The Curative Power of Ithaculture

There is a little town in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania that for many decades was home to a medical impossibility. In Roseto nobody ever had a heart attack. Strangely, no men had heart attacks. Unlike the rest of the United States and even neighboring towns, there were as many elderly men as there were elderly women. Men didn’t die before women. It is true: I went there and met them.

When a medical researcher who had a summer home nearby learned of this in 1960, he was astonished and curious. What on earth was causing this? If they could identify the causative agent, maybe they could end heart disease in the country! So he brought in medical research teams to study the health of the little town and find out what it was. It took a thirty-year longitudinal study to finally find out the answer.

The researchers did medical examinations of the town: could it be cholesterol, or genetic factors? They found that it had nothing to do with cholesterol, or any medical cause they could identify. So they brought in a team of nutritionists. Since everybody there was Italian, they looked to see if it were the “Mediterranean diet,” with lots of “good fat” in the olive oil. But it turned out that they couldn’t afford olive oil. They fried all their meatballs in lard. Still no heart attacks. Nobody ever spoke of nutrition there.

In the bargain, Roseto was a place where the men worked in the hard and dangerous slate quarry. They drank cheap red wine by the gallon, and smoked like chimneys.

At a complete loss to find the cause, the researchers brought in a sociologist. The sociologist found the cause that had not been visible to all the other scientists. The reason that men did not die of heart attacks in Roseto was because of how they lived. Every evening, the citizens strolled in a promenade down the Main Street, saying hi to neighbors on the porches of modest houses. There were no fences between homes. If you were wealthy, you didn’t build a big house or buy an expensive car. The only socially permissible way to display wealth was through hospitality: inviting neighbors and friends to eat at your table.

The sociologist checked another thing: how many people were in nursing homes or institutions of other types, and how many people were on welfare. No Rosetoean was in any sort of nursing home or other institution. There was only one person on welfare. She had just moved in from out-of-town.

Once the researchers grasped that the positive effects on health and well-being were produced by the local culture, they got on a plane and flew to the little town in Italy town where everybody in Roseto had originally come from. What’s they found there was the exact same thing. People walked down Main Street in promenade in the evenings.  There were no big houses or big cars. Men didn’t die of heart attacks there, either.

The cause was confirmed over time as young people in Roseto went away to college and didn’t come back to their old home town. Residents started building houses in suburbs. They liked their big houses, but they started to feel lonely. As this change took place, men in Roseto began to have heart attacks. The heart attacks rate in Roseto is now the same as in the rest of America.

Why am I writing about an Italian-American village in a column about Ithaca? Because Ithaca, in its own way, may have more in common with Roseto than it does than most of the rest of current America. Just as in Roseto, Ithaca has long had a unique and vibrant culture. When we think of our word for this: Ithaculture, we tend to think of music, and the arts, and the many celebrations for which we are known. Living in Ithaca is good for my heart, and not just its pumping abilities.

In this column I am going to capture personal stories about the healing power of Ithacaculture. “Without community, no single human being can survive,” the Dalai Lama once said. Here in Ithaca, the words of the Dalai Lama are important. That says something essential about our culture. The many small hospitable acts that constitute daily life in this place flow from his observation. That is how we survive as most of the rest of our country deteriorates. Maybe we remember something here; something essentially American. Maybe what is essentially American is under our feet.