Italians and Food

294 Pages·2019·3.224 MB·English

by  Roberta Sassatelli

CONSUMPTION AND PUBLIC LIFE
ITALIANS AND FOOD
EDITED BY
ROBERTA SASSATELLI
Consumption and Public Life
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Birkbeck College
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Indiana University
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Roberta Sassatelli
Editor
Italians and Food
Editor
Roberta Sassatelli
University of Milan
Milan, Italy
Consumption and Public Life
ISBN 978-3-030-15680-0 ISBN 978-3-030-15681-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15681-7
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Foreword
Why Italy?
For over two decades, the dialectical and dynamic relations between
the national and the international and between the local and the global
have provided central intellectual challenges for the new, multidiscipli-
nary field of food studies. On the one hand, food production, prepa-
ration and consumption always underwrite the local, private, and
domestic practices that generate identity and that differentiate among
relatively small and intimate groups of people at local and regional lev-
els. At the same time, and at least since the seventeenth century, the
nations of Europe have claimed loyalty and promoted identity among
far larger groups of people who live on much wider territories. Nations
owe their sovereignty to an international state system that recognizes
a rough equivalency among them and respects their borders (and the
nations that adjoin those seams) while also assuming unity within
each national group that the state purportedly represents and governs.
Theorizing how local foods and food practices have defined the national
through the development of what has been called “banal” or “gastro-”
nationalism—terms that are sometimes subsumed in this volume within
v
vi Foreword
the term Italianicity or italianità—remains a vital activity for the field of
food studies as does understanding how local and national foods, prac-
tices and cultures circulate internationally, transforming food and food
practices in the many places they travel. Both issues however, inspire
empirical study of national cases rather than analysis at a global scale.
Thematic and analytic concerns like these have repeatedly pushed
case studies of Italy and its inhabitants toward the center of food stud-
ies. Editor Roberta Sassatelli’s introduction outlines brilliantly why this
has been so. Emigration from Italy and the long-existent excitement
of tourists to see Italy’s cultural treasures have created multiple, pow-
erful sites for gastronomic confrontations, change, and exchange. Each
has helped to make “Italian food” so attractive to eaters worldwide
that market demand now supports myriad business opportunities for
Italians, for diasporic people of Italian descent and even for those with
knowledge of but no personal roots in Italy. The possibility that food is
more central to definitions of Italian culture and identity than to other
cultures may itself influence how in the Italian case the local becomes so
thoroughly entangled in the national and the global.
Understanding culinary mobility and dynamics by focusing on a sin-
gle nation is the core undertaking of the essays collected in this volume.
As a non-native Italianist I have crossed many borders and lived long-
term in three quite different countries—the United States, Germany,
and Canada—but I have never lived for an extended period Italy—the
country that generated the migrations and diasporas that I have writ-
ten about intermittently for 40 years. That personal experience means
I brought to my reading of this volume’s individual essays a keen inter-
est in viewing the Italian case from outside, largely by identifying ways
Italy might be compared to other nations. Applying comparative per-
spectives to national case studies may have special attractions for read-
ers who are either not culturally Italian or are not scholarly Italianists.
This group of readers includes both general readers who may know
only a little about Italy and who are mainly fascinated to learn gener-
ally about food and food practices (readers who may or may wish to be
labeled as “foodies”) and scholars with expertise on the food and food-
ways of countries other than Italy. I assumed the contributors to this
volume wanted to reach both these groups, since they chose to publish
Foreword vii
in English, with an English-language press that is located in the United
Kingdom. (Italians and Italianists could have been reached quite easily
by an Italian-language publication.)
As this suggests, the structure and content of this volume itself illus-
trate nicely the tension between national and international approaches.
While most of the authors publishing here were either born or raised
in Italy (and presumably they also learned Italian as a first language
or “mother tongue”) all operate as scholars within a fairly cosmopoli-
tan food studies world. Three contributors in addition to me have
lived and worked abroad for extended periods of time (Parasecoli in
China and the United States; Cinotto in the United States; Counihan
in Italy and the United States); all the others have studied abroad or
worked as visiting professors or researchers for longer or shorter peri-
ods. Most important, all frame their specific research topics within an
international historiography about Italian food. (The reader of c itations
will find references to the Americans, Gabaccia and Helstosky, and
to the British John Dickie, alongside the more lavishly cited Italians
Montanari and Sassatelli and the more briefly noted Parasecoli, Cinotto
and Scarpellini.) Perhaps the best evidence of the relevance of interna-
tional scholarship for those writing Italy’s food studies emerges from
the theoretical work that contributors have mobilized as they devel-
oped their interpretations. The influence of the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu and the Mumbai-born but long-time U.S. resident, anthro-
