#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 Karima03:22 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 diet15:27 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 lard24:00 Hot Mention: Ancel Keys 26:10 The ideas of the Mediterranean diet26:54 The Mediterranean Pyramid34:09 UNESCO and making food an intangible heritage37:09 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