I never thought of myself as a “foodie.” Not that I didn’t enjoy food. Perhaps I enjoyed it too much, which is how I became significantly overweight and had a frozen pizza addiction. 

To combat my (literally) growing health problem, I swung to the opposite end of the food spectrum, consuming nothing but bland chicken, rice, broccoli, protein shakes, etc., for a few years. I had pivoted from junk food hedonism to health food puritanism. 

I was skinnier but also miserable and malnourished. It was a state of being I accepted, believing that you could either enjoy food and be overweight or stay slim and treat food as a grudgingly necessary source of nutrients.

That’s when I met my now wife, Eva. She’s 100% Italian. 

To be clear, I don’t mean that her grandparents came on a boat from Italy, but she grew up in Brooklyn. She was born and raised in a small village in Calabria, where the only traffic is when shepherds are herding their flocks of sheep across the street. 

It’s about as isolated a place as you’ll find in Italy, where almost no food is imported from outside Italy, and most are grown, raised, or produced within a few miles. It’s a place where every notable event in life, from Easter to just a Sunday afternoon, is marked with an enormous meal. Eva was new to America and also new to my philosophy that a protein shake was an acceptable dinner.

Falling in love with a southern Italian woman while simultaneously believing that food is poison (especially food that tastes good) presents some challenges. 

For the sake of love, I suffered through her pleas to try new foods and rolled my eyes when she claimed that the chicken I was eating was full of hormones and chemicals. It was difficult for me to understand why she cared so much about what I ate. “You can eat what you want; I can eat what I want. Who cares?”

Photo from Author

I wasn’t prepared for how important food is to most Italians. 

Sure, we know the stereotypes, but the truth is, perhaps, more exaggerated than most of us can imagine. Eva’s family spends most of the day talking about food. The first thing they talk about when they wake up is what everyone wants to eat for lunch. 

While cooking, they talk about how they’re making the food. While eating, they talk about what they want to eat tomorrow. Every time Eva calls her mother from the US, they ask each other, "What did you eat today?”

As much as I didn’t understand her obsession, I found amusement in her endless tirades against the new culinary experiences she encountered in America. I thought others might, too, so I started filming some of her reactions to American junk food during the pandemic and posting them on YouTube. 

For example, I would order a cornucopia of Domino’s Pizza fare and capture her rants against the “desecration” of Italian food and disbelief at the greasy, chemical-laden dishes she insisted were unfit for human consumption. We enjoyed making the videos, and people liked them, so we kept filming.

Initially, I foolishly thought of myself as the straight man in our emerging comedy duo. She was the passionate idealist, comically ranting to the heavens about things that didn’t matter, while I was the down-to-earth realist who wisely recognized that food colorings are just a fact of life (and can they be so bad anyway?). The truth, I later realized, is that I was the clown and the butt of my jokes. I only learned this because Eva had never seen a “reaction video” and didn’t quite understand how they usually worked.

There are plenty of food reaction videos on YouTube, such as “Chinese Girl Tries American Chinese Food” or “Irish People Try Indian Snacks. " Usually, the guest sits in front of a static camera, tries some new food, and shares their thoughts and impressions (the more dramatic the facial expressions, the better). 

What made Eva different, though, was that she always put her money where her mouth was. Instead of criticizing Hot Pockets, she would suggest demonstrating how to make an authentic Italian calzone that tasted delicious and wasn’t full of ingredients you can’t pronounce.

Photo from Author

At this point in our daily lives, I almost never let Eva cook for me. Pasta and pizza are too fattening. I’ll stick with my unseasoned chicken breast, thanks. 

Because of my dietary isolation, these videos that we published for the world became a weekly documentation of myself tasting my wife’s cooking for the first time. It was a shocking, life-changing experience, and all of it was captured on camera.

I remember the first time I was truly blown away. We made a video where Eva tried the Americanized version of “Fettuccini Alfredo.” We followed a standard recipe using cheese, heavy cream, parsley, and lots of garlic. 

The result was good! It tasted yummy to me, and I was frankly skeptical that much improvement could be gained when she then set about making traditional Roman “fettuccine all’Alfredo.” Her recipe? Fresh, handmade fettuccine pasta, salt, butter, and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. That was it.

The result blew me away. Here, I had eaten two pasta dishes back-to-back, one so simple that it seemed almost ludicrous. But the comparison couldn’t have been more stark. 

The American version was not bad, but the Italian dish was better by orders of magnitude. That day, I learned to appreciate the Italian culinary philosophy of simplicity and good ingredients, and I’ve never looked back since.

To our surprise, the videos of Eva started to get traction, and thousands of people began asking for her recipes. 

Photo from Author

I didn’t set out on our YouTube journey with the goal of starting a cooking channel, but that’s what our project became. Over the years, we have shared hundreds of authentic Italian recipes with millions of viewers. 

We have taken hundreds of our followers on food tours through Italy, introducing them to authentic Italian food in person. We wrote a cookbook to introduce a broader audience to the dishes that had changed my perspective. It has been an unexpected journey I never imagined myself taking.

Along the way, I learned that food isn’t healthier if it’s bland and tasteless. I realized that eating a balanced diet (yes, with plenty of carbs and fat) would get me in much better physical shape. And yes, I learned that all-natural chicken, which isn’t full of hormones and antibiotics, doesn’t release a gallon of water when you cook it and tastes much better.

Photo from Author

Most importantly, I finally learned why Eva cared so much about what I ate. For her, and many Italians, food is love. 

I mean that, literally. Feeding someone is the purest expression of caring for them: taking care of their most primal need while simultaneously providing them pleasure. 

This attitude toward food isn’t unique to Italians; at one point, it was common to all cultures. Some of us have lost this relationship with food as the pressures of modern life and convenience mentality have distanced us from the truth.

When my wife pestered me to eat differently, she wasn’t nagging. She loved me. I didn’t fall in love with her because of food, but learning about her cooking culture made me fall even deeper in love. 

Especially after realizing the magnitude of my stubborn stupidity and what she had put up with. Sticking with someone who turns down fresh pasta, handmade with love, to slurp down a protein shake — that’s real love.

And now, on the rare occasions when we are apart and have to connect over the phone, my first question is always, “What did you eat today?"

Harper Alexander was a cinematographer in Los Angeles before meeting his future wife, Eva Santaguida; together the pair co-founded Pasta Grammar, a YouTube channel dedicated to traditional Italian cooking. Their first cookbook Italian Family Kitchen is out now.