You Can Get a Bad Meal in Italy

10.25.06

The American Academy in Rome—whose Prixe de Rome grants allow lucky scholars, artists, writers, and musicians to take up residence for 12 months amid the institution’s idyllic architecture and gardens up on the Janiculum Hill—has never been prized for its bleak institutional food, hardly what you’d expect for your dream year in the Eternal City. Now, Alice Waters has come to the rescue with the Rome Sustainable Food Project. A rep from Chez Panisse will work at the academy for a year to introduce fresh, local, organic products onto the cafeteria menu while respecting the academy’s limited budget. The idea is for the academy to put students in touch with the pleasures of eating in Rome, while ridding them of a certain Yankee mentality that implies: The worse the food, the more intellectual you are.

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