According to a news report from WineNews.it, “The ‘Made in Italy’ diet, more commonly known as the Mediterranean diet, is seriously at risk with the exponential increase in the importation of foreign foods like tomato preserves (+101%), olive oil (30%), and grains (7.7%) for making pasta and pizza, the products that are the symbol of traditional Italian cooking.”
 
“This alarm was raised recently by Italian food and agriculture union Coldiretti, based on the data released by ISTAT for the first quarter of 2007, in order to emphasize that the increase in imports is aided by the fact that there are no obligations to indicate the origin of a product on labels and, thus, foreign food products can be sold as traditional Italian foods,” said the story. “For olive oil, Coldiretti notes that Spain and Tunisia are the main suppliers to Italy, while tomatoes arrive, above all, from China. And, Coldiretti points out, if these trends are confirmed throughout 2007, over half of the olive oil sold as Italian oil in supermarkets will be pressed from foreign olives while a third of tomato concentrates on the national market will be of Chinese origin. It is probable that, in restaurants and pizza parlors, an apparently Italian menu actually consists of ingredients from far off lands that cannot boast the same environmental and productive qualities of those produced in Italy.”

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