"If we rely on our biological experts, cultivated food is certainly useful, I agree. If we consider that we have now exceeded 8 billion inhabitants, where can we find the necessary genuine foods to feed everyone? Our biologists are very good and serious about building , even if in an artificial way, good food products, why do we have to give them up?".
Gaetano Caricato, mathematician, poet and partisan, who took part in the 'Comunicare One health' event, promoted by senator Antonio De Poli and Paola Binetti, in collaboration with the cultural association No. profit 'Medicine and Frontiers', chaired by Michele Guarino, associate of Gastroenterology, University Campus Bio Medico of Rome.
Gaetano Loaded in a moving story of his youth during the Second World War, he highlighted nutrition at the time of the conflict.
"I left weighing 70 kilos, when I returned home to Foggia, after a year, I was 43 kilos, so the type of life we were forced into can be deduced".
And he goes back to those moments.
"One of the first days of March '44 I was taken prisoner by a patrol of soldiers and SS and held in a concentration camp in Casale Monferrato waiting to be deported to Germany. We were fed with cabbage slop and hard rye bread which had to be dipped in the slop to to be able to swallow it. The commander of the barracks, Michele Palumbo, responded to our complaints about the unacceptable food that soon in Germany, in the labor camps and workshops where we would be sent, we would be adequately fed".
However, Caricato managed to escape, reaching, after an adventurous journey, a family in Pescia, Tuscany, where he ate a hot soup and a slice of chestnut before reaching the partisan group "led by his friend Manrico Ducceschi".
"We took turns looking for food products from the surrounding farmers, asking for wheat flour, legumes, chestnut flour, chickens and rabbits which we had to ration".
Then the illness in July 1944, the return to Pescia and then in September the decision to return home, which took 8 days of walking.
The secret of the 101 years?
"The secret does not exist. I believe that each of us is entrusted to a being who creates the world who acts on each of us in very mysterious ways".
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