In March 2023, an article in the Financial Times caused controversy around the world, in the media and at the table. In Marianna Giusti’s article, historian Alberto Grandi (author of Denominazione di origine inventata, Mondadori publisher 2020) relates how he – to use the modern term – “debunked” Italian cuisine.
Grandi has met with reproach for having dared to touch, among other things, the history of pizza and that of carbonara. While the former is of Neapolitan origin, it returned to Italy in its current form “imported” by immigrants from the United States. And we owe the latter to the Anglo-American troops who participated in the liberation of Italy from Nazism and fascism in 1944-45.
Grandi’s work, thanks to the media exposure that followed, has opened a sort of Pandora’s box: it has touched the heart of a form of food chauvinism that permeates the entire Italian nation and political spectrum, which is more attached to the idea that, rather than Roman law or Renaissance art, “Italian cuisine is the best in the world” – an idea supported and perpetuated by marketing.
‘Who is the real Dane? Who is the real Frenchman? If you eat couscous are you a real Italian? If you eat tabbouleh are you a real Frenchman?’ – Fabio Parasecoli
This idea is neither neutral nor harmless, but is an aspect of what is called “banal ationalism”. “Gastronationalism is one of the most insidious forms of this ‘banal nationalism’ because it is met with a certain indulgence, and mistaken for patriotic pride. It is not difficult to see the signs of nationalist deviation with regard to food,” explains Michele Antonio Fino, who teaches Fundamentals of European Law, Food Law and Legal Ecology at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, (founded by Slow Food), and is the co-author of Gastronazionalismo (Peole publisher, 2021) with Anna Claudia Cecconi.
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As British sociologist Atsuko Ichijo argued in 2020, while there are still no substantial academic studies on gastronationalism as a phenomenon, there is a great variety of studies on food and its cultural significance.
For example, sociologist Mathilde Cohen has worked on the relationship between “whiteness” and French food. In 2010, sociologist Michaela Desoucey published Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union (American Sociology Review, 2010), in which he analyses this precise phenomenon in Europe. The term “gastronativism”, coined by Fabio Parasecoli, who teaches Food Studies at the Nutrition and Food Studies Department of New York University (see Gastronativism: Food, Identity, Politics, Columbia University Press, 2022), has also made an appearance. “This concept can help express the tensions around food, how it is used ideologically in politics, even within a nation to distinguish classes, religions, ethnicities…”, Parasecoli explains. In short, to support “who belongs to a community… and who does not”.
Food and tradition, for the right alone?
The passage from fork to defence of traditional values is short. The “defence of our products is a battle of civilisation: in politics everything can be negotiated, but here Made in Italy either is or is not,” declared far right leader Matteo Salvini when he was minister of the interior (he is now minister of transport).
“Those who cherish food traditions and want to preserve their memory and practice are not nationalists, they become so when they associate this desire with the assertion of the superiority of their own traditions over those of other peoples and countries,” adds Fino, who speaks of “supremacist language in food”.
“What is real Italian food? The politically important question here is ‘who is the real Italian? Who is the real Dane? Who is the real Frenchman? If you eat couscous are you a real Italian? If you eat tabbouleh are you a real Frenchman‘?” asks Fabio Parasecoli.
We can always cite Salvini again, who denounced, not so far back in 2019, tortellini without pork as an act of erasing “our history”. Or, for example, the Pork Festival, reintroduced in an anti-Muslim key in Hayange, in the east of France, by Rassemblement national (far-right) mayor Fabien Engelmann, who still holds office, in 2014. “A festival like this is selective”, “A chance to spend a day with like-minded people”, “Here at least we don’t see them, the ones from the mosque and their traditional clothes, burkas, etc.”, attendees told Le Monde at the third edition of the festival.
What we eat is part of the social and cultural construction of who we are, and, together with other elements, the construction of national identity. The state often has a hand in this process too.
To take just one example, the “bible” of Italian cuisine, L’arte di mangiar bene by Pellegrino Artusi, was published in the Risorgimento (mid-19th century) period, and the Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine in the Fascist (1922-1943) era.
“We talk about Spanish gastronomy because the state has tried to build it up,” Xavier Medina Luque, professor of Food Anthropology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), explains to El Confidencial. “Certain dishes have been chosen to represent the different regions, and sometimes these are inventions. For example, the story of the paella, created by Franco’s Ministry of Tourism in the 1960s, does not correspond to reality. They were looking for a rich dish that combined the elements that Spain wanted to show to the outside world. Behind this dish is a very clear political intention and a tourist attraction that has finally taken hold in Spanish society. The mixed paella we are used to eating today is a relatively recent creation that does not correspond to the idea behind the Valencian dish.”
French cuisine, on the other hand, began to define itself as “gastronomy” (understood as the art of the table) “between the 18th and 19th centuries, with figures such as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, and the publication of guides and almanacs,” explains journalist Nora Bouazzouni, who has published three books on food and cultural construction, all for Nouriturfu (Mangez les riches – La lutte des classes passe par l’assiette in 2023, Steaksisme – En finir avec le mythe de la végé et du viandard in 2021, and Faiminisme – Quand le sexisme passe à table in 2017). In the post-French Revolutionary period, the bourgeoisie had to integrate the codes of the nobility, in a process of national restructuring.
Bouazzouni adds that “nationalism, and likewise Gastronationalism, go hand in hand with virility: meat exalts France”. There is talk of a “French carnivorous tradition”, the idea that meat consumption enhances the cultural construction of masculinity. This position is taken up by conservative, far-right figures on a global scale (often in combination with opposition to the fight against climate change).
PGI, PDO, tradition as property
The position of food in relation to identity can also be linked to the complex relationship with European identity.
