"Just the Facts, Ma'am"

Joseph Mills
From the Inner City Series, 1982-1989
Washington, DC
American Photographer

While reading Eat Pray Love, I came across this statistic that made me dog ear the page the second my eyes hooked it. The quote comes from a break down of the author’s observations about the mundane and massive changes that have occurred in Italy, resulting in constant and tectonic cultural idiosyncrasies:

“Though there is a general sadness around Rome right now, anyway. The weather has turned cold. The sanitation workers and the train employees and the national airline all went on strike on the same day. A study has just been released saying that 36 percent of Italian children have an allergy to the gluten needed to make pasta, pizza, and bread, so there goes Italian culture.”

This is a statistic from 2006, y’all and this accounts for over 1/3 of the Italian population! So imagine the state of affairs four years later…makes me want to translate my cookbook into Italian.