#29 - True Historical Italian Food with Karima Moyer Nocchi, Author of Chewing the Fat

"Traditions are always things that are selected and dusted off from the past and embellished and sort of made into a collage of who we are and what represents us. What I wanted to capture with this book was the difference between that collage and the very important idea of tradition, with what people were actually eating." Karima Moyer-Nocchi, speaker, historian, professoressa and author of Chewing the Fat and The Eternal Table , discusses with us the sometimes shocking differences between the myths of Italian traditional foods and the true history. She also shares her heart about the vital importance of capturing the oral narratives of our elders before the generation of memory keepers from a unique time have left us. "History has always been written as if no one ever ate." Love what we're doing? Our podcast is sponsored by our patrons and listeners! We'd love you to be part of our Patreon community! For $12 a month (or equivalent in your currency) you'll be helping us with the costs of recording, editing and putting this work into the world. And you'll get to be part of our world on a deeper level - we've got a monthly intimate patron-exclusive podcast called Kitchen Table Chats and we're also going to share cooking classes, extra interviews and much more. Check out www.patreon.com/ancestralkitchenpodcast for all the details! "I really don’t have the words to describe the feeling that I have of watching that happen, and making that transpire – because you can just feel that this is the first time that these families were actually paying attention to what the older woman had to say." Time Stamps: 00:30 Welcome and thank you to our patrons! 01:43 Introducing Karima 03:22 What’s the last thing you ate? 05:24 Diving in to Chewing the Fat: why our traditional ideas of Italian historic foods are just wrong. Karima explains this and some sources of our misperceptions. "If you want to look up the dates of wars and things like that, you need to go to another book. Because this is a book about truthfulness, which is the other side of the coin." 11:57 Why are these false ideals we hold about historical Italian food and diet so prevalent? 12:55 Hot Mention : The development of the idea of the Mediterranean diet 15:27 What did people eat? The surprising myths that emerge about Italian food during the fascist era. 19:36 The biggest surprise for Alison in the book! Addressing the olive oil question and shocking revelations about lard 24:00 Hot Mention : Ancel Keys 26:10 The ideas of the Mediterranean diet 26:54 The Mediterranean Pyramid 34:09 UNESCO and making food an intangible heritage 37:09 When you started out on this project, did you know you would find all these myth-busting revelations? 39:57 What surprised you the most? 42:38 Karima’s interviewing and recording process; the concept of oral narrative in the historical record. 49:00 Learn about yourself as an interviewer 53:55 What do you want people to do with the information in the book? What do you want to happen because of it? Resources Mentioned: Five Cheapest Foods Episode What is the fifth quarter? The Columbian Exchange "Using butter was an expression of wealth. If someone in your family was not well, you would try to procure some butter. I’ve seen things like curatives to pick someone up and give them a little bit of energy, putting a little pat of butter in their coffee. That would be something you would give someone when they were not feeling well." Ancel Keys - a quick search for this biophysicist produces a number of polarizing articles Narrative History mention on Instagram The Art of Eating Well: An Italian Cookbook by Pellegrino Artusi " The things that we do now that are going to be traditions in 25 years – because that’s how long it takes something to become a tradition according to the EU – we don’t realize it because it’s not a reenactment now. " Project Gutenberg's Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome, by Apicius Le Ricette Regionale Italiane by Anna Gosetti della Salda Magazine: La Cucina Italiana The Silver Spoon (Traditional Italian Home Cooking Recipes) Karima on Instagram The Eternal Table , by Karima Moyer-Nocchi. This is a more scholarly worked, covering 2,500 years of Roman culinary history. TheEternalTable.com On April 23rd, Moyer-Nocchi will be presenting on the History of Macaroni and Cheese at Monticello, as a part of the Heritage Harvest Festival. This ticketed event will be available both virtually and in person! "I thought I was just going to go and talk about food. But you can’t just go and talk about food." If you like us and use Apple Podcasts, we'd love it if you left a review! Here's how: Open the Apple Podcast app Find Ancestral Kitchen Podcast in your library (you can search for it) Scroll down to 'ratings and reviews' Click on 'write a review', choose how many wonderful stars you would like to give us (!), title your review and then, in the lower box type a review of up to 300 words. Thank you. We really appreciate you taking the time to support us! Thank you for listening - we'd love to continue the conversation. Come find us on Instagram: Andrea is at Farm and Hearth Alison is at Ancestral Kitchen The podcast is at Ancestral Kitchen Podcast Original Music, Episode Mixing and Post-Production by Robert Michael Kay