Representing Italy Through Food

Edited by Peter Naccarato, REPRESENTING ITALY Zachary Nowak & Elgin k. Eckert REPRESENTING ITALY Through Food Representing Italy Through Food EDITED BY PETER NACCARATO, ZACHARY NOWAK AND ELGIN K. ECKERT Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 3 02/11/2016 12:01 Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Selection and Editorial Material: Peter Naccarato, Zachary Nowak, Elgin K. Eckert, 2017 © Individual Chapters: Their Authors, 2017 Petter Naccarato, Zachary Nowak and Elgin K. Eckert have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. 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Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters. 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 4 02/11/2016 12:01 Contents List of figures ix Notes on contributors Acknowledgments xv xi Editors’ Introduction: Presenting food, representing Italy Peter Naccarato, Zachary Nowak, and Elgin K. Eckert 1 PART ONE (Re)presenting iconic Italy And at last, the farmers win Massimo Montanari 17 2 Authenticity all’italiana: Food discourses, diasporas, and the limits of cuisine in contemporary Italy Aliza S. Wong 33 3 The Slow Food Movement and Facebook: The paradox of advocating slow living through fast technology Ginevra Adamoli 55 1 PART TWO Representing Italy in literature and film Clara Sereni’s Casalinghitudine: Recipes for political history Ernesto Livorni 77 5 Inspector Montalbano a tavola: Food in Andrea Camilleri’s police fiction Elgin K. Eckert 95 6 There’s a mobster in the kitchen: Cooking, eating, and complications of gender in The Godfather and Goodfellas Peter Naccarato 111 7 In cibo veritas: Food preparation and consumption in Özpetek’s “queer” films Elgin K. Eckert and Zachary Nowak 125 4 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 7 02/11/2016 12:01 CONTENTS viii PART THREE Marketing, packaging, and advertising Italy Producing consumers: Gendering Italy through food advertisements Diana Garvin 141 9 “A kitchen with a view”: The modernization of gender roles in Italy through Barilla’s 1950s and 1960s advertising 8 campaigns Antonella Valoroso 165 10 Semiotics of sauce: Representing Italian/American identity through pasta sauces Maryann Tebben 183 PART FOUR Global representations of Italy 11 Italianità in America: The cultural politics of representing “authentic” Italian Cuisine in the U.S. Ken Albala 205 12 Leggo’s not-so-autentico: Invention and representation in twentieth century Italo-Australian foodways Rachel A. Ankeny and Tania Cammarano 219 13 Italian food in Israel: Representing an Imagined Mediterranean Nir Avieli 239 14 Afterword: Italy represented Peter Naccarato, Zachary Nowak, and Elgin K. Eckert 263 Index 267 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 8 02/11/2016 12:01 Editors’ Introduction: Presenting food, representing Italy Peter Naccarato, Zachary Nowak, and Elgin K. Eckert Spaghetti and pizza belong to a legacy that has spread throughout the world, just as books have, but unlike books these foods are immediately recognizable and accessible to all. They represent a culture of commerce and craftsmanship, based on taste and manual skill, that reconstitutes a body of knowledge through imitation and an element of reminiscence, despite the distance from the place where this knowledge originated. Cooking is perhaps an unlettered art, but it also survives thanks to remembered knowledge – the memory of what has not been lost as well as what will be recorded in writing – and it is thus a civilizing force.1 he etymologies of the Italian words for taste (sapore) and knowledge (sapere) suggest why we should, as scholars of Italy and Italian culture, attend to food. Both words share a grammatical root, which means not only “to taste,” but also “to perceive,” “to research,” and “to be wise.”2 Studying how the production, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food intersect with wisdom and (self)-knowledge in cultural representation come naturally. At the same time, such work aligns with a broader focus on representation as an essential tool for historical and cultural analysis. At least since the publication of Erich Auerbach’s influential study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature in 1946,3 the focus of theorists has been on the issue of the representation of everyday life in different disciplines and T 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 1 02/11/2016 12:01 2 REPRESENTING ITALY THROUGH FOOD contexts. How we represent ourselves, our lifestyles, and habits (alimentary or otherwise) is intimately tied to our physical, political, and social conventions. Mimeses related to food, in particular, are a key to understanding the cultural memory of a group. As Jan Assman states in her essential work on that topic, cultural memory is a “characteristic store of repeatedly used texts, images and rituals in the cultivation of which each society and epoch stabilizes and imports its self-image; a collectively shared knowledge of preferably (yet not exclusively) the past, on which a group bases its awareness of unity and character.”4 Representations are the only way we can “know” people who are distant either