So- its unfair to use your personal version of Italian culture as a yardstick for all other foods.
Sorry, but I was really talking about healthy food (or food combination) not about taste. We have unhealthy food in Italy, as well, and they are the yummiest thing on earth, if you ask me. But they are perceived as such -
unhealthy. They are allowed once in a while, but people know that they shouldn't eat them every day.
The famous
melanzane alla parmigiana are layers of fried eggplants with mozzarella and tomato, then baked in the oven. But if you search for the recipe on the Internet, you will find many variants that try to make the dish lighter/healthier (for example, by grilling eggplant instead of frying it).
It may be that in Italy we are more healthy-conscious than in Argentina by history, but I notice that here the simple things are more expensive than processed food, and it is something that I can't really understand, except that it is a consequence of globalization.
Another thing I was mentioning are vegetables. I don't understand how it is possible that meat is cheaper than fruit, in Argentina. I easily spend many Evita bills at my veggie shop, and sometimes I think I could make 3 asados with that kind of money.
To cultivate fruit and veggies you just need the soil, irrigation and seeds. To raise a heard you need to buy the calves, make a pen, treat them if they are sick, kill them, cut them with high hygienic standards and then transport them through a refrigerated mean of transport, and within a short time. Just the costs are higher, the timing is worse... how is it possible that as a result meat is cheaper?!
Some members have mentioned that also in North America there is a similar tendency, and that the Americas share a common denominator in that regard. I agree with those observations, although I have only been in the US and here. However in the US there are many dishes who were really influenced by European immigrants, for example the New England clam chowder, and you could truly map them across the US.
Here it sounds more like a food desert, despite the many European immigrants that arrived here in the last two centuries.
There should be a reason to why the US and Argentina, both former colonies, young countries and with a lot of immigrants, have evolved in a such diverse fashion with regard to food. It looks like in the US they have maintained their food diversity by adding dishes as a consequence of immigration, whereas in Argentina they have shrunk food to a handful of plates liked by all. Which are not healthy, and my point is that they became so popular
because they are yummy (=unhealthy). With "
yummy" I mean that we are genetically predisposed to like more protein-rich foods from our past lives which involved a high manual labour, and with "
unhealthy" I mean that they add too many calories to our diet than those required by our modern and sedentary lifestyle.
One day I caught a glimpse of a TV advertising showing veggies dancing and singing to promote vegetable consumptions because they are rich of vitamins. It was a school day and it was 10 AM, so it was not for children. Using these simple ads on public television to teach adult people that "carrots contain vitamin A" and "carrots are good" and "eat carrot!" in 2014 looked very odd to me.
(I don't have a TV, so I don't know how common this kind of advertising is. I saw also one about wearing a helmet with robots running around!)
I don't think it is a matter of culture or "richness" - think about India or Africa, where they eat mainly vegetables.
It seems to me that there is a basic understanding among humanity about what food is good and what food is bad for you health, and I believe this came by simple observation of how long and hard it is to digest them. There is no Western Science talking here, just a mere common sense.
Vegetables are good, but in the US they sell three veggies fries as if they were healthy vegetables. They are just french fries with added tomato or spinach as a colorant! Do they really believe they are eating healthy veggies that way? Or is it a case of make-pretend?
I think about the
lawsuit filed by a mother in the US against Nutella because on their package it said it was part of a nutritious breakfast for you children, and she found out that *indeed* nutella was very unhealthy.
Isn't there a school education program about this?
And furthermore... is really there a "national" interest to push toward a healthy nutrition when the government is also allowing great multinational to destroy the local habitat to cultivate huge crops of a limited kind of vegetables?
