#28 - Raising a Large Family the Ancestral Way

"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."

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"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 2...