From the desk of Roland Rocchiccioli – 8 November

To eat, or not to eat? That is the question. One week you should, the next week, you shouldn’t! It is most confusing.

READING news stories, and searching websites, seeking the truth about food and its efficacy is tantamount to buying a pig in a poke. One might ask? Where is the empirical evidence to support the preventative claims attributed to food, which are bandied with such alacrity?

The recommendations of what one should, and should not, eat are similar. The assertions of what they might, or might not, help prevent, vary accordingly.

I am from a long line of peasant stock. Garlic and a wooden stock would not stop my mob. My mother, Beria, was 96 when she left to sit on a cloud and play a harp. Aunt Edith is 103. Paternally, I represent generations of shepherds in the Tuscan Alpi Apuane. If genetics count, I should be here for a while yet.

I have, for the greater part, eaten good food for all of my life. Until I went away to boarding school it was, mainly, a Mediterranean diet. Always, there was a leg of ham hanging on the back verandah. If you were hungry you cut-off a slice, whacked it between two slices of fresh pipe-loaf bread brushed with Spanish, cold-pressed, Virgin olive oil (Beria contended it was stronger and fruiter than the Italian), and you tucked-in. My father bought wheels of goat and sheep’s milk cheese. The Italian provincia of Giuncugnano, from whence he came, is a major Pecorino Toscana cheese producing areas.

My childhood was a veritable culinary cornucopia of figs and pendulous bunches of grapes – black and white; striped oval watermelons which cracked like a stock-whip when cut, rock melons which scented the air when watered, passion fruit, olive oil, coffee with bread, pomegranates (picked from trees at the front house, peeled, and devoured apple-like); enormous vegetable garden beds of spinach and silverbeet – eaten pan fried with garlic; tall Slav cabbage made into a soup with Dutch cream potatoes (Beria wouldn’t contemplate any other variety) and fresh haricot or broad beans; Baccalà was soaked overnight and cooked into a stew with potatoes and green beans; tinned pilchards packed in salt; gravy beef vegetable barley soup, giblets, pig’s trotters, chicken risotto, rigatoni, cutlets, dates, prunes, dried apricots, salami, mortadella, Italian sausages made from pork, lamb and wild donkey. Fig and grape jam. Dried fruit in cakes, puddings, slices; coconut meringues; fresh eggs and butter. Home-made gnocchi, olives, steak pan-fried in butter. My father ate cheese and pear. Traditional Italian favourites were common place.

Potato and Iceberg lettuce salads were tossed with olive oil, vinegar, chopped garlic, and seasoned with salt and pepper. Tomatoes and spring onions were eaten fresh from the garden.

You could have written on a pinhead with a six-inch nail what my mother did not know about rearing chooks. The Sunday dinner bird was cooked in a cast iron camp oven placed in the oven of the woodstove. The dirty camp oven was never washed in soapy water!

As an adult, I have added avocados, Greek and fermented yoghurt, all types of beans, noodles, and vegetables of any variety to my daily diet.  I have never tasted Coca-Cola, eaten a hamburger from a fast-food outlet, or considered buying a Chico roll. Once, in 1968, I tasted Kentucky Fried chicken, a culinary experience I have never felt the urge to repeat.

Obviously, the coupling of good diet and exercise is imperative; however, if the preventative propositions have any basis in truth, I should be the healthiest person, ever. Diet notwithstanding, I have a triumvirate of medical complications which, in the best of all possible worlds, Dr Rimas Liubinas and oncologist Professor George Kanourakis assure me, I shall die with, and not from.

Still, I eat well, but one is left pondering the merit of myriad preventative prognostications, and the inevitable disappointment they might engender for some.

Caveat emptor!

Roland can be heard on RADIO 3BA, every Monday morning, 10.45 and you can email him with recipes via [email protected].