WHILE it’s true that there may be no free lunch, there are lunches worth working for, and even some worth working all the way through to dessert for.

Last week, the boss and I were invited to lunch with Lidia at Felidia, the TV chef’s three-star restaurant on East 58th Street.

Yes, I’m talking about Lidia Matticchio Bastinaicha – the unlikeliest star on television – who hosts the wildly popular

PBS series, “Lidia’s Family Table,” carried by nearly 90 percent of PBS stations with a reach of something like 50 million people.

That’s a whole lotta anchovies.

Lidia made us feel like we were having lunch with a dear friend, or better yet, a favorite cousin or an aunt.

Her easy graciousness is one of the reasons her cooking show has become such a phenomenon. That Italian-family warmth comes through whether she’s cooking, sharing a meal with you, or teaching you how she does it.

Her new series is her third since 1998. She admits that she started on TV – an appearance on Julia Child 10 years ago was her big break – to promote her restaurant. But now both the restaurant and her TV show are “my children,” she says. ‘You don’t say which comes first.”

Right after an antipasto of fava beans, asparagus and fagiolini with balsamic-juniper pecorino, I asked the obvious: How is it possible that Italians (in Italy, that is) seem to have no excess body fat, although they always seem

to be enjoying pasta and drinking wine, while we Americans are getting so big that jeans will have to start carrying “Wide Load” warning labels?

Lidia laughed, and launched into one of the most interesting conversations about not only food, but about the science of food. “It’s about balancing everything out,” she says. “It’s about taking the time to eat slowly, building contentment and [thus] being contented with smaller portions. A meal has to have lots of diversity to satiate the taste, the sense of smell. If all of your senses are involved, you become satisfied.

“Take a ripe peach for example,” she says as the spring vegetable soup was served. “The cell walls of the fruit are mutated to keep them from collapsing; the peach cannot die. And ironically, it’s only when a fruit begins to die that it is at its optimum!”

Clearly this soup wasn’t made with Frankenstein vegetables because I could tell I was getting satiated already!

“People these days eat the genetic memory of flavor,” she sighed.

She explained that when a team of sociologists did a study of the application of heat to food, they discovered that

charcoal and grilled tastes are actually coded into our genes.

Hey, this may finally explain why modern cavemen love to BBQ.

Next came the pasta course – which most definitely wasn’t genetically altered: pear and pecorinofilled ravioli, accompanied by talk of home and family. Her show is, in fact, filmed at her Queens home which she shares with her mother and her mother’s – yes – boyfriend.

She loves that everyone gets involved in the show, especially her grandkids. “I would love to address the whole concept of nutrition with children,” she said as we were served a wonderful wild striped bass poached in mushroom-tomato broth with celery root.

“Modern kids need to understand the cycle of nature and their part in it. They need to understand simple, natural concepts which have become foreign to us – like the importance of eating seasonal foods in season.”

There was talk about food epiphanies and art (Lidia’s daughter, Tanya, is an Oxford educated art historian) and what she calls straight-ahead cooking on her show which is taped in real-time – six hours to make every 30-minute

show.

“If a roast takes several hours, then we tape it from beginning to end, and edit it down. The camera needs to catch the subtleties, the faces of the kids, the cycle of the cooking.”

There was lots more food, too. And wine.

Still, when I got back to work I didn’t even feel full – or tipsy.

Ah, Lidia of Felidia.

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LIDIA’S FAMILY TABLE

Sunday, 5:30 p.m., Ch. 13, Monday, 8 p.m., Ch. 21