La cucina non mente mai. Intervista a Marisa Laurito

Marisa Laurito, actress, singer, and director of the Teatro Trianon Viviani in Naples at the time of the interview (December 31, 2025), is one of the most passionate voices in contemporary Neapolitan culture. In the interview, food emerges as a relational language, a healing practice, and a means of cultural transmission. The common thread is a phrase Laurito utters with conviction: "cooking cannot lie"—recalling Laura Esquivel's novel "Sweet as Chocolate"—because food conveys the energy of those who prepare it, their love or indifference, their joy or suffering. Raised in a Neapolitan family of limited means, Marisa Laurito recalls a daily table of pasta and legumes, pasta and vegetables, and oily fish: unknowingly, a Mediterranean diet ante litteram, the one Ancel Keys would "discover" and deliver to the scientific world between the 1950s and 1960s. Childhood cooking is also a feminine cuisine: the women of the family gathered around the stove, telling stories of love and sorrow, preparing forty Easter pastiere to give as gifts and receiving the same number of pastiere, endlessly debating whether Aunt Antonietta's was better than Aunt Gilda's. At thirteen, punished by her grandmother for throwing away bread, she was sent to a field with farmers for a fortnight: a practical initiation to the culture of non-waste that irreversibly shaped her relationship with food. From that pedagogy of scarcity, a cuisine of creativity was born: broccoli stalks become cream soups or pasta sauces, cauliflower scraps are used to season spaghetti, and broccoli rabe are used to make orecchiette. Her book "Avanzi Tutta" systematizes this philosophy: a classic recipe followed by three or four possible reuses of the leftovers. Interview by: Elisabetta Moro Video by: Elisabetta Moro. Editing by: Mariangela Bianco ITA/ENG subtitles: Mariangela Bianco Information by: Mariangela Bianco Translations: Mariangela Bianco MedEatResearch - Center for Social Research on the Mediterranean Diet, directed by Marino Niola and Elisabetta Moro Completed on: December 31, 2025