver another helping of history.

“This cuisine dates back millennia,” declares a proud Antonio Montuoro, president of the International Academy of the Mediterranean Diet. Food is just a part of it though. “The other parts are the panorama, the beauty of nature, our historic centers, our heritage,” he enthuses, extracting his fork from a potato peperonata to point at the scenery around us.

“All this is part of the lifestyle of the Mediterranean diet,” the 72-year-old explains serenely, mopping tomato sauce off his plate with a thick hunk of artisanal bread.

It’s a beautiful story and a terrific seasoning for our meal. The only problem is it’s not true. Fifty years since the term was coined by the American physiologist Ancel Keys — and a decade and a half after UNESCO recognized it as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity — the Mediterranean diet has become a mishmash of hyperbole, half-truths and howlers, stirred together for political and commercial ends.

Amid backlash against the Green Deal and agricultural protectionism hardening across Europe, southern politicians and lobbies have weaponized a series of recipes and ingredients to fry the European Union over its liberal climate and trade policies, while boosting lucrative — and often unhealthy — exports to America and Asia.

Italian politicians have always been sensitive about food, but Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has taken that to new extremes, pursuing a vendetta in Brussels against attempts to cut meat consumption, draft warnings against booze and pick a common front-of-pack nutrition label for the EU. The right-wing figure claims ad nauseam that these stigmatize her ancestral food traditions, and has stoked a gastronationalist frenzy to enlarge support for her Brothers of Italy party.

Public health has greatly suffered in Italy as a result. The country struggles with one of the EU’s highest rates of childhood obesity. One-tenth of citizens drink alcohol daily, and salt overconsumption costs it more than France, Spain and Greece combined, according to a recent report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

Compare modern Italian eating with the original idea of the Mediterranean diet and you reach an unavoidable truth: The Mediterranean diet is dead. 

So why do we keep hearing about it?

Cucina povera

There are two competing theories on how the Mediterranean diet was born. Both begin with Ancel Keys, its founding father. A Colorado-born polymath with PhDs in biology and physiology, Keys got his start in the world of nutrition in the 1930s, developing a portable provision for United States troops as they prepared to enter World War II (the famous “K-ration”).

An energy-dense brick of sausage and sweets, the K-ration was hardly salutary. But then neither was contemporary American food, whose fatty abundance was killing middle-class men in droves. At the time, doctors were baffled: This was the best-fed cohort of the richest nation on Earth. What was going on?

Keys and his chemist wife Margaret figured it was down to diet, specifically too many saturated fats, and in 1951 they flew to southern Italy to prove it. A colleague had told them working-class Neapolitans rarely suffered from heart attacks and generally lived longer than, say, Minnesotan executives. The Keys measured the locals’ serum cholesterol. It was much lower.

But correlation isn’t causation, so the couple set up a pilot study in Nicotera, a sunny seaside town at the toe of the Italian boot. The Keys recruited 35 families and, for the next three years, took blood samples, calculated body mass and ambushed Nicoterans at mealtimes to see what — and how much — they were really eating.

It was “cucina povera” (peasant cooking), described Montuoro, whose relatives remember being accosted by the peculiar foreign researchers. Everything they ate was local and organic, rooted in traditional recipes furnished by subsistence farming.

The results of Keys’ research were incredible. Besides scarce coronary disease, the experiment found minimal cancers or degenerative illnesses. Off the back of their findings, scientists organized the “Seven Countries Study,” the largest epidemiological investigation in history, spanning 12,000 men across three continents. It turned the Keyses into celebrities, and the couple put out several bestselling cookbooks.

“How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way” was published in 1975, bringing a cornucopia of rustic dishes to the overfed households of industrial America. Idyllic imagery was key to its success, helping blow the notion of la dolce vita across the Atlantic. This contributed to a dramatic fall in heart attacks, saving thousands and spurring the global rise of Italian food.

So far, so good. Where the two theories split is on what the Keys really found in Nicotera. Orthodoxy holds that the American duo discovered a fantastically nourishing, mostly plant-based regimen centered on moderation and communal eating, as well as a food pyramid much like the one we all saw as children.

According to their data, young men got one-third of their daily intake from cereals, one-third from fruit and vegetables, one-fifth from wine, and one-tenth from animal proteins and olive oil. Sugar and salt were negligible. It’s the dominant interpretation and the one modern nutritionists rely on when they assert that the Mediterranean diet is the world’s healthiest.

But there’s another version. Backed by iconoclastic academics and anthropologists, this rendering argues that Ancel Keys’ books were never meant to be descriptive — they were prescriptive. “Italians have never practiced the Mediterranean diet,” said Alberto Grandi, author of “Italian Food Doesn’t Exist” and professor at the University of Parma.

