Marxist historian pisses off 
by exposing them to reality
Grandi has made himself unpopular in some quarters by criticising Italy’s mighty food and drink sector, which, by some estimates, accounts for a quarter of GDP. On the podcast, he jokes he should only leave his house “with personal security guards, like Salman Rushdie”. In 2019, the Italian ambassador to Turkey reprimanded Grandi at a conference in Ankara after Grandi ridiculed Italy’s 800 protected designations, products whose quality is recognised by the EU as inextricably linked to their area. At Les Mots literary festival in Aosta in 2018, he was attacked by a Roman presenter who, offended by Grandi’s claims about carbonara, “called [him] every name in the book” in front of a dumbfounded live audience.
Read this to piss off the Italian in your life
European cuisine before the introduction of New World crops (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, corn, beans) must have been a fucking wasteland. If you’re interested in food stuff for the common peasant in Europe, read the first volume of Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism. Spoiler: most people had some kind of gruel (oatmeal basically) and ocassionally a few veggies except on feast days, “recipes” by and large were for the wealthy elite.