c. 2000 Religion News Service
ROME _ A Roman Catholic priest from Tuscany has added fuel to the fires of Italy’s debate over fast food by condemning the hamburger, French fries and Coke as “the fruit of a Protestant culture.”
“Fast food reflects the individualistic relation between man and God introduced by Luther,” the Rev. Massimo Salani said in a full-page interview published Wednesday (Nov. 8) in the Catholic daily newspaper Avvenire.
With Italians deeply divided over the arrival of McDonald’s and other fast food chains in a country that takes its three-hour lunches more seriously than it does politics and religion and almost as seriously as soccer, other newspapers leapt on the story with obvious glee.
“Theologian Excommunicates the Hamburger,” said a headline in the Rome daily Il Messaggero Thursday (Nov. 9). “The Hamburger Is Not for Catholics,” the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera declared.
A professor of patrology, the study of the writings of the Fathers of the Church, in the Tuscan city of Pisa, Salani, 41, is also author of a newly published book, “At Table With the Religions,” about the dietary habits of the world’s principal religions.
The priest criticized Catholics who eat too much, said Muslims do not have “a balanced diet” and urged ecumenical opposition to bioengineered foods, but he reserved his strongest words for fast food, which he labeled “the fruit of a Protestant culture.”
“The individualistic relation between man and God, started by Luther, is also reflected in the world of eating. Lacking the community aspect of sharing, fast food is certainly not a Catholic model,” Salani said.
“The advance of fast foods is the complete forgetting of the sacred nature of food,” he said. “In McDonald’s, you look for a fast meal, satisfying your hunger as quickly as possible in order to dedicate yourself to something else.”
McDonald’s, which claims to serve 600,000 Italians every day and offers green salads and Italian-style pasta and rice salads in addition to hamburgers, issued a formal statement of rebuttal.
“Fast food means being served quickly, not eating quickly,” it said. “We serve sandwiches for clients of any race and religion, and we adapt ourselves to every culture and to the tastes of consumers who, because of traditions, religion or habit, are not always the same throughout the world.
“For this reason, in Israel there are kosher McDonald’s that don’t serve cheeseburgers and milk products while in India, beef is not offered.”
Riccardo Di Segni, a doctor and rabbi in Rome who wrote a “Guide to Jewish Alimentary Rules,” said he found it strange that “Christianity, born with the abolition of (Jewish) alimentary rules, is now calling for new rules.”
Nor did Giacomo Mojoli, a vice president of the Slow Food organization formed to counter the inroads of fast food in Italy, give wholehearted approval to Salani’s attack. He said Slow Food took a lay rather than a religious approach to the issue.
“Fast foods are dangerous because they bring about the homogenization of taste, because there is no cultural diversity. But there is no sense in demonizing them,” he said. “You can see that this type of atmosphere responds to groups of young people. All right. We have to reinvent other places to intercept the kids.”
Salani did win praise from Italian Minister for Agricultural Resources Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio. The minister described his call for an “ecumenical front of religions against biotechnology” as “very positive” and joined in the attack on U.S.-style fast food.
“This type of culture does not belong to us and cannot become our way of eating,” he said.
DEA END POLK