temporally (in the past), spatially (in faraway countries), or socio-culturally (maybe in our own country, but in different groups). What they eat (or what we are told they eat through mimesis) tells us their stories. Taking Assman’s assertion one step further, Naccarato and LeBesco argue that “how a culture decides to represent itself tells us far more about that culture’s dominant ideological underpinnings (and the fun people can have in transgressing them) than some ‘naturalized,’ purportedly nonconstructed version of it does.”5 But as our memories are highly selective, “the rendering of memories potentially tells us more about the rememberer’s present, his or her desire and denial, than about the actual past events.”6 Modern Western society is inundated with representation: more books, more films, and more advertisements are produced than ever before.7 Digital media and handheld devices give us more immediate access to representations of the Other than was previously even imaginable.8 It should not be surprising, then, that Isabelle DeSolier insists that “the material culture of food includes not only food itself but also food media, such as television cooking shows, food blogs, and cookbooks. For the material world does not exist in isolation; the media play a key role in the relationship between people and things.”9 Clearly any study of cultural representations today must include the role that media (representations) play in shaping the world and our experience of it. Taken collectively, the chapters in this volume offer a reading of Italy (real and imagined) that utilizes not only traditional modes of cultural representations, but also extends this analysis to a variety of mimetic acts. The underlying thought that unifies these chapters is that understanding these mimeses is of vital importance as representations “teach” us about the world around us, our relationship to it, and our own sense of self. As such, by focusing attention on representations of Italian food and foodways, we learn something vital about historical and contemporary perceptions of Italians and their culture both within and outside of Italy. Given the richness of Italian culture and the breadth and variety of its cultural productions, one may ask why focus on Italian food and foodways in particular. Of course, Italian literary history abounds with examples of food representations from the earliest texts on: twelfth- and thirteenth-century 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 2 02/11/2016 12:01 EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 3 burlesque poetry is full of descriptions of feasts (and famines). The “three crowns” of Italian literature (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio) all place food at the center of their recounting. One of the most fanciful is Boccaccio, who conjures up an imaginary land where “a mountain, all of grated Parmesan cheese,” where there live “folk that do nought else but make macaroni and ravioli, and boil them in capon’s broth, and then throw them down to be scrambled for; and hard by flows a rivulet of Vernaccia, the best that ever was drunk, and never a drop of water therein.”10 Maestro Martino wrote the first “Italian” cookbook in the fifteenth century, and many other cookbook authors followed him. Regional dishes and regional products that circulated in the early modern period are not proof that Italian cuisine was fractured but rather that there was a common identity in Italy based in part on trade in shared food products, and circulation of recipes.11 Modern and contemporary Italian cinema also relies heavily on food as a semiotic pasta over which it can pour sauce-like messages. It’s hard to think about Italian movies without conjuring up the iconic example of Totò eating spaghetti in Miseria e Nobiltà or four friends attempting to eat themselves to death in La Grande Bouffe. Despite this long historical and cultural association of Italy with food, however, the contemporary identification of Italy with high quality food is relatively recent. In fact, historian John Dickie explains that in the eighteenth century, Grand Tourists—“wealthy young gentlemen, most of them English, [who] came to Italy to view the sites of the classical past”—recorded their impressions that Italy’s food “was generally poor, and eating in the Italian countryside was often a disgusting experience.”12 In fact, these foreign travelers were obsessed in the early modern period not with Italian food, but with Roman and Ancient Greek ruins. Similarly, British travelers, far from being enchanted by fresh vegetables and strong olive oil, disliked the dishes they were served. They frequently complained about the taste of garlic, the use of oil for frying, and the lack of the familiar cuts of meat.13 While Dickie acknowledges that it is difficult to determine the veracity of such assertions, such narratives themselves yielded tremendous power in shaping the real and imagined perception of Italy and its food as this present volume tries to make clear. The extent to which such perceptions have changed over time is highlighted by Fabio Parasecoli, who comments in the Introduction to his book Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy that often when people find out that he is Italian they immediately make assumptions about his own love of food and cooking. He notes, “The assumption that I have a deep and innate connection with good food points to the widespread notion that Italy is, indeed, a special place when it comes to eating and the pleasures of the table. The world seems to be so in love with Italian food that many tend to think of it as exquisitely traditional, almost timeless, untouched by the events that have shaped what many consider a broken food system.”14 As Dickie’s history makes clear, 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 3 02/11/2016 12:01 4 REPRESENTING ITALY THROUGH FOOD such “timeless” associations of Italy and its food tradition are myths that are created and circulated by the kinds of representations that are interrogated by the contributors to this volume. In contrast to the eighteenth-century grand tourists, Parasecoli suggests that contemporary tourists are “often pleasantly surprised by their meals” and “end up projecting healthy amounts of romanticism on to dishes and ingredients, enriching Italian food with their own desires and longings.”15 He also emphasizes the role of cookbooks and non-fiction works like Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun in “solidifying perceptions, expectations and biases about Italian food.”16 Taken collectively, Parasecoli argues, such representations of Italy and its food culture bring us into “the realm of the pastoral fantasy: far away and acceptably foreign, Italy is at time imagined as a backward but charming place where there is no room for the hustle and bustle of modern efficiency: where productivity is not a priority and life is different, sweeter. Visitors expect to get back in touch with nature and with themselves while rediscovering food as enjoyment and partaking, rather than a source of anxiety and the cause of extra pounds.”17 Of course, such perceptions about Italy, its people, and its food have been shaped to a large extend by its ever-expanding tourist industry.18 At the same time, there is also the long history of emigration that has contributed to Italy’s global reputation as a cultural and culinary landmark. And while the effects of Italian immigration can be seen across the globe, the example of its impact in the United States on both historical and contemporary perceptions of Italy, Italian culture, and Italian food is illustrative. Noting that food has been “the most eloquent symbol of collective identity for Italian Americans throughout memoirs, literature, poetry, and the visual arts,” Simone Cinotto underscores the extent to which “eating becomes an act of self-identification and pride for Italians and an occasion for asserting cultural and political claims.”19 As millions of Italians emigrated to the United States, they—like so many other migrant groups—used the production and consumption of food to create a unified sense of identity that emerged from the tables of the Italian American home and gradually circulated across national and international landscapes through a complex process of commodification and consumption of Italian foods and foodways. As Cinotto explains, “Immigrants did the work of group identification with the tools they acquired in the encounter with the goods, markets, and material culture of their host country and with the continuing circulation of foods, people, capital, ideas, and imaginaries between Italy, the United States, and the rest of the world.”20 Thus, the study of how Italian foods and foodways have and continue to circulate both within the country and across the globe is essential for understanding Italy, its culture and its people. There are also more pragmatic reasons to use food as a lens to investigate Italy. While Jacques Derrida is often credited with starting the so-called 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 4 02/11/2016 12:01 EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 5 “archival turn,” it was actually the anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot who first called historians’ attention to the archive and its limitations. Trouillot was able to bring what archivists have always known to a larger audience: archives are constructed, not only brick by brick but also ideology by ideology. The winsomely small number of records that make it into the off-green folders and sturdy acid-free boxes reflect a subjective winnowing. The wheat too often is what those in power believe, while the thoughts, hopes, and curses of the poor (frequently not written down at all) are winnowed out like so much chaff.21 Food, however, gets into the archives. In the monumental Medici Archive, now being completely transcribed and archived online, the search term “wine” for example turns up in 562 document synopses.22 Many of these will be the bane of the historian’s existence: the extremely dry daily minutiae of government. But sifting with a different kind of sieve, we can find fragments of everyday life that let us paint a picture of a peasant farmer’s routine. He complains about his neighbor’s poplars shading his vines, debates the amount of wine due to