Garlic and Oil: Politics and Food in Italy

257 Pages·2004·1.125 MB·English

by  Carol Helstosky

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Garlic and Oil
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Garlic and Oil
Politics and Food in Italy
Carol Helstosky
Oxford • New York
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English edition
First published in 2004 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
© Carol Helstosky 2004
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1 85973 890 7 (Cloth)
Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn
www.bergpublishers.com
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Unification through Monotony,Italy 1861–1914 11
2 The Great War and the Rise of State Intervention,Italy 1915–1922 39
3 The Cooking of Consent,Italy 1922–1935 63
4 Austerity and Decline,Italy 1935–1945 91
5 The Challenge of Abundance,Italy 1945–1960 127
Conclusion:A Cuisine of Scarcity 151
Epilogue:Food in Italy Today 155
Notes 167
Bibliography 217
Index 238
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the institutions and organizations that offered generous financial
support for the research and completion of this book. I received post-doctoral
support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, through the American
Academy in Rome, and the German Marshall Fund. Research for Chapters Two
and Three was funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the American Historical
Association, and Rutgers University, where I completed my doctoral dissertation.
I would also like to thank the archivists and staff at the Archivio Centrale dello
Stato, Rome; the Biblioteca Nazionale, Rome; the Biblioteca Alessandrina, Rome;
the Biblioteca di Storia Contemporanea, Rome; the Museo Criminologico, Rome;
the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence; and the librarians at the American Academy in
Rome, the Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Rome, and Penrose Library at the
University of Denver.
Several people have guided this project through completion and generously
offered their time and advice in reading parts of this manuscript. I thank Victoria
de Grazia, who shaped this project in its earliest stages. I am also grateful to
Carole Counihan, Belinda Davis, John Davis, Donna Gabaccia, and Linda Reeder
for reading the manuscript and supporting the project. However, all errors and
omissions are the responsibility of the author.
This work has benefited from numerous conversations, in the United States and
in Italy, with friends and colleagues in the field of history and elsewhere. My
heartfelt thanks to colleagues at the University of Denver, to Nancy Bisaha, Paul
Deslandes, Joanna Drell, Paul Garfinkel, Wendy Kaplan, Suzanne Kaufman,
Giuseppe Lauricella, Laurel McSherry, Borden Painter, Livio Pestilli, Susan
Pennybacker, and Scott Sandage. Thanks also to Zack Poppel, who provided
research assistance at the last minute.
And last but not least, I’d like to thank my family. My husband Martin Gloege
has provided unflagging support and sound editorial advice. My daughter, Helen
Flannery Gloege, supplied some much-needed humor at the end of this project.
This book is dedicated to my father, Edward V. Helstosky, and to the memory of
my mother, Helen C. Helstosky. Her life and death taught me about the frailty of
the physical body and the resilience of the human spirit.
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Introduction
Italian food is everywhere we look: espresso bars, lavishly photographed cook-
books, Italian cooking shows on television, and pizza delivered to our doorsteps.
Despite our familiarity with Italian food, we know very little about its history. We
understand that Italian cuisine is rich in regional diversity and has been influ-
enced by culinary styles from North Africa, the Middle East, and western Europe.
We also know that for much of Italy’s recent history, popular diet consisted of
simple dishes prepared with few ingredients and the predominance of grains and
produce over meat and dairy products, the so-called Mediterranean diet. We are
perhaps most familiar with pizza and pasta, the foundations of Italian cuisine,
given that these dishes are consumed throughout the world. Global consumers
may prepare these foods to fit their own circumstances, but they strive to main-
tain the authenticity of these foods by using tomatoes or garlic and olive oil in the
preparation and presentation of these dishes. What is known today as Italian food
is a recent creation, however, and bears little resemblance to the abstemious and
even inadequate diet endured by much of the population of Italy in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. In fact, only in the last several decades have Italian
consumers actually begun to eat what the rest of the world recognizes today as
Italian cuisine.
During the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth century,
popular diet in Italy consisted of either bread or polenta, consumed with a compa-
natico, usually onions, peppers, garlic, sardines, anchovies, or oil. Pasta, legumes,
wine, dairy products, and fresh produce were consumed less frequently while meat
and alcohol were consumed only on special occasions. The content of the Italian
diet is not surprising, if we consider that a rocky terrain covers much of the penin-
sula. The landscape is excellent for growing grapes and olives, but very few crops,
including staple crops like wheat, rice, or corn, can flourish on such uneven soil.
To a great degree, Italy’s Mediterranean diet was the unfortunate consequence of
environment, yet human activity shaped popular consumption habits as well.
Although few people starved or fell seriously ill from malnutrition in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, the majority of the Italian population did not
consume a nutritionally adequate diet because of economic and political
constraints on their behavior as consumers and eaters. Subsistence farming and
local markets characterized Italian agriculture while a weak national economy
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