Tuscan Vegetable Truths - or how a NY journalist proved me wrong

It was April 2008 and my friend Elizabeth Koenig, the head of PR for Castello Banfi in Tuscany, called me to ask if I would talk to a New York Times journalist, Mark Bittman, about vegetables in Tuscany. She said she couldn’t think of a better person for him to talk to about the vegetables in Tuscan cuisine. He said he didn’t think vegetables were very prominent in the Tuscan diet and there wasn’t anything interesting or new to learn. I said that after seeing our vegetable gardens, meeting our growers, and tasting some select dishes, he would appreciate how much a part of our lives vegetables are in Tuscany.

[Mark Bittman is leading the discussion in America on the ethics and health benefits of eating less meat, and has spoken out about the relationship between increased beef consumption and global warming. He writes The Minimalist column in the Times, has written several cookbooks, and was at that time traveling in Italy researching his cookbook ”How to Cook Everything Vegetarian”.]

So Mark and his friend came to lunch. I don’t remember what I cooked, hopefully he does, I’m sure it involved seasonal vegetables like artichokes, asparagus and fava beans. We did spend several very pleasant hours in my old mill kitchen, eating and talking and drinking good local wine, and I don’t know if I convinced him of how much Tuscans love vegetables, but I did enjoy the experience as well as his book when it came out and started winning awards.

It was January 2011 when I went on an all-vegetable diet, also known as the yeast cleanse or acid/alkaline diet. It basically means you eat all the alkaline foods (vegetables/fruits) you can and shun any foods that cause your body to be acid (meat, dairy, alcohol, beans and grains). For two weeks I ate only vegetables and fruit; then for four months my diet was 80% veggies and fruits and 20% fish and chicken. I ate a lot of avocados, olives and almonds - the only alkaline nut - for some satisfying fat. If I had a snack attack I ate a mountain of pumpkin seeds in the shell. Sometimes I cheated but mostly I didn’t. It wasn’t the easiest thing I’d ever done, but it also wasn’t the worst. I started the diet in January while visiting my mom in Florida and had a pretty good rate of success in following it while I traveled around the US doing cooking classes. It took me a month to lose a single pound, but at the end of 4 months I had lost 20 and had a new relationship with vegetables.

The really hard part was when I got back to Tuscany in April. It was easy to continue my new way of eating as long as I stayed at home and cooked. But I’m a social animal. I wanted to go out to restaurants with friends and I frequently had to eat out with the culinary tour groups I lead. It didn’t take me long to realize Mark Bittman was right:

They don’t eat vegetables in Tuscany.

They sell them in the market. Piles and piles of artichokes, peas, leeks and greens.

They grow them in their gardens. Mountains of zucchini and peppers and tomatoes.

You can buy them and cook them at home, but God help you if you have to go out.

My options in restaurants and trattorias were always the same: sautéed spinach or swiss chard, heavy with heated oil, a bowl of plain lettuce leaves or some sliced green tomatoes (Tuscans like their tomatoes green). If I got lucky there might be a mix of zucchini, eggplant and peppers, which are great when grilled and lightly drizzled with olive oil, but an inedible mash of oversalted, overcooked veggies when roasted. Never wanting to be one of “those” people on a limited diet, repeating a litany of what they can’t eat, I often ordered whatever sounded good and then made up for it the next day by eating raw veggies for breakfast and lunch.

In Italy, eating seasonally means celebrating each vegetable or fruit in their season. Your attention and culinary efforts are concentrated on the goodness of each before they’re gone from the market until the next year. I knew that veggies like fresh beets, turnips, daikon radish, cilantro and jicama were “exotic” and impossible to find in Siena, and anticipated that my veggie diet would be more limited than it had been in the US. But what surprised me is that some really common things like broccoli are seasonal and missing from the stores, and the diet, for much of the year.

Mark Bittman was right. Tuscany has nothing new to add to the vegetable discussion. At one time, when Tuscans were poor peasants and country farmers, their diet was vegetable based, meat was scarce and saltless bread was the main starch. But in the last 40 years as Tuscany acquired wealth through international recognition of their wines and an increase in tourism, Tuscans quickly left their vegetable roots behind them and embraced piles of cured meat, grilled meat, braised meat and pasta.

I’m not as religious about the diet as I was a year ago. It turns out 2012 is the year of the cocktail, so I had to add alcohol back into my diet. I feel better when I eat lots of fresh vegetables, and my cooking classes include more vegetables and less meat than they used to, with a fresh green salad rounding out the meal before dessert is served. To date no one has noticed or complained. I tell them Tuscans have a long history of eating vegetables, which is true; now I’m admitting that they’ve left that history behind