the landlord, or offers a certain bottle to the local judge (perhaps for future judicial favors). It’s rare to find an instance where a subaltern is asked their thoughts on something, and yet food’s omnipresence in the archives lets us make some guesses about their mental worlds.23 This sort of reconstruction works because food, as Maryann Tebben comments in this volume, is an expression—a semiotic system as well as a nutritional one. Tebben highlights the semiotic fluidity of sauce, but the ability to carry signs is not limited to sauce. As the contributors to this volume show, a dish of pasta, birds of prey spiced with garlic, and even couscous are Italian dishes that mean something.24 While the historians writing in this volume are tracking the changes in these meanings over time, the other contributors are examining what these semiotic entrees say about both contemporary Italy, but also about how Italy is imagined and represented outside of the peninsula. Food as bearers of Italianness is not simply an abstract question for welleducated gourmands: it is a daily question worth billions of dollars. An article in a leading Italian business magazine discusses the damage done to the Italian export balance of trade by so-called “Italian sounding” products. These are counterfeit “Italian” food products sold with almost-Italian names like “Rosecco” (U.K.), “Parmesao” (Brazil), and “Mozzarella Company” (U.S.A.). These names, rather than reflecting a general food category, mask a potentially lower-quality food, which catches the coattails of an Italian brand’s collective reputation. They also narrowly avoid running afoul of European “protected denomination/origin” laws for foods, as they do not blatantly use the protected food products real names, only those sounding like them. The numbers that the author of the article cites are stunning: in France there are twice as many Italian-sounding products on the market as originals, in Germany and Holland almost triple. Italy, which according to a farmers’ 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 5 02/11/2016 12:01 6 REPRESENTING ITALY THROUGH FOOD association makes 21 percent of the EU’s denomination of origin food products, has had a constant agricultural trade deficit for more than a decade, and loses millions of euros a year to Italian sounding products abroad.25 While tragic for the producers of the “genuine” (if that word actually means anything when used in reference to food) food articles, this enormous market in counterfeit Parmesan, Chianti, and prosciutto di Parma shows how important the connection of food to Italianness is for people around the world. It also shows that the representations of Italian food that are the concern of the vast majority of people—in the preceding case, the producers of the “real” parmesan cheese, the producers of Parmesao, and the consumers who puzzle over the two—are not solely limited to high culture. The analyses in this volume are not directed solely at famous literature, Renaissance paintings, or the grapes sculpted into lintels. There is an attention to representations that are more plebian, but far more widespread. As mentioned above, while a number of the chapters are historical, this volume also engages contemporary Italian food culture as a global phenomenon, and looks to what its future could be. The volume Taken collectively, the chapters in this volume explore how representations of Italian food and foodways construct, promote, and/or challenge historically and ideologically specific images of Italy and Italian culture. By examining how Italian food and foodways are represented across media (from literature to film, from cookbooks to social media, from marketing campaigns to product advertisements) authors address key questions that are central to understanding Italian culture, in general, and its food and foodways, in particular: What qualifies as “authentic” Italian food and foodways? How do claims to “authenticity” reveal conflicts between a supposedly static culinary past and Italy’s historic food dynamism? What role do representations of these foods and foodways across various media play in shaping how Italian culture is perceived by Italians and non-Italians alike? What does an analysis of these representations reveal about the fundamental connections between a culture’s foodways, and the values and ideologies that it promotes? In tackling these questions, this book explores the many facets of Italian food and foodways and the various ways they are represented, socially constructed, and performed by people in Italy and around the world. In doing so, it helps us understand the enduring power of Italy, Italian culture, and Italian food. The three chapters in Part I, (Re)Presenting Iconic Italy, focus specifically on iconic representations of Italy and Italian foodways in order to understand 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 6 02/11/2016 12:01 EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 7 their historical roots, to examine their ideological function, and to consider their role in imagining (and re-imagining) contemporary Italian culture. In “And at last, the farmers win” Massimo Montanari studies