TELEVISION GIGS DON’T GET BETTER than David Rocco’s. The host of David Rocco’s Dolce Vita spends much of his year cooking, charming and eating his way around Italy. For the Food Network show’s fourth season, which finished taping recently, Rocco, his wife, Nina, and their twin infant daughters set up camp in a sprawling, 500-year-old farmhouse in a little town just outside Florence with, as Rocco describes it, “about 300 people and 800 chickens and a neighbour named Anna who gave us eggs every morning whether we wanted them or not.” He refers to his work filming the show as “extended vacations.”

Which makes the celebrity chef’s latest project, pushing healthy cooking and eating in high schools across Ontario, seem uncharacteristic. Making polpo in umido in Sardinia qualifies as la dolce vita. Teaming up with Dalton McGuinty to teach a class of Brampton students to make couscous, as Rocco and the premier did last fall, not so much.

Rocco started planning a schools project nearly two years ago. He saw the crap many high school students eat, and he kept reading headlines about obesity in children. He thought his own expertise—simple, healthy cooking (plus a camera-ready smile)—could be of value. But before he had a chance to take his plan to Queen’s Park, culinary kismet struck: Rocco got a call from McGuinty, who was looking for somebody to head up a program promoting nutrition in schools. Rocco proposed that he could develop a series of recipes and then prepare the dishes on video; the videos could be shown every couple of weeks to students across the province, who would then go home and share the wealth (and the tomato sauce). “Back in the day, when we took home economics, we had to follow the exact recipe,” says Rocco. “It was boring, and we felt we were being judged.” Rocco’s cooking style is imprecise, to put it mildly. “It’s about balance,” he says, “and that’s just using your instinct, common sense.” His favourite culinary term is “quanto basta,” Italian for “as much as you need.” With McGuinty’s help (and occasional on-tape sous-chefing), Rocco rolled out a pilot program—called Eating Well Looks Good on You—in four Ontario high schools last fall. At St. Joseph–Scollard Hall in North Bay, a teacher dutifully printed off recipes for 50 students and handed them out: “And then the first thing I did, I said, ‘OK, take the recipe and throw it out.’ ”

If his mission sounds familiar, it’s because English celebri-chef Jamie Oliver took on the eating habits of students in the U.K. in 2006. Rocco and Oliver have a few things in common: the magnetic personality, the boyish good looks, the stripped-down cooking style. But while Oliver waged war against grease-laden high school cafeteria menus, Rocco has no intention of taking on beef patties and spicy fries. “I don’t think that’s the way to do this,” he explains (with all due respect to the Naked Chef, of course). “It’s about giving kids choice and empowering them.”

Rocco grew up in Scarborough, near Kennedy and Sheppard, the son of hairdressers who emigrated from Naples. After university (he has an economics degree from York), he and Nina took over an Italian restaurant called La Madonnina in Vaughan, where Rocco usually found himself working the front-of-house—“I’m not a chef, I’m Italian!” he often says. An extraordinarily handsome Italian non-chef at that. Rocco was a model long before he became a Food Network fixture. He started appearing in department store catalogues in senior high school. In the early 1990s, he fronted a national Evian campaign. His first television commercial was with Neve Campbell. “I’m not going to tell you what I did,” Rocco laughs. Then, unprompted, he does. “It was a bit crazy. I was the guy in line for school pictures and Neve Campbell was looking at me, I was looking at her... It was a Tampax commercial!” He did spots for Ford, Chrysler, Heineken and Coors, and even walked the runways in Milan.

Rocco decided early on that he wanted to be a television star, and the food world seemed like the perfect entrée. He and Nina, now executive producer of Dolce Vita, filmed the pilot for their first series (Avventura: Journeys in Italian Cuisine With David Rocco) on the second-last day of an Italian holiday in 1998, and edited the tape with the help of their wedding videographer. “Within three weeks, we had an offer for 26 epi­sodes.” Dolce Vita followed a few years later. And from the beginning, Rocco’s good looks have been one of the show’s main draws.

“Admit it: you don’t just watch David Rocco’s shows for the food,” read a recent headline in Singapore’s Today (Dolce Vita airs in more than 100 countries). A subtlety challenged columnist in Brisbane, Australia, gushed, “If food is the new sex, David Rocco qualifies as the new foreplay.” A Toronto publicist for his (excellent) new cookbook, called David Rocco’s Dolce Vita, told me, “The recipes are really good, but there’s a lot of eye candy in there for the ladies, too.” She was referring to pages 162 and 163, perhaps, on which Rocco is shown on a yacht on the Mediterranean, cooking zuppa di vongole in a pair of notably short trunks. Or to page 131, which displays Rocco beating egg yolks for tomato salad on a beach while wearing what his childhood friends at Kennedy and Sheppard might call a banana hammock.

If all goes according to plan, Rocco will be replacing his Speedo with a parka in 2009. He has volunteered to spend the school year travelling across Ontario to promote his latest project, and recently met with the premier to flesh out the details. But unlike Jamie Oliver, Rocco will not be filming a television series about his work in schools, he pledges. “That would be another headache,” he says. Headaches are so un-dolce.

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