pologist Arjun Appadurai, is most in evidence across the chapters of this
book, followed by concepts developed by sociologists Joseé Johnston
and Shyon Bauman (Canada), philosopher Michel De Certeau (France)
semiotician Roland Barthes (France), anthropologist Mary Douglas
(U.K.), social psychologist Michael Billig (also U.K.) and American
sociologist Michaela DeSoucey. Such theoretical work has the power
to create the kinds of intellectual walkways that could ultimately con-
nect case studies of individual nations, bringing them into dialogue and
shedding new, sometimes unexpected light on each national case.
Italian food is not the only cuisine that currently enjoys what Fabio
Parasecoli in his essay sagely calls “global prestige” among discerning
consumers in search of authentic, traditional, often peasant- or locally
based culinary experiences. Note that, in this view, global prestige is
viii Foreword
not a creation of 50 or 100 “best” high-end dining venues worldwide.
Global prestige probably more closely resembles assessments made by
e.g. CNN’s list of places where travelers will find “the best food.” (Italy
holds first place in the 2018 listing of ten countries, the others being
France, Thailand, China, Mexico, Greece, India, Japan, Spain, and
the United States.) Chinese and, increasingly, also Mexican food coex-
ist with Italian food on the global stage and also beckon to discerning
consumers worldwide. Parasecoli’s focus on the “road to global suc-
cess” in the case of Italy lays a strong foundation for comparisons to
Mexico and China. In his analysis of Italy, the combination of mass
migration and mass tourism, alongside a national economic miracle
and increasing state intervention to promote Italian food products pro-
vide keys to the rise in status from stigmatized to cuisines celebrated for
their national traditions and authenticity. The rise to global prestige of
Mexican cuisine also begins with histories of mass migration and rising
mass tourism, whereas for Chinese cuisine it is likely that migration and
economic miracle are more salient than tourism or state intervention.
Despite similarities, the narratives that emerge and define authenticity
and tradition at a global scale are likely quite different for each national
case. Parasecoli identifies the nonna as a central figure in narratives of
Italian culinary excellence but there is no essentialized grandmother
associated worldwide with Chinese cuisine. The cocinera tradicional (tra-
ditional cook) who symbolizes Mexican cuisine to the world is indige-
nous, rural, and female but she is not imagined as kin.
In his exploration of Italian food in diaspora, Simone Cinotto
explores the importance of mass migration, one of the historically
most important building blocks of the global prestige in all three glob-
ally prestigious national cuisines. His account of the creation of a dias-
poric Italian family ideology—in which loyalty to family becomes a
central element of ethnic or national identity—goes a long way toward
explaining why and how authenticity and tradition came to be associ-
ated with Italian cuisine through kinship and the nonna. While fam-
ily ties were (and are) just as emotionally important to migrants from
Mexico and China, the family group is not, arguably, as closely associ-
ated with Mexican or Chinese nationalisms. Cinotto describes the heavy
investment of Italian immigrants’ labor and capital into the growing,
Foreword ix
production and retailing of familiar Italian-style foods in diaspora; these
activities worked to consolidate an association of diasporic Italianicity
with food in ways that may not have been operative in the unfolding
of other migrant groups. Only more explicit comparison can deter-
mine whether diasporic associations of family and kinship with food
also carved an Italian pathway to global prestige that was demonstra-
bly different from that of the Mexican or Chinese pathways. Although
Cinotto does not discuss the possibility, the powerful association of
diasporic Italianicity with food may also have created potential for com-
petition between diaspora and homeland food enterprises, each compet-
ing to deliver somewhat different versions of authenticity and tradition
for global consumers. (The global campaign of the Associazione Verace
Pizza Napoletana—AVPN—provides one possible example of such
competition).
Chiara Rabbiosi takes up the second type of mobility that proved
essential in the rise of Italian cuisine to global prestige—tourism. With
her careful attention to the significance of spatial scale, her chapter
raises questions—of deep interest to any comparativist—about the uni-
versality or particularism of the paradoxical location of Italian cuisine
between the local and the national. The paradox is heightened by her
sensitivity to the fact that many tourists travel very long distances to
enjoy the experience of consuming authentically and traditionally local
foods in very specific places and to the fact that tourists often under-
stand the food and foodways they encounter as “Italian.” While food
studies scholars of France, China, and Mexico (and many other coun-
tries as well) have noted similar tensions between strong regional food
traditions and the paradoxical construction of an identifiable national
cuisine, no other country seems to have achieved the level of success
seen even in smaller Italian tourist destinations (such as seaside Rimini,
the focus of her local study) in luring so many long-distance travelers
with promises of authenticity and tradition that is powerfully inflected
by localism. According to Rabbiosi, the commitment of the Italian state
and Italian food producers to designations such as PDO (Protected
Designation of Origin), PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) and
TSG (Traditional Speciality Guaranteed) stabilizes a national “Made in
Italy” branding of many local foods. (Surely, the French wine industry