Telling children about olive oil L’

by Chiara Di Modugno

olio spiegato alle mie figlie is an ambitious project, in the form of a book, published by Olio Officina, designed and structured with children in mind.

Although, at intervals throughout the book, there are sections dedicated to adults which explains more complex concepts, the author Lorenzo Cerretani is above all interested in talking to younger readers interested in trying their hand at cooking. And if there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that seemingly simple things actually turn out to be the hardest of all. Children are a highly demanding audience, and it is difficult to get and keep their attention. A writer needs to understand how they learn, and to respect the speed at which they like to do so. Not everyone has what it takes to succeed in such an undertaking.

L’olio spiegato alle mie figlie aims to help young children find their bearings in a sector that remains unclear to most consumers, by shedding light on and explaining its main aspects.

Knowing about the food in our diet translates into eating with awareness. Such knowledge need not be of a biological or chemical nature; that’s not we’re talking about here. But knowing which product is most suitable for a specific use is clearly important, and when it comes to olive oil, people often lack the information they need.

Olive oil is good for our health, and for millennia has been seen as lying halfway between a food and a medicine; consuming it on a daily basis brings long-term benefits to our body.

Cerretani takes a look at how olive oil has been employed over the centuries, from its use in massaging the muscles of warriors and wrestlers, to the preparation of balms and perfumes, even before its adoption as food. The real turning point came when attention began to be paid to its use in the kitchen. It became clear that local eating habits had an impact on the health of an area’s inhabitants, and Mediterranean peoples, who consumed mainly extra virgin olive oil rather than other fats, displayed much better health than those living in other Western countries.

So, imagine boys and girls, or young adults, since the language used lends itself to various age groups, who may be reading about these concepts for the first time, discovering how oil takes care of us in so many ways.

Olive oil thus becomes a hero, the hero that every story needs, but making a book’s protagonist a type of food, instead of one of the classic stock characters we may expect, is no simple matter. And yet Lorenzo Cerretani has pulled it off, reserving the more technical aspects for the “extra information for parents” sections of the book, and offering his expert knowledge to help create and foster a love of olive oil, and to show how it can become a part of our everyday life.

The book contains illustrations by Margherita, the author’s niece, who despite being only eight years old at the time of the book’s publication, managed to perfectly interpret concepts that bore no relation to her everyday life. In short, this was a little girl addressing other children, expressing her own way of observing her surroundings.

Her drawings complete and enrich the book, as well as making the pages customizable, since the illustrations are not coloured in but only show the outlines of the subjects. I think this is a wonderful way to involve young readers, who will have an opportunity to identify with the various figures they encounter as they read. The book also contains sections by two people very close to Lorenzo Cerretani. At the beginning we find a preface by Prof. Giovanni Lercker, who taught Cerretani at university and fuelled his passion for olive oil, while the book closes with a section by the author’s first junior school teacher, Gianfranco Buccella.

The final stories enclosed in “The olive grove tales” have a rural soul, reflecting a way of life that still exists, but that risks dying out. The modern world has been its downfall, but these stories remind us of just how important farming, and more specifically olive growing, is in such a context.

L’olio spiegato alle mie figlie is a book to give to someone you love, an example of one of the most wonderful gifts there is: knowledge.

It’s as if you are saying to the recipient: “There’s something precious in here that I would like you to know about too”.