Live Longer, Live Better, With a Meat-Based Diet

This is the REAL Mediterranean diet

This is a photo of a picture that hangs on the wall above my dining table. It was painted by the Italian artist Renato Guttuso in 1974 and is called La Vucirria, after the marketplace in Palermo, Sicily. I love this picture, because it is portrays the ordinary and the richness of daily life: human interaction, menacing rivalry, shopping, and of course food.

Italy is a country where the food culture remains sacrosanct, despite scheming corporate moves to control and distort culinary traditions. Even the government is alarmed and has moved to head off threats to the nation’s revered, food-loving identity. It recently approved a bill to ban cell-based laboratory food, and has plans to place restrictions on the labelling of fake meat products, prohibiting terms such as “tofu steak” and “vegan mortadella”. The government’s stated aim is to “protect national livestock heritage”.

Sicily is an island in the middle of the Mediterranean. Guttuso’s painting depicts typical Mediterranean foods: fish, meat, eggs, olives, fruits and vegetables. You can see two big mortadella hams in the background of the image, with their distinctive chunks of fat embedded in the cured pork. There’s a huge beef carcass and what looks like a skinned rabbit hanging next to it. In…