The Mediterranean diet is under threat in the country that invented it as rising prices for staples such as pasta, bread, fruit and vegetables alter Italian eating habits. The Confedera-zione Italiana Agricoltori (CIA), the Italian farmers’ confederation, said that Italians were eating “chicken pieces instead of pasta, fried foods instead of vegetables and cheese instead of fruit”. Even wine sales have fallen by nearly 5 per cent.

In a study of Italian food shopping patterns last year the CIA said that sales of bread had fallen by 6.2 per cent compared with the previous year, vegetables by 4.2 per cent, pasta by 2.6 per cent and fruit by 2.5 per cent. Sales of pork were down by 4.7 per cent and beef by 3.8 per cent.

By contrast sales of eggs had gone up by 4.2 per cent and chicken by 3.8 per cent. “Shoppers are looking for low-cost protein in a time of austerity,” the CIA study said.

The result “reads like the shopping list of an impecunious student living away from home”, said the newspaper Corriere della Sera.

“Sales are falling of the products which are the symbols of Italian cuisine. Pasta is not just part of our diet, it is part of our culture”. Like many other countries, Italy is feeling the effects of booming world food prices, blamed partly on China and India, whose populations have developed Western tastes as their economies grow. Other factors include desertification, flooding and a shift in crop use from food to biofuels.

After decades of relative stability the cost of wheat has doubled in less than a year and prices of rice, coffee, milk and meat have soared.

In Italy pasta prices have gone up nearly 20 per cent in the past year. Giuseppe Politi, the head of the CIA, said that crops were “rotting in the fields” as families, who were having trouble making ends meet, adjusted their shopping habits.

Marcello Ticca, of the Italian Institute of Food Research and Nutrition in Rome, said that Italians no longer consumed the recommended amount of vegetable fibre a day. Mr Ticca said the pressures of modern life were partly to blame, with many Italian women who had once stayed at home going out to work. “Who has time to prepare and cook vegetables any more?” he asked.

Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement, said that there was “no need to panic. It would be terrible to abandon our Mediterranean diet just because the price of pasta has gone up a bit.” He suggested that the answer was to eat less meat.

One ingredient of the Mediterranean diet – olive oil – has held its own, with sales rising by 1.5 per cent.

Italian police impounded more than 25,000 litres of “counterfeit” virgin oil last month, however, after tests proved that it was made from sunflower seeds and soya beans mixed with beta-carotene and chlorophyll.

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