Tracey Lawson

I loved this book. I've been trying to improve my family's eating habits, and keep seeing references to the virtues of a Mediterranean diet. The medical papers always say something like, "and yet the food is not the whole story; the benefits of the Mediterranean diet are also attributed to the lifestyle, the sources of the ingredients, the social aspect of the meals," and so on. And the cookbook I bought (The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, by Nancy Harmon Jennings), like most sources I have found, has wonderful recipes from all over the Mediterranean: Greece, Tunisia, Spain, Morocco, Italy, France, Lebanon.

Yet each of these places (maybe each area in each country) has its own typical cuisine based on its own lifestyle. This book is a complete story of one of those cuisines. The town of Campodimele is an Italian mountain town built around a medieval walled city. It is famous for the longevity of its inhabitants, who are frequently active and hard-working into their eighties and nineties.

The book follows these people month by month through a year, each chapter focusing on one component of the diet (olives, greens, bread, game animals, etc.), how it is produced, gathered, preserved, prepared, cooked, and eaten. Yes, there are recipes, or more accurately, instructions for preparation, but it is not a cookbook. It is a way of life.

Maybe I can't replicate this lifestyle, but my local farmer's market is today. I will look at it with new eyes.… (more)

This is a book of praise to a lifestyle that is, for most of us, unattainable. In the Italian village of Campodimele the residents enjoy an unusually long lifespan. And it's not just long, but the elderly residents enjoy an active old age. this has caused them to be investigated into what causes them their longevity. There are clearly going to be a mixture of factors, but food and diet has to be one factor, which is where this books, part documentary, part cook book, comes along. The author visits the village to discover the cause of the long lives and falls for the lifestyle and food. And I can see why, it's all very idyllic. Sugar coated, in fact.
Presented as a year of events related to growing their own food, harvesting, preserving and eating it. the residents are, almost universally, over 70 and still spry. No-one seems to have an office job, no-one seems to have a lack of time, the sun is always shinning and no-one ever suffers from a failure of the crop to take, or snow until March. It is a continual praise of the self sufficiency lifestyle, but the problems of that are never touched on. It was interesting, the history of the food they cook, the methods of preserving and attitudes to food, but it's noticeable that it makes no effort what so ever to work out how this would be compatible with the life that most of us lead. The cynic in me thinks that this praise of nature and self sufficiency is written by someone who has the money behind them to be able to cope with the vagaries of a crop failure.… (more)