Ice Cream Imposters
January 31st, 2010
There possibly isn’t a woman in this country who does not have a difficult relationship with food. Flick through the women’s mags and you can see a dozen conflicting messages about women, their bodies, their role as mothers and provider of meals, their sex appeal, their health and their role as consumers. After spending serious hairdresser time with these mags I stagger out into the light looking groomed, but my mind is reeling. Of all the evils women must be on alert for at all times the number one is carbohydrates. This may change next decade, but for the moment carbs are as unwelcome as an ancient, incontinent dog on the carpet.
But Italy, Bella Italia, the vessel holding our holiday dreams and desires, is the land of carbohydrate – pasta, bread, gelati, and wine just to name a few. I don’t know the stats on this but from observation visiting Italy, (in villages and non tourist areas), you don’t see many fat people. The descendents of the twentieth century Italian Diaspora living here in Australia and eleswhere are far more likely to be carrying too much flesh. Partly because it was mostly famine plagued Southern Italians who migrated. And for them food had become not only important to live but was invested with huge symbolic significances that were hard to leave behind.
In many Italian communities visiting relatives is the main social occupation, there are protocols to this pastime and if you don’t know them it can become tricky. One is to eat everything you are given if you are a guest – it’s the host’s way of saying ‘you are a valued visitor and I am well off enough to stuff you to the eyeballs’. And if you are the host you must have on hand, at all times, enough food to show you are doing well and can participate in this social exchange. It’s a status thing and all cultures have a variation on the theme. Food is no longer in short supply in Italy, although some areas are still marked by struggle, nor in the US or Australia, but the customs continue, and if you take it all seriously, and wish to maintain a link to the homeland, you feed – and you eat everything offered to you.
So this is one reason for the extra heft, the others are best left to the health planners, but I would offer another reason. One is the size of the serves. Italians in Italy eat small amounts of good food, like the French. In the south they eat masses of vegetables and grains, and pasta is reserved for Sunday or for a small first course before the meat or fish and vegetable course. And by small I mean maybe one and a half cups or less of cooked pasta. They drink wine with the meal – not before and not after. The younger ones might use other mind-altering substances but binge drinking is mainly the preserve of Northern European cultures and their once colonial outposts.
Having a strong culturally determined relationship with food means the forces of modern marketing and industrial food companies have found it hard to get a foothold in Italy. They will inevitably get in there and upsize everything, but the modest amounts eaten at meal times means that a gelati can be eaten and enjoyed in the heat for the evening without lashing ones self with a birch twig and drinking only sprout juice the next day
I like pasta, bread and wine, but my favourite carbohydrate of all is gelati. I don’t like ice cream, it tastes greasy and rich. But gelati, which is milk or fruit based, is lighter and more refreshing. If it’s made with cream it’s not gelati – don’t be fooled. In Italy you can have a dollop of cream on your gelati but why you would do this I’m not sure. And in some cities you can have your gelati between two thick slabs of sweetened bread. This has to be eaten quickly I imagine and I’ve only ever seen young men eating this combination. These blokes are probably perpetually hungry, no matter how much they eat.
A famous American ice cream brand has recently opened its first shop on a beachfront in Sydney. I queued with a friend to taste this new and exotic substance but was sadly disappointed. It was just ice cream with a funky name, huge serves and a big advertising budget. It wasn’t one of those rare moments when you taste something and you know you’ll remember that moment forever. My first taste of the Fiore de Latte flavoured gelati from a small gelataria in the back lanes of Rome was one of those moments. And all ice cream and gelato subsequently will be found wanting – the price you pay for cavorting in carbohydrate Eden.
for a good feed ...
