It was the orange that did it. A few nights ago, I was having dinner at the home of my oldest friend here in Venice, and after we’d eaten pasta and salad I reached for an orange.
Eyes wide with horror, Roberta said, “You’re not going to eat that, are you?”
With my subtle command of the nuances of Italian, I asked, “Huh?”
“The orange,” she said, pointing a trembling finger at the offending fruit. “You’re not going to eat that.” I wondered if it was rotten or perhaps the last orange. But no, neither seemed to be the case, and so I asked, “Why?”
“Because it’s lead,” she began and went on to explain that oranges are gold in the morning, silver at lunch, but, if eaten at night, after dinner, a sort of gastronomic alchemy will transform them instantly into lead. And there it was at last, the specific example that unveiled the fundamental mystery of Italian life and culture, the diamond-like clarification of a system that has eluded my understanding for more than four decades.
For Italians, food is far more than something to be eaten. Or, more clearly put, all food, for Italians, has an added component beyond taste and nutritional value: it is either pesante or leggero, that is, heavy or light. I’m an American, citizen of the country that has contributed popcorn and the Big Mac to the cuisine of the world, and so this concept is confusing to me and has been so since I first arrived in Italy, more than forty years ago. Americans make little ceremony out of the daily business of eating, thus they regard it differently from the way Italians do. We do not observe the distinction between light and heavy food, hence our confusion when confronted with the fact that all Italians seem to divide all food into one or the other.
With the ardor of a committed anthropologist, I sought to deepen my understanding of this belief system and asked Roberta to make it clear to me. After she had explained at great length, a few overriding principles emerged.
Lightness or heaviness seem more related to one’s mother than to any quality of digestibility adhering to the foods themselves. If your mother cooked it, it is light, regardless of whether it is boiled zucchini or pasta with butter, cream, and parmigiano. This last can also be judged light, I think, because all of the ingredients are white, the certain color of lightness, as with chicken and veal.
Anything you don’t like to eat is heavy. Also, anything you ate before you got a cold is heavy. Colds, it must be added, are gotten only as a result of un colpo d’aria, the germ theory not having much weight in the Italian belief system, and one of its effects is to render heavy any and all food consumed within six hours of the first symptoms.
Pasta can be heavy or light, depending upon the sauce with which it is served. One would think that cauliflower sauce would be light (as it is white and hence light) but cauliflower is in the family of the cabbage, thus rendering it heavy. Tomato, being acid, is heavy, unless it is cooked a long time, whereupon it becomes light. Unless your mother didn’t like it, in which case it is doomed to eternal heaviness.
Onions, like oranges, change according to the time they are eaten and tend to grow heavier as the day progresses. Fried food is always heavy, unless it is fried in a light oil, lightness here corresponding to how clean the oil is believed to be.
Reading this over, I realize it still doesn’t make any sense to me and seems the product of a cloudy mind. Perhaps I’m getting a cold. Or perhaps I ate something heavy.