The Perfect Meal, Episode 5: Sustainable Food
The Perfect Meal: The Secrets of the Mediterranean Diet
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26m
Directed by Alexandros Merkouris • Documentary • 2023 • 26 minutes
The Mediterranean Diet is the world's most sustainable food tradition. Developed across the centuries along the shores of the Mediterranean, it is based on seasonality, locality, freshness and minimal processing - helping to give answers to some of the most urgent problems today.
Award winning ‘green chef’ Xavier Pellicer visits an organic vegetable field outside Barcelona, which supplies his restaurant with produce, while London-based Chef Marianna Leivaditakis explains her connection to the land, sea and mountains of Crete. She seeks to bring back this way of life, which pushed her ancestors to respect the environment.
Rare film archive of the Cyclades in the 1950’s brings alive daily life on this unique island archipelago, which has combined seasonality with local agricultural products and a scarcity of water for thousands of years. For Professor Antonia Trichopoulou, the Cyclades drew on a tradition of poverty to create a unique tradition which respected the environment. She believes that this can help inspire the birth of a «Planeterranean diet», one healthiest for our bodies and the planet. At the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastian, the Predimed team collaborates with chefs and dieticians to create recipes which are healthy, tasty and sustainable: a perfect meal.