Earlier this week, the Spanish Government's Development Minister Elena Espinosa announced that Spain would be seeking to have "the Mediterranean Diet" appended to UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, possibly as a rejoinder to French President Nicolas Sarkozy's earlier call for UNESCO to formally recognise French food.

From The Telegraph:

The Spanish government... says what it describes as the Mediterranean diet is so good, so healthy and historical it should be promoted throughout the world. It is leading a bid - joined by Italy, Greece and Morocco - to persuade the U.N. education and culture body, UNESCO, to put the Mediterranean diet on the world heritage list.

"Spain took the initiative... convinced that the characteristics of the Spanish culinary model par excellence make it clearly deserving of this UNESCO distinction," said the agricultural ministry in a statement.

If Spain gets its way, the Mediterranean diet could join the intangible cultural heritage list, alongside the Festival of the Dead in Mexico and the Royal Ballet of Cambodia.

Whether a unified "Mediterranean" cuisine even exists seems to be more an invention of modern food writers and nutritionists than of actual cultural practice. Indeed, it only seemed to become fused into a cohesive set of foods around WC Willett et al's work in the 1990s with their construction a "Mediterranean diet pyramid" around the broadest sense of a cuisine as possible and the subsequent diet craze that ensued:

The diet is characterized by abundant plant foods (fruit, vegetables, breads, other forms of cereals, potatoes, beans, nuts, and seeds), fresh fruit as the typical daily dessert, olive oil as the principal source of fat, dairy products (principally cheese and yogurt), and fish and poultry consumed in low to moderate amounts, zero to four eggs consumed weekly, red meat consumed in low amounts, and wine consumed in low to moderate amounts, normally with meals.

If you remove olive oil and wine from that list, you end up with a description of almost every conceivable diet on Earth, save for those under extremely harsh conditions and anybody eating the "Western" diet that is cursed with a superabundance of cheap, cheap meat.

In a region as large and diverse as the Mediterranean basin, what parts of the cuisine do you choose to protect?

It seems odd to safeguard such a broad-based cuisine because regional diets are in a state of flux and have always been so. Certain elements of a cuisine must be fixed in time and place to preserve them, whether they be average menus, typical ingredients, or traditional preparations. Willett's study suggested Crete, some (but not all) of Greece and Southern Italy in the 1960s as the perfect but arbitrary point in time where the Mediterranean diet existed, despite all of the people in those regions eating completely different things.

Protecting food heritage and diversity are laudable goals, but they're probably not best achieved by categorising foods by gigantic, imaginary regions and then trying to uncover a common thread that binds them. When the deadlines for UNESCO nominations close in August, it will be fascinating to see which national foods will attempt to be officially protected and if any will make the cut.