What is Italian cuisine? What kind of national identity does it reflect, considering that Italians are famously attached to their local and regional culinary traditions? These are the central questions that food historian Massimo Montanari and comparative law professor Pier Luigi Petrillo address in their book Tutti a tavola: Perché la cucina italiana è un patrimonio dell’umanità (Everybody come to the table: Why Italian cuisine is patrimony of humanity). The two authors wonder: “How can a culinary tradition be resistant to any rule or codification, essentially anarchic, and yet enjoy a solid and recognizable status? How can a culture be founded on multiculturalism? Might this not be a good reason to consider Italian cuisine a “heritage of humanity”?
The book is a short and very enjoyable read (only in Italian, for now), but an important one, as Montanari and Petrillo are among the scholars behind the candidacy for the inclusion of Italian cuisine in the UNESCO Representative List for Intangible Cultural Heritage, under the title “Italian cooking, between sustainability and biocultural diversity” (La cucina italiana tra sostenibilità e diversità bioculturale).
According to the authors, the focus of the candidacy is the “everyday dimension” of Italian cuisine, “its marking every moment and every aspect of any Italian person’s life, wherever they may be” (105). This characteristic differentiates it from other cuisines already in the UNESCO list, which are centered instead on specific dishes, preparations, ingredients, special occasions and festivities. This normalcy makes Italian food accessible and easily understandable, as its success around the world demonstrates. Despite its variety, which the authors compare to a mosaic, “it includes and attributes value to all the differences, tied to sentiments and essential ideas that are widespread… It tells the stories and the values on one’s community through distinctive tastes.”
Montanari and Petrillo point to diversity, freedom, and inclusion as foundations: Italian food is the result of historical processes in which people of different backgrounds have endlessly mixed, reinvented, and reinterpreted recipes, establishing traditions that are not set in stone but still evolving and shifting. Italian cuisine does not need any strict codification but grows out of a strong sense of identity that, the authors underline, is the “opposite of chauvinism, souverainism, and gastronomic fundamentalism” (106). This is an important message right when food is often used to distinguish and separate “us” from “them” (whoever the “us” and “them” in question maybe be), generating forms of political exploitation that I have defined as “gastronativism.”
The UNESCO candidacy – supported by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry and the Ministry of Culture– was launched by the Italian Academy of Cuisine, a cultural institution of the Italian Republic, founded in 1953 and which today boasts 220 branches in Italy, over 80 abroad and more than 7,500 associated academics; the Casa Artusi Foundation, launched in 2007 to promote Italian cuisine; and Cucina Italiana, the oldest food magazine in Italy, founded in 1929. The choice of the word “cooking” to translate the Italian word cucina, which also means “cuisine,” in the UNESCO dossier points to the focus on kitchen practices rather than a culinary canon.
As the website of the Italian Consulate in Barcelona explains, “Italian cuisine is not just food or a simple recipe book, but also a set of social practices, habits and gestures that lead to considering the preparation and consumption of a meal as a moment of sharing and meeting. It is the collective ritual of a people who conceive food as a cultural element of identity. In Italy, cooking is a way of taking care of family, friends and customers. It is a mosaic of many local skills, an expression of creativity and knowledge that becomes tradition and is passed down between generations. It is also a form of protection of biodiversity, based on not wasting anything, on the reuse of leftover food and on seasonal products from various territories”. Other Italian embassies and consulates published similar texts in support of the UNESCO candidature, almost verbatim, which suggests a shared language coming from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome.
These texts point to the rootedness of the culinary practice in social networks and dynamics: family, friends, sharing, meeting, collective rituals, intergenerational transmission of knowledge built around an element that contributes to the lived experience of the Italian identity. As such, Italian cuisine can be convincingly considered as heritage, predicated on all stakeholder’s creativity (which is meant to dispel the risk of musealization) and on diversity, “a mosaic of many local skills,” “biodiversity,” and the “products from various territories,” which in their seasonality ensure a sustainability that is also enhanced by the traditional opposition to food waste– a core feature of the culinary practices of all Italians. After all, creativity around leftovers already inspired L’arte di utilizzare gli avanzi della mensa (The art of using the leftovers from the table) by the writer Olindo Guerrini, posthumously published in 1918, which reflected the realities of World War I and the food scarcity that accompanied it
However, the reference to the reuse of leftovers in the candidature is more an invitation (one could even say wishful thinking) than an observation of current eating habits. In fact, Italian society has fully embraced consumerism and the waste that comes with it. It is hard to avoid nostalgic tones when referring to practices that many Italians still recognize as traditional and “theirs” but that they may not practice at the same level – and with the same frequency – that their parents or grandparents did. Italian cuisine is alive and well, but it still may need some safeguarding to ensure a thriving future.