Answers on a postcard to the supermarket in the European Parliament and/or the International Criminal Court.
It’s been a challenging week for Italian foodstuffs. Italy’s agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, was livid when he saw a jar of carbonara sauce on the shelves of the Delhaize store inside the Parliament in Brussels that contained pancetta rather than guanciale — the cheek of it! (Guanciale is pork cheek, get it? No? Oh.)
Lollobrigida said such products represent the “worst of ‘Italian-sounding’” foodstuffs and called for an “immediate investigation.” Thank goodness there isn’t a war (or several) going on.
That said, passing off food as Italian is a big financial deal. Agricultural group Coldiretti reckons the “scandal of fake Italian products” costs the country €120 billion a year. Italy has also applied for Italian cuisine to be included in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list (which basically means you can’t f**k with it). On a side note, already on the UNESCO list is “shrimp fishing on horseback” in Oostduinkerke, Belgium. I didn’t know shrimp could ride horses!
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party plans to write to Parliament President Roberta Metsola to complain about the use of the Italian flag on the offending jar of pasta sauce. Mind you, Meloni’s party is the Brothers of Italy and — shock — they are not all brothers!
“On the record: no one should put carbonara in a jar,” Metsola’s spokesperson told my colleagues at Brussels Playbook, in what may or may not have been a reference to the 1980s film “Dirty Dancing.” However, Metsola’s team pointed out that while food labeling is an EU competence, it is not the Parliament president’s job to intervene. As we all know, the Parliament president’s actual job is to, er, let’s circle back on that one.