"Kick the Devil out the door and he'll crawl back in through the window," one often hears, and it's certainly the case when it comes to food legislation. Last time I gleefully wrote about how the Italian government has found a way around the EEU health regulations that threatened to put an end to innumerable gastronomic specialties, by decreeing that the specialties are for local consumption only and cannot be exported into other EEU member states. This week the EEU is instead pressuring the Italian government to relax its dioxin limits, which are strict enough to keep meats produced by other member states out. In the wake of the discovery of a tremendous amount of dioxin-laced pork in Belgium one would think strict limits are a good thing, but the EEU bureaucrats do not, and now the Italian green party is marshalling support for the Government's position. The problem, according to an article I read (I think) in Agricola Slowfood's newsletter, is that the people who set the limits for pesticides and other contaminants in Italy are officials of the Ministry of Health, while those who set the limits for the EEU as a whole are in the Ministry of Industry. Consequently, while the Italian regulators are on the side of the consumer, the EEU people worry first about the bottom line of the companies, and if their decisions pose a risk to health, tough. I sincerely hope the EEU people's children and grandchildren gorge on the foods they allow.

Nor is the EEU's making things easier for industry limited to dioxin-laced meats. They're pressuring Italy and Spain to eliminate the requirement that chocolate only contain cocoa oils and not those from other plants -- imagine a law requiring that a product contain only the necessary ingredients and not cheap substitutes! -- and they want to remove the requirement that honey producers state where their honey comes from on their labels. Why is this important? Because it will allow the big companies that can afford to cut prices to gain market share to use honey from elsewhere without telling anyone. This is going to put lots of European honey makers out of business, and moreover, much of the cheap honey from India and the Orient is cut with syrups of one kind or another. The bureaucrats say they will be on the alert for fraud, but considering their track record to date I will buy locally from people who do state the provenance of their honey on their labels. And so will most other people, I think; the ads for food on Italian radio and TV have suddenly begun to emphasize that the products touted (especially meats) are of exclusively Italian origin. This is something nobody used to think about, and in their haste to make things easier for industry the regulators in Brussels may have created a new soap box for the various European nationalists to use: "Buy local!" is a powerful slogan that can extend far beyond food.

A presto,
Kyle Phillips
Webweaver, About Italian Cuisine

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