SPICE OF LIFE?

Everyone knows that the Mediterranean diet, and the Italian variey of this in particular, are among the most healthy in the world. Why, then, in the country which loves dough-based products more than any other, are there so many cases of gluten allergy? It is estimated that one Italian in every 150 suffers from coeliac disease and some are not even aware of the cause of their discomfort.

It is worth remembering here that pasta means only "paste" or "dough" and, according to John Dickie in Delizia [which is fast becoming my favourite volume on the history of Italian food] it is true that Muslims brought pasta to Sicily and thence to Italy, but these were Muslims from the Maghreb [indicating that pasta was not invented by the Arab peoples]. It seems that something like "dough cooked in liquid" was known to the Greeks before them. At some time during the Middle Ages, largely because of poverty, pasta became the staple food of Italy. Add to this the fact that the poor depended upon it until quite recent times, along with bread and a version of pizza, and you begin to wonder about the possibilies of inherited food intolerance and of becoming intolerant to something which you eat every day. [I'm no scientist but I believe the latter theory can explain certain addictions.]

I am sometimes astonished by the number of digestive ailments suffered by people in my small circle of friends here and ask myself [again with little scientific evidence] whether this could be partially due - however good the Sicilian Mediterranean diet - to a strange aversion to using spices [other than cinnamon, saffron and ground chilli pepper] in the non-Muslim Mediterranean countries.