Over the summer I've been reading Annie Hawes's book 'Journey to the South' about her trip with her Italian boyfriend and his family to mark the memorial service for some dead relative. The book is much better than I've made it sound and her two previous accounts of her attempts to run an olive grove in northern Italy are even better.

One of the things I learned in the third book is that until the middle of the twentieth century, parts of southern Italy still operated according to a feudal system. Landlords owned vast tracts of the countryside on which they allowed peasants to live and work in return for some enormous proportion of the food they produced. In order to prevent any family becoming too attached to the land that they worked and thus becoming more likely to want to claim it for themselves, the lords insisted that no family could work the same patch of land for more than one consecutive year.

The result? Land which had the potential to be rich and fertile if well-managed fell into disorder so that it became harder and harder to make a living. Hard work became a pointless exercise since the landlords would take most of what was produced and the great Italian art of corruption and deceit became the common currency.

By contrast, Anna Del Conte was talking about Italian food on Women's Hour a few weeks ago and made the comparison between the Italian love of food and the British attitude to food as functional. She suggested that the industrial revolution was at least partly to blame. Once people were separated from the land that produced their food they lost the sense of what food could and should be. In the part of Italy that she comes from, everyone keeps their own patch of land, presses their own olive oil, preserves their own peppers and tomatoes and artichokes. People know what food is, where it has come from, what it is good for, how it should be cooked. And, as a result are healthier and happier.

So there we go. Yet more reasons to live on the land!