“The goal is to make Americans eat better and so [Keys] builds an ideal food model,” a fictional amalgam of ingredients cultivated around the Mediterranean basin, insisted Grandi. The diet wasn’t discovered so much as invented — and Nicoterans’ leanness was due to a different ingredient: hunger.

Keys “went to the people’s houses and people were ashamed. They’d say ‘Come back tomorrow because today we won’t eat anything.’ Or they’d only have polenta or chestnut flour,” Grandi contends. Claiming such individuals enjoyed some ancient, gastronomic elixir is “really offensive to the memory of our grandparents and great-grandparents. Because they went hungry.”

It’s a controversial take that has made Grandi notorious in Italy. Several of my interviewees dismissed the northern academic as an attention-grabbing sensationalist. Others, however, backed him, citing archeological evidence, Keysian exegesis and parental memories. It’s impossible to know for sure and, in a way, it doesn’t matter.

The bottom line is that while the Mediterranean diet may stand above others in eminence, its feet are mired in mystery. And for many, that’s convenient, since this ambiguity has been crucial in transforming the coarse peasant cooking of mid-century Nicotera into the slick brand of mass marketing we know today.

Cucina commerciale

Icons take time to build and the Mediterranean diet was no different. Affluent, modish northerners initially laughed at the Keyses’ notion that they should imitate the impoverished, backward south, said John Dickie, professor of Italian studies at University College London and author of “Delizia: The Epic History of Italians and Their Food.”

It took twenty turbulent years to change their minds. First was the economic miracle of the 1960s, which industrialized Italy at the same time as agriculture’s “green revolution” drove people from farms to factories. Next were the “years of lead,” during which anarchists and mafiosi bombed the state. Then came the financial crash triggered by the 1970s oil crisis.

Overwhelmed, Italians turned to a mythical past, embracing folksy foods and a culinary crusade for so-called “authenticity.” “What we associate with the Italian diet, these supposed traditions, loads of them date from the [period] when Italians have left peasant living far behind and covered it with a nostalgia for the countryside,” said Dickie.

An anti-American backlash followed. The Slow Food movement erupted in 1986 after a McDonald’s opened in central Rome. Angry at the “banalization of food,” the left-wing peasant alliance wanted a return to Italy’s gastronomic lineage, including the increasingly well-known Mediterranean diet, said Barbara Nappini, the current president of Slow Food Italy.

Right-wingers liked that too, and they soon adopted the lingo. Farmer unions and food companies spotted the opportunity and lobbied the European Economic Community — the forerunner to the EU — for intellectual property protection and overseas promo, which they received in the 1990s.

Yet even as the largely meat-free Mediterranean diet attracted burgeoning interest from the medical profession, in the popular imagination, it was growing ever more open to interpretation. The health craze of the 1990s stamped the diet into fitness magazines, which were less fussy about animal proteins. Meat and cheese slowly acquired more prominence, as did olive oil, while fruits and vegetables were gradually passed over.

“Europeans’ heritage fever begins,” remembered Michele Fino, a winegrower and professor of European law. “Cheeses, cured meats, vegetable preserves, baked goods, pasta — a whole, huge range.” Along with wine, these are the moneymakers, creating more added value and netting more profit than the humble cereals, fruits and vegetables promoted by the Keyses. They are also the less healthy products though, meant to be consumed sparingly. It was around this time that the World Health Organization classified alcohol as a carcinogen, for which there is no safe level of use (processed meat got the same grade in 2015, with red meat listed as “probably carcinogenic”).

By the time UNESCO recognized the diet as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2010, a mental switch had been made. In theory, UNESCO recognition isn’t intended to confer any commercial benefit. In practice, this one endorsed — and unleashed — one of the world’s most successful brands. “The Mediterranean Diet” became synonymous with “Mediterranean food” — as if whatever Italians ate was wholesome by definition.

That year Italian agri-food exports totaled a modest €27 billion, topped by fresh fruit and vegetables (over €4 billion in value), which were roughly still on par with meat, cheese and processed pastas combined. Over a decade later, exports have tripled, streaking past €70 billion last year.

The composition has also flipped. Wine dominates the ranking (€8 billion), followed by pastas and dough-based goods (€7 billion), dairy (€6 billion), and processed vegetables (tomato sauces and such). Fresh produce has grown too, though not as much as cured meats and olive oil, which now account for a couple of billion each.

This evolution has been mirrored by a shift in how Italians eat. Supermarket shelves in the country have swollen with doughy snacks and processed sauces, sparking an obesity and overweight crisis. Southerners and children have been particularly affected, with the latter ranked Europe’s second-most obese (behind kids in Cyprus and just ahead of neighboring Greece, Croatia and Spain).

Ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks undoubtedly play a big role, but so do local staples. While it is convenient to blame fatness on foreign imports, under-18s are also the highest meat, dairy, pasta and dessert consumers, as well as the least careful about excess salt and the lowest fruit and vegetable eaters, according to the country’s statistics institute.

The plates of today’s Nicoteran children are more likely to hold a gelato than a tomato. Yet that hasn’t stopped companies waving the diet around to flog foods their grandparents would’ve hardly recognized. “Mediterranean diet sets records on world tables,” crowed Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farmer union, in a press release this month, as it celebrated the boom in sales of trademarked wines, olive oil and factory-made pastas.

According to Massimiliano Giansanti, the head of Italy’s third-largest farmer union, Confagricoltura, it’s all gravy. When I asked whether people were confusing terms, he admitted “there’s a potential risk,” but he argued we shouldn’t tell people what to eat.

“We’re exporting the products of our Mediterranean diet to the world,” he concluded proudly.

Cucina politica

Italians are said to have two obsessions: football and food. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi famously exploited the first, scoring big electoral points by manipulating the craze for calcio (his Forza Italia party was named after a football chant). Giorgia Meloni has taken to the second, cooking up a pungent gastronationalism with her Agriculture Minister and ex-brother-in-law Francesco Lollobrigida.

Meloni was berating Brussels about food before she came to power, making attacks on the Farm to Fork strategy, the agricultural arm of the Green Deal, into a pillar of her platform. Addressing a European Parliament event in 2021, the then-opposition politician alleged there were “discriminatory policies” against meat, referring to EU plans to cut livestock emissions and encourage more sustainable, plant-based diets.

The European Commission also wanted to establish a bloc-wide food label to help consumers make better choices. The top contender was France’s Nutri-Score, which provided shoppers with a simple, five-color nutritional rating from green to red. Meloni denounced it as “crazy,” arguing it favored French products and unfairly penalized Italian staples, like salami, Parmigiano Reggiano and olive oil (in reality, these fatty products got the same score as their French counterparts).

Lobbies like Coldiretti and Confagricoltura had a solution though. Researchers had amassed evidence that the Mediterranean diet (the all-but-vegetarian one) was among the world’s healthiest. Italy’s money-spinning meats and cheeses were still in its matrix, no matter how minimal. Why not just say the Nutri-Score clashed with the unassailable Mediterranean diet?

So Meloni did. After her landslide victory in October 2022, she marshaled a multipronged influence effort in Brussels to bury the front-of-pack labeling legislation. While Lollobrigida fulminated at the monthly meeting of agricultural ministers, Meloni’s lawmakers joined flash mobs and demonstrations outside.

There, Coldiretti and Confagricoltura staff heaved signs saying “Italian produce = quality” and “No to Nutri-Score.” Behind the scenes, the Italian ambassador also met with Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski — part of Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists political family — and pressed him to scrap the labeling law. Days later, the Pole’s chief of staff emailed the health commissioner, who was leading on the file, to argue against the French system, according to documents recently released to NGOs in a freedom-of-information act.

“It was the hijacking of the Mediterranean diet,” Serge Hercberg, a professor at the Sorbonne and the inventor of Nutri-Score, told me over the phone. “They knew it was false. They had to know. But by force of repetition, they thought they’d be able to convince, and they did.” More than 300 scientists published a report refuting the allegations in 2023, but by then it was too late. The Commission shelved the law. “It’s Goebbels’ line,” said Hercberg. “Repeat a line often enough and it becomes the truth.”

The playbook was so successful that Rome repeated it with alcohol, insisting the Commission’s intention to put cancer warnings on booze violated the Mediterranean diet.

Historically, they had more of a point here given the liver-curdling quantities of booze that Nicoterans drank, but scientifically the research had moved on. We now know coastal communities were not healthy because of wine drinking but in spite of it. No matter. The Commission dropped that plan as well. Ireland eventually went it alone, facing a barrage of Italian criticism, with Lollobrigida claiming it was a protectionist conspiracy to bash wine in favor of local whiskey (despite the fact they will bear the same label).

Lollobrigida also attacked lab-grown meat and went after veggie sausages, banding together with far-right parties in Spain, France, Hungary and Poland to harangue Brussels over its supposed attempts to dismantle national food traditions.

As absurd as the accusations were, they’ve won hearts and minds. Right-wing or left, nearly every single Italian I spoke to for this article was opposed to Brussels’ agri-food policies. They were convinced their cooking was among the world’s healthiest and that obesity was imported by foreign corporations. That’s partly true. But it’s also partly false, and until Italians acknowledge they are no longer eating as their ancestors did, they and their kids will be the ones paying the price.

The Mediterranean diet is dead. Somebody please tell the Italians.

Giovanna Coi contributed to this report.