More than just pasta, seafood anchors Italian cuisine

From CNN Correspondent Carolyn O'Neil
June 30, 1996

GALLIPOLI, Italy (CNN) -- Italian food brings to mind pasta and sauces. But seafood is also a major part of the Italian diet, especially in towns along the coast. And Italy has a lot of coastline.

By nine o'clock in the morning, fishermen have already returned to port having spent the past eight hours casting their nets into the waters of the Ionian Sea.

The next few hours will be spent cleaning and mending nets while their "frutti di mare" or "fruits of the sea" are being sold fifty feet away in an open air market where restaurant owners and local people barter for the days catch.

In the midst of the bustling market, American author Nancy Harmon Jenkins, who writes cookbooks on foods of the Mediterranean, surveys the fish market for what would soon be lunch.

"I think the freshness is one of the most important aspects of what we're seeing here. Freshness, variety and abundance," Jenkins said.

Italians, on the average, eat fish twice a week. Mediterraneans have depended on the sea to fulfill their diets, which is why they make the most of the days catch.

"Here, they pull up a net with a bunch of fish in it. Maybe there is some bass, some expensive bass. They sell that to a restaurant for a high price. There's some calamari that may even be frozen and kept for selling later. And then there's trash fish that is used in a very economical and very tasty local way. To me, that's one of the great things about the Mediterranean, that sense that the resource is precious and we have to use every bit of it if we are going to use it at all," Jenkins said.

And while other oceans, such as the north Atlantic, have been over fished or polluted, some fear the Mediterranean Sea could suffer the same fate

Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, a non profit organization promoting traditional foodways, draws attention to these problems.

"We must learn specifically by educating our children to think about these food choices as we approach the new millennium and as we think about the terrible pressures on the earth for the next century and the population growth," said a spokesman for the organization.

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