one iconic figure on the contemporary Italian foodscape, the rural farmer. He argues that the figure of the farmer has not always been a celebrated one; rather, he notes that for many centuries, it has been scorned both by rural nobles and urban bourgeoisie. Montanari discusses the popular medieval literary genre, the “satire of the bumpkin,” which described the farmer as rough, uncouth, and almost bestial. However, he argues that this image is no longer current given that, within contemporary society, working the land has been redeemed to the point of becoming fashionable. Contemporary representations of the farmer, Montanari concludes, emphasize the richness of farming culture, the individual and collective value of faming experiences, and the wealth of knowledge required in the field. By revisiting ferociously “anti-farmer” representations, focusing specifically on medieval and Renaissance recipe books, Montanari argues that much of what is considered “high” culture is indebted to farmers. In “Authenticity all’italiana: Food discourses, diasporas, and the limits of cuisine in contemporary Italy,” Aliza Wong focuses on the town of Lucca, using it as a case study for understanding the importance of representing Italian food as “authentic” given the dramatic demographic changes that Italy has witnessed over the last quarter-century. In an effort to protect the iconic status of “authentic” Italian food, Lucca has banned “inauthentic” restaurants from operating within the city walls. Wong argues that these new policies reveal Italy’s struggle to balance the past (including long-standing divisions between northern and southern Italy) and the present (including the challenge of dealing with Italy’s increasing multiculturalism). At the same time, they provide a way of understanding how the iconic status of “authentic” Italian food and foodways has provided a foundational vocabulary for negotiating nationalism, identity, authenticity, and belonging. And in “The Slow Food Movement and Facebook: The paradox of advocating slow living through fast technology,” Ginevra Adamoli offers a quantitative content analysis of representations of the Slow Food Movement on social media, focusing on how they function to protect the iconic status of Italian food and foodways. Recognizing the pervasiveness of new media in forming people’s food identities, Adamoli considers the role of new communication technologies in shaping the Slow Food Movement’s identity and promoting its efforts to protect the status and authenticity of Italian food. While the speed offered by such technologies may seem to contradict the philosophy of Slow Food, Adamoli concludes that it nonetheless plays a crucial role in constructing and circulating food identities that support the movement’s ideals and goals. The four chapters in Part II, Representing Italy in literature and film, focus on the role of representations of food in literature and film in creating, 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 7 02/11/2016 12:01 8 REPRESENTING ITALY THROUGH FOOD sustaining, circulating, and/or challenging traditional narratives about Italian food and Italian culture. In “Clara Sereni’s Casalinghitudine: Recipes for political history,” Ernesto Livorni focuses on Sereni’s second novel, which follows a unique format in which recipes are associated with specific moments in the life of the author as well as Italian political history. Livorni considers how this unique representation of Italian history and Italian food reveals the essential links between individual and national identity. By exploring the connections between specific recipes and events, Livorni teases out the reason why a given recipe is associated with a particular personal memory or historical event. Emphasizing the Sereni family’s background and her own political engagements, Livorni argues that often the recipes work as a link between private and public, with particular emphasis given to the social and political situation of women in Italian society. It is through this unique form of representation, Livorni concludes, that Sereni’s text teases out the complex links between Italian food and Italian history as it invites readers to appreciate culinary, social, and regional differences as they play out across generations. In “Inspector Montalbano a tavola: Food in Andrea Camilleri’s police fiction,” Elgin K. Eckert analyzes representations of food in Andrea Camilleri’s highly popular series of crime novels featuring Inspector Montalbano. Eckert argues that food serves an important thematic and narratological purpose: the Inspector uses food to come to terms with situations of death he encounters in his investigations and serves as an affirmation of life. But food also serves a symbolical, communicative function (which is also highlighted in the RAI television adaption of the series). Scenes focusing on food are interspersed at regular intervals throughout the series to highlight the traditionalistic, nostalgic characteristics of the Inspector: through his refusal of non-traditional foodways and popular, trendy restaurants, he makes implicit statements about a postmodern, consumer-driven society. Tracing Montalbano’s