Monday,
July 09, 2007
In
The
ANNOTICO Report
The great debate is between Taste and Social propriety. There
is the additional aspect of the Medicinal value of Garlic..
In
From
Associated Press
June
22, 2007
"I
will never use garlic!" declares the Sicilian chef as he demonstrates how
to make a flavorful pasta dish octopus linguine with orange juice and
almond pesto without the ingredient
he hates.
A
quintessential element of traditional Italian and
"Garlic
is the king of the kitchen," says Antonello Colonna,
another prominent Italian chef. "To eliminate it is like eliminating
violins from an orchestra."
Critics
have started a ferocious campaign for garlic-free dining, and the debate has
moved out of culinary circles. Corriere della Sera,
They
have a high-profile campaigner in former Premier Silvio
Berlusconi, whose aversion to garlic and obsession with minty
breath are legendary. During his five-year stint, Palazzo Chigi,
the premier's palace, was rigorously garlic-free.
"He
considers garlic very dangerous for the environment, his personal
environment," said Carlo Rossella, who heads the
news department for one of Berlusconi's Mediaset
channels. "Berlusconi doesn't like bad smells. Garlic is considered by
Berlusconi a bad smell."
Rossella, who says he is allergic to garlic, has been
compiling a list of garlic-free restaurants and hopes to persuade
"distinguished" restaurants to come up with separate garlic-free menus.
"Garlic
for me is a sort of persecution," he laments. "They put garlic in
almost any dish: With meat, with fish, everywhere. It's not politically correct
to impose garlic on everybody."
Food
critic Davide Paolini
counters that certain dishes such as the aglio,
olio e peperoncino (or garlic, oil and hot peppers)
pasta simply cannot be cooked
without it. He has launched a survey on his website to ask readers where they
stand on the debate.
"It's
nonsense dictated by people who want to keep their breath under control,"
he told The Associated Press. "But it's a real, genuine smell. It's not stink."
The
bulbous herb has long been a mainstay of Italian cuisine, from steaks in
Garlic's
therapeutic qualities also have been proclaimed, including for heart disease,
cancer and infections, but there's no agreement in the scientific community. A
study published in February in the Archives of Internal Medicine found garlic
had no effect on cholesterol in people whose levels already were elevated.
Fearing
the no-garlic campaign might hurt producers, farmers associations have weighed
in. One leading farming group, Coldiretti, put out a
statement lamenting the "controversy over the use of garlic" and
maintaining it contributes to Italians' longevity.
Italians
consumed 108 million pounds of garlic in 2006, up 4.3% from the previous year,
according to Coldiretti. Italian production, however,
was down from 65 million pounds in 2005 to 62 million pounds in 2006, while
imports were up from countries like
La
Mantia's customers love his garlic-free dishes his trattoria
has been a success story in
"You
can cook perfectly well without it," he said. "I use a lot of
different ingredients mint, basil,
capers, orange, lemons to make up for it."
Moments
after scooping his pasta from the pan and sprinkling it with thin almond
slices, he says: "And that is how we do it."
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