In the 1980s, several European countries began to mark certain national food traditions as their cultural heritage. These initiatives were part of a broader process that saw, in 2003 in Paris, the approval of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage at the XXXII UNESCO General Conference.
“Patrimonialisation is the transformation of culture into an economic asset, through a process of protection that should aim to preserve practices, knowledge or traditions for future generations. In reality, patrimonialisation is transformed into the creation, sometimes entirely artificial, of some speciality food, which is taken away from the free market, and assigned to the exclusive production of a specific territory or population,” explains Michele Antonio Fino.
Europe’s contribution is the creation of the “Protected Designation of Origin” (PDO, 1992) and “Protected Geographical Indication” (PGI) labels, which are intended to harmonise this fragmented process and provide common rules to a common market.
Moreover, with the increasing technicality of the guidelines, the process comes closer and closer to patent rules.
‘”Food sovereignty” represents one of the greatest forms of appropriation of a positive and highly social concept in order to turn it into an instrument of racism and selfishness‘ – Michele Antonio Fino
The phenomenon not only concerns Europe, argues Parasecoli, it is in fact global. “For example, India has created a similar system, and China has a comparable system. The world today is divided into two large camps: those who think that these geographical indicators, this form of intellectual property, can help sustain and develop traditions, and those who, like the United States, Australia or South Africa, think that there is no need, that the intellectual property tools that exist are sufficient”.
However, Fino says, “PDO and PGI were conceived as two absolutely exceptional schemes, to be used exclusively to protect authentic specialities, which are decidedly rare. The proliferation of certifications, on the other hand, makes it clear that the European Union has put a powerful tool in the hands of member countries to feed nationalism”.
As its authors explain, the book Gastronazionalismo emerged “from the realisation that a nationalist and at times even violent lexicon around food depends on an underestimation of a complex social phenomenon: in a time of fluid identities, an supposed national gastronomic identity becomes an occasion for belonging, opposition to others, a claim to superiority. An example: even for people who are repelled by the idea that German people are horrible, it is not at all repugnant to categorise German cuisine (or even any other European cuisine) as horrible, or in any case inferior to Italian cuisine.”
“Food sovereignty”
A further step in a somewhat neurotic process is the creation of food sovereignty ministries: in Italy, by an extreme right-wing government, and in France, by a right-wing government that has been winking at the extreme right for several years now.
“This terminology represents one of the greatest forms of appropriation of a positive and highly social concept in order to turn it into an instrument of racism and selfishness,” argues Fino. “The concept was developed by La Vía Campesina (a movement that brings together farmers from 180 countries, founded in 1993) to enshrine the right of indigenous peoples, first and foremost in Latin America, to preserve their food traditions and the territories on which they were based against the expansionist aims of cultivation and exploitation intended to feed the markets of the first world. Today, the concept is being distorted to defend something that does not need to be defended, such as the production of Parmigiano Reggiano or Parma ham, products based precisely on the erosion of Latin America’s food sovereignty, since soya and maize, mostly transgenic, are cultivated in those territories to the detriment of the indigenous populations, to be exported to Italy and feed the animal and processing industries”.
Food and geopolitics
There are countless examples of food issues being given political valence.
In May 2019, the foreign ministry of the Russian Federation boasted on its X (formerly Twitter) account of the most famous traditional Russian dish, borsch. There is in fact a dispute over this soup, because its origin is said to be Ukrainian. “As if stealing Crimea wasn’t enough, you had to go and steal borsch from Ukraine as well” is how one Twitter user reacted. The latter was then quoted in a BBC article that took the controversy seriously and tried to prove the Ukrainian origin of this soup.
There is also the anti-European angle, whereby Europe is perceived as an “other” that transforms identity. This is the case in the Czech Republic, where a form of gastronationalism has appeared as a criticism of the EU framework, and is used by Eurosceptic, populist and far-right parties to push the emotional envelope and mobilise the electorate, explains Petr Jedlička, journalist for Deník Referendum.
Already at the time of accession to the European Union, there were attempts to defend the traditional goulash cooked in Czech pubs, which according to tradition should be served after being left to rest for a day or two, which is not commercially possible according to European hygienic standards. There was also controversy over “Pomazánkové máslo” (spreadable butter), a dairy product which, due to its low fat content, cannot be called butter; or Czech rum, made from potatoes, which cannot be called rum. So Czech national-populist politicians beat their chests, saying that the EU cannot and will not allow butter and rum to be taken away from the Czech people.
Boróka Parászka writes in the weekly Hvg that in Hungary the use of food to invoke identity is a constant among the political class. National-populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán regularly publishes about cooking and food, and shares pictures while he is at the table; former Justice Minister Judit Varga and former President of the Republic Katalin Novák are the most prominent female figures who have held positions at the top of contemporary politics, and ‘a key element of their communication was sharing pictures about cooking and family, and holiday preparations”.
These are evidently “traditional” dishes, from a tradition that is beginning to be called into question by several authors in Hungary today. “While contemporary Hungarian literature has rediscovered gastronomic themes as literary subjects, a reinterpretation and deconstruction of gastronomic myths has also begun,” Parászka explains.
“If we look for the origins of something, we find that there are no pure origins, everything is mixed. Most products come from other places, they have no indigenous origins,” concludes anthropologist Xavier Medina Luque. “We see that each culture has adapted these products to create particular cuisines and ways of life. There are foods that we have had for much longer or much shorter periods of time, but they all ended up being part of our culinary cultures.”
This article was produced within the PULSE project, with contributions from Boróka Parászka from Hvg (Hungary), Petr Jedlička from Deník Referendum (Czech Republic), Lorenzo Ferrari OBCTranseuropa (Italy) and Andrea Muñoz from El Confidencial (Spain).