changing relationship with food in both its thematic and symbolical function over the course of the series, Eckert’s analysis reveals how Camilleri’s attitude toward certain crimes and political situations changes over the years. In “There’s a mobster in the kitchen: Cooking, eating, and complications of gender in The Godfather and Goodfellas,” Peter Naccarato studies representations of food and food-related practices in mafia movies and television shows. By examining scenes from The Godfather, Goodfellas, and specific episodes of The Sopranos, Naccarato considers what messages about gender and identity are communicated as Italian men in general—and Mafiosi in particular—move from the table into the kitchen, preparing the food that they ultimately consume. He argues that rather than reading such scenes as unrealistic, they communicate a perhaps unexpected reality within Italian and Italian-American cultures, namely that food play is central to male bonding. As such, representations that reflect shared participation in food production 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 8 02/11/2016 12:01 EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 9 reveal its role in creating and sustaining individual and group identities among these men. The implication of this assertion is that such representations of Italian-American men preparing food serve to disrupt normative assumptions about food, gender, and identity not only in Italian and Italian-American cultures, but in Western cultures more broadly. And in “In cibo veritas: Food preparation and consumption in Özpetek’s “queer” films, Zachary Nowak and Elgin K. Eckert analyze two of Ferzan Ozpetek’s most important and well-known films, 2000’s Le fati ignoranti (His Secret Life) and 2010’s Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons), both of which focus on homosexual relationships in contemporary Italy and use food as a non-verbal way of representing a number of important thematic aspects. Both films place significant emphasis on the preparation, serving, and consumption of food. In each of the many instances in which food takes center-stage (or is even marginally involved), it provides the backdrop for the creation or resolution of conflict. Eckert and Nowak discuss the symbolic meaning of Özpetek’s use of food and focus their analysis on how it is used to represent both characters and narratives. They analyze how Özpetek illustrates the relationships between Italians and their food, even while challenging traditional biological gender roles. The three chapters in Part III, Marketing, packaging, and advertising Italy, explore representations of Italian food in marketing, packaging, and advertising to understand their role in promoting particular images of Italian culture. In “Semiotics of sauce: Representing Italian/American identity through pasta sauces,” Maryann Tebben examines the naming of pasta sauces and the role of the marketing of this condiment in promoting specific Italian and ItalianAmerican identities. For example, the word “ragù” in Italian denotes a rich meat sauce tied to Bologna “la dotta e la grassa,” while the trademarked name “Ragú” for American spaghetti sauce calls to mind a simple, accessible, culturally innocuous, smooth tomato sauce that is nevertheless recognizably Italian. Pointing out that tomato sauce is hardly the most important sauce in Italy, Tebben argues that it emerged from the country’s fractured culinary landscape and it was used to represent Italian identity simply and directly in America. According to Tebben, differences in how pasta sauces are named and marketed in Italy and the United States illuminate how immigrant Italian food culture is represented in both countries. In “Producing consumers: Gendering Italy through food advertisements,” Diana Garvin offers a critical analysis of food advertisements from the popular cooking magazine La cucina italiana, arguing that they demonstrate how in the specific context of Italy’s postwar economic boom, advertisers invoked prescriptive models of gender through promotions for pantry staples such as rice, margarine, and pasta. The advertisements that Garvin studies indicate that the same food stuff will have a different biological effect depending on the consumer’s gender. Garvin argues that because these adverts portray food requirements (such as 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 9 02/11/2016 12:01 10 REPRESENTING ITALY THROUGH FOOD caloric content, taste, and nutritional value) as being fundamentally distinct for male and female bodies, they not only evoke pre-existing conceptions of gender division, but actually work to create new, biologically determined differentiations between men and women. And in “‘A kitchen with a view’: The modernization of gender roles in Italy through Barilla’s 1950s and 1960s advertising campaigns,” Antonella Valoroso analyses a number of advertising campaigns produced by the Barilla Company, focusing specifically on the ways in which these campaigns have accompanied, reflected, and even contributed to creating Italian society in the last sixty years. Through her analysis of the principle modalities and communication strategies utilized