John Dickie explores how Catholicism has played an extraordinary central role in the Italian diet, with meat and fish playing musical chairs on Italian tables. He spends some time looking at the diet of popes through the ages and some more interesting quirks along the way. We will reveal how the rules that dictated the Christian diet were broken, how desperate meat eaters considered goose to be fish because they spent so much time in the water and what is the bedrock of Roman cooking today.