This is not a direct reply to this particular post but it is really about the "whole stick".
Hey Paul. I think I've heard this before. Is it because of portion sizes that some immigrants end up with the problems you describe? Back home in Greece, I hear stories about the gigantic portions encountered in the Americas by Greek immigrants, e.g. giant beef steaks that can't be eaten in one sitting etc.
It's also true that food has social value for Italians. One of those "offers you can't refuse" is pasta from your nonna.
I know my relatives were desperately poor during WWII. The branch of the family that immigrated to the U.S. has a lot of obesity, but the branches who went to South America and Italy don't.
I'm fascinated that the men who were born here tend to have traditional views (e.g. your mom shouldn't remarry if dad dies) but when I think of the ones who stayed in Italy my first thought is "they look gay" and I mean that as a compliment not an insult.
Oh, that. Yes, it's true- all around the Mediterranean. We love our food :)
>> I'm fascinated that the men who were born here tend to have traditional views (e.g. your mom shouldn't remarry if dad dies) but when I think of the ones who stayed in Italy my first thought is "they look gay" and I mean that as a compliment not an insult.
Yes, I know what you mean. It's a whatsitcalled, a common trope, that second- and third-generation immigrants are a bit behind the times with traditional values compared to the people who actually stay behind. I don't know how true it is. I have some family who emigrated to the US, but I rarely get to see them anymore. And my folks Back Home are conservative enough anyway...
And I know what you mean about modern Italian men, also. They don't really do macho.
I went to a family party a while back and the biggest topic of conversation was that many people had been diagnosed with Type II diabetes. I was asked if I had it and I wasn't ready to confess that I'd just gotten a 6.7 A1C myself. (I lost about 8% of my body mass and haven't read above 5.8 since)
The rest of us are dying from diabesity, but the the media runs a constant drumbeat about anorexia because they people in the media aren't representative of the cultural diversity of the country. My Italian relatives aren't newspaper reporters, magazine writers, or professors.
Some ethnic groups disproportionately go into the jobs that tell stories for the rest of us, so the stories that we're told are about their problems, not about our problems.
On top of that, people who work in the storytelling industries tend to be self-centered. In a working class family, troubled daughters smoke cigarettes, get pregnant, etc. In a storytelling class family, anorexia initially looks like the kind of "self development" that the storytelling class prizes -- it takes a while to see the self destruction it entails... So it's a way a person in that situation can "create a crisis" that their family can relate to.
Also I think storytelling class families are more vulnerable to media images because their own members write the text that goes next to those images. Ordinary people have some protection from images of Olga Sherer and Kim Noorda because they know these images are illusions that are sent out from New York and Los Angeles.
Those images wash over the rest of us and are automatically discounted in our minds because we know they come from "another world". If your mom or dad has the byline for the article that occurs next to the model and you just might get invited to a party where these people appear, you don't have the cultural protections that you get just from growing up in Iowa, Alabama, etc.
This movie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Year_Itch
is about encounters between a middle-aged book publisher and a young and beautiful model that might at first seem as improbable as a Japanese harem anime, but it's not an improbable match if you see the pair as coworkers in the same industry. (You would live in the same apartment building and otherwise consort with people "in your class")