Italian food 'under threat'

Pasta: "Threatened by immigrant cuisine"

The BBC's David Willey in Rome.

Italian gourmets are up in arms about what they perceive as a threat to traditional Italian cooking - the increasing number of foreign dishes offered in restaurants, trattorias and fast food joints.

We must combat grave threats to our palate from new foods which are arriving from abroad because of the ever greater presence of immigrants

Giuseppe dell'Osso Cooking Academy spokesman

A gourmet association founded in 1953 calling itself, rather portentously, The Academy of Italian Cooking, has organised a one-day meeting in the mediaeval Umbrian town of Gubbio to draw up plans to combat what they are denouncing as "an insidious invasion".

The invasion is the arrival on Italian dinner tables of Japanese sushi, Tunisian couscous, and Indian curry, not to mention the omnipresent American hamburger.

Macdonalds and Burger King now have 40 outlets in Rome and the coffee chain Starbucks is on its way, it was announced last month.

And there are now more than 200 Chinese restaurants in Rome.

Extinction danger

"Alarm, Alarm!" warned the daily La Repubblica. "Globalisation, in the form of battalions of Arab, Chinese and American flavours is driving our country's food tastes towards extinction."

Starbucks coffee: Preparing to join the "invasion"

Three hundred anxious gastronomes gathered in Gubbio will listen to speeches by university professors cataloguing the current disasters befalling Italian regional cooking.

They will then sit down to a feast of tortellini pasta, local white truffles, wild boar, pigeon with olives and almond deserts - washed down with the finest red wines from Lombardy, Tuscany and the Veneto.

"We must combat grave threats to our palate from new foods which are arriving from abroad because of the ever greater presence of immigrants," says Giuseppe dell'Osso, spokesman for the cooking academy.

"It is all evolving extremely rapidly," he warns darkly.

Ancestors' ships

"Not so," reply some leading Italian chefs and restaurant owners.

Celebrating the Italian pizza

Livia and Alfonso Iaccarino run the only three star Michelin restaurant in central and southern Italy.

"Our ancestor's ships brought lemons and spices to Italy from abroad, plus exotic recipes which we used to eat until recently, like egg-plant and chocolate", they say.

Mario Fadiga, who owns one of the best restaurants in Bologna says the problem is not to be hamstrung by tradition.

"Pasta such as lasagne and tortellini, and bollito, boiled beef a la Bolognese, are three wonderful dishes, but the menus of restaurants in Bologna are fossilised, that's why they are not doing well.

"I only wish we had more new foods, new condiments and new ways of cooking. I for example use Thai tempura, a pasta which you fry, and I also serve Japanese sushi. Should we go into the trenches to defend spaghetti alla Carbonara?"

The best of Italian regional cooking will in fact be enhanced by the development of more cosmopolitan tastes among Italian gastronomes.

And after all, if it were not for Christopher Columbus, Italians would still be eating their maccaroni without tomato sauce.