in these campaigns, Valoroso considers their role in both reinforcing traditional gender relations and modernizing women’s representations within Italian media and society. The three chapters in Part IV, Global representations of Italy, analyze representations of Italian food and foodways in a global context, from the United States to Australia and Israel. In doing so, they reveal how such representations contribute to global perspectives on Italy and Italian culture. In “Italianità in America: The cultural politics of representing ‘Authentic’ Italian cuisine in the US,” Ken Albala examines representations of Italy and Italian food across the U.S. culinary and cultural landscape in order to understand the changing ways Americans have viewed authentic Italian cuisine from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Albala traces this culinary history, noting significant shifts that he argues reflect not only generational changes among immigrant populations (the first generation holding on to foodways of their homeland, the second for the most part assimilating and the third desperately trying to hold onto their traditions), but also reveal dramatically changing attitudes toward Italy among all Americans. Albala analyses these shifting attitudes in relation to larger political and social movements, economic changes, and other historical forces including agriculture and patterns of import. He concludes that the representations of Italian food that influence how Americans conceive of it are a product not only of changing culinary fashions but also of larger socio-economic forces. In “Leggo’s not-soautentico: Invention and representation in twentieth century Italo-Australian foodways,” Rachel Ankeny and Tania Cammarano offer a case study of Leggo’s tomato products, an Anglo-invented Australian product line that was transformed into a quintessentially Italo-Australian one through a series of marketing and advertising campaigns that established its authenticity. According to Ankeny and Cammarano, this analysis supports their assertion that shifting perceptions of Italy, Italian identity, and Italian food in Australia were caused in large part by large-scale industrialization of Australia’s food supply and concurrent cultural shifts throughout the twentieth century that led to the rise in popularity of what is now termed “Italo-Australian” cuisine. 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 10 02/11/2016 12:01 EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 11 And in “Italian food in Israel: Representing an imagined Mediterranean,” Nir Avieli interrogates the popularity of Italian food in Israel, which is second only to the so-called “oriental cuisine” (the food of Jews from Moslem countries, which is very similar to Arab and Palestinian fare). Avieli argues that the preference for southern Italian food is due in part to what it represents to Israeli Jews, namely a way to feel embedded in the Mediterranean region while ignoring the dispute with neighboring Arabs, whose foodways are often uncomfortably similar. He concludes that Italian cuisine is so popular in Israel precisely because it has very little to do with Jewish or Palestinian culinary traditions and histories, and therefore represents an extremely convenient means for a flawless national imagination—a sort of supranational pan-(western) Mediterranean identity— that bypasses conflicts and complications. And in the Afterword, “Italy represented”, we tie together the main themes that have run through the chapters and offer some conclusions about the ongoing role of representations of food and foodways in creating and recreating visions of Italy and Italian culture both domestically and globally. Notes 1 2 Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xx. Another cognate is σοφία, Greek sophia, “wisdom.” All three words share the Indo-European root *sap-. For a review of the reconstructed root and a variety of other cognates, see Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd edn, vol. 1 (Bern: Francke, 1989), 880. 3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1957 [1946]). 4 Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Tonio Hölscher and Jan Assmann (eds), Kultur und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 15. 5 Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 3–4. 6 Birgit Neumann, “The Literary Representation of Memory,” in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 333. 