The Minister of Agriculture is fixating on food. And that doesn’t do him much good

We are in the midst of a nuclear Third World War and the Italian government talks only about eating. Fratelli d’Italia wants to introduce the crime of instigating anorexia; but it is clear that the one with eating disorders is precisely Minister Lollobrigida. He has a sick relationship with food, the Italian one to be precise. “Italian cuisine is a story, a setting”, says the minister, who evidently appreciates wine as well as Italian food – so much does the driver drive. It’s still: “Our cooks are producers of culture, history, aesthetics, poetry”; we would have to answer him “but he talks like you eat!”, but perhaps the minister eats just like that, that is, heavy. Or maybe he’s been fasting for months, which explains all this mystical delirium about chewing stuff.

I don’t know about you, but as a foodie and gourmand that I am all this rhetoric about food made me sick. When I go to a restaurant (that is, always) I want to eat, not break my kidneys. For me, chefs explaining dishes are like comedians explaining jokes: boring, or even worse, poor. If I taste what’s on the plate and I don’t like it, you can also tell me the whole incredible story of the raw materials used and how they were treated, but then you give this filth to the cat anyway and bring me a spaghetti with tomato sauce, please. If, on the other hand, I like what I eat, I don’t need you to explain why, I already know: because it’s good. And I don’t need to know why it’s good; favor.

Instead, Minister Lollobrigida likes to be told about the dish, perhaps he’s a pervert, he gets excited to hear people say “beans”; and he’s very picky, if he finds cricket flour or synthetic meat on his plate he sends it back without even tasting (if, on the other hand, he finds a hair of Italian hair in the soup, then he eats it without saying a word and even says it’s good). Don’t suggest they eat Mexican, or Chinese, or sushi: the Minister of Agriculture and for Food Sovereignty wants to eat only Italian. And woe to tell him – as food historian and professor at the University of Parma, Alberto Grandi recently argued to the Financial Times – that Italian cuisine (obviously, like any culinary tradition in the world after millennia of trade and commerce) she’s only Italian: she gets angry, and makes her even hungrier from nervousness. According to the Domani newspaper, the minister is even thinking of a task force of tasters to be sent around Italian restaurants around the world to check the quality of the cuisine – don’t tell the minister that Italy too is full of Italian restaurants that cook badly.

I understand that Lollobrigida’s relatives are all very busy (to say: the sister-in-law is the Prime Minister); but I wouldn’t leave him alone. I think the minister needs help, and sincere affection; because when someone vents so much about food, it means he’s not well. The more I read his culinary proclamations on his social profiles, the more Lollobrigida’s government activity seems like a sovereignist remake of Marco Ferreri’s “La Grande Abbuffata”: story of a Minister of Agriculture who shuts himself up inside his ministry to gorge himself on food until he dies – Italian food, of course.