7 While there was a 63 percent increase in digital book exports from the U.S. alone in 2013 (the last year for which data is available in early 2016), print publishing is still an enormous business. China, the U.S., and the U.K. in 2013 published just short of a million new titles or new editions. For a summary of the continuing expansion in the global book market, see “Annual Report” (International Publishers Association, October 2013), 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 11 02/11/2016 12:01 REPRESENTING ITALY THROUGH FOOD 12 http://www.internationalpublishers.org/images/reports/2014/IPA-annualreport-2014.pdf (accessed October 12, 2016). World production of movies has grown enormously, from 4,642 films produced in 2005 to 7,610 films in 2013. This is a 63.9 percent growth rate. It’s also interesting to note that the percentage of films made by the top five producers has dropped steadily in that time from 60.5 to 52 percent. See Luis A. Albornoz, Diversity and the Film Industry: An Analysis of the 2014 UIS Survey on Feature Film Statistics. Information Paper No. 29 (Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2016), http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Pages/DocumentMorePage.aspx?docIdVa lue=943&docIdFld=ID&SPSLanguage=EN. 8 The enormous number of hand-held devices today means that, according to a recent marketing report, there are over thirty billion “mobile moments” a day when a person interacts with their smartphone. The potential for viewing representations—films, ads, or other still images, not to mention text—is clearly enormous. See Jennifer Wise et al., “Vendor Landscape: Mobile Engagement Automation Solutions” (Forester Research Inc., November 5, 2015), https://www.forrester.com/ report/Vendor+Landscape+Mobile+Engagement+Automation+Solutions//E-RES125304 (accessed October 12, 2016). 9 Isabelle de Solier, Food and the Self: Consumption, Production and Material Culture (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 3. See also Signe Rousseau, Food Media: Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). 10 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. J. M. Rigg, vol. 2 (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903), 187. 11 Several of the authors of chapters in this book highlight this argument, first advanced by Italian food historians Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari. See their introduction in Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History, trans. Aine O’Healy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 12 John Dickie, Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food (New York: Free Press, 2008), 146, 146–7. 13 For more on British impressions of Italian food, see Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 75–80, as well as Dickie, Delizia!, 146–7. 14 Fabio Parasecoli, Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 8. 15 Ibid., 8–9. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Ibid., 12. 18 As Luigi Barzini notes, “In the 1950s the tourists numbered eight, ten, twelve million yearly. A little later, only yesterday, they were fifteen, seventeen, nineteen million. They have now passed the twenty million mark, a proportion of more than one tourist to every two and a half Italians, and the total is still growing. It appears that, if circumstances remain favourable, the travellers will reach thirty million within a decade, and will eventually match and even surpass the number of native inhabitants in the 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 12 02/11/2016 12:01 EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 13 peninsula.” Luigi Barzini, The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and Morals (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 1. 19 Simone Cinotto, The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 2. 20 Ibid., 8. 21 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Social historians, of course, have been reading archives “back against the grain” for decades in an effort to recuperate the lives of common people, but historians in general still seem hesitant to problematize the social construction of archives, and its effects on the narratives that can be written from those records. An exception is Kirsten Weld, who has called for historians to adopt “archival thinking” and move the archives from the footnotes into the body of historical narratives, making them objects of analysis, not simply containers for sources. See her Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 13. For an archivist’s view of the problem, see Terry Cook, “The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,” The American Archivist 74 (2) (October 1, 2011): 600–32. 22 See bia.medici.org for this remarkable collection. It’s important to note that digital collections share many of the same subjectivities as brick and mortar archives: what has been preserved is what those in power thought important, and even what is noted in a document synopsis is subjective to a certain degree. 23 The obvious exception to this is when elites want to punish subalterns for heterodox thought, and subject them to judicial scrutiny. For a classic account, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 24 An objection could be raised to couscous being an Italian dish. Pellegrino Artusi, widely considered the founder of a unified Italian cuisine, listed cuscussù in his famous cookbook, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. Whether couscous—eaten every day by hundreds of thousands of people in Italy—or kebabs or spring rolls can truly be considered ‘Italian food’ is part of a fierce political debate examined by Aliza Wong in this volume. 25 Gaetano Murano, “Pericolo Italian Sounding,” L’Impresa 7/8 (2011): 51–3. See also Amy Riolo and Luigi Diotauiti, “Knocking Off Made In Italy,” Ambassado (Fall 2014): 24–9. 9781474280419_txt_print.indd 13 02/11/2016 12:01