This is a draft of my review of Diana Garvin’s book, Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work, published on the journal MLN.
Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves has marked world cinema with its raw representations of post-World War II poverty in Italy. Faithful to its neorealist tenets, the filmmaker used food, from homemade frittata sandwiches to mozzarella in carrozza in a restaurant, to provide a political commentary on the hopes and despairs working class Italians were experiencing after the end of fascism. While food is at the fore of the narration, the images of domestic kitchens in the background also provide viewers with plenty of information about the material lives of the protagonists, their poverty, and their will to survive. Maybe less memorable than, say, the famous scene in the Roman trattoria where father and son share a meal to the notes of the song Tammurriata Nera, stoves, pans, and cooling utensils offer a more granular and lifelike sense of what everyday reality was like at the time. Fascism had fallen, but the material world it had built for Italians was all they had. Thirty years later, the 1977 A Special Day by Ettore Scola brought us back to that reality: more precisely, to the apartments in the housing projects built by Mussolini in many large Italian cities (in that specific case, Rome). While our attention is focused on the interaction between Sofia Loren’ housewife and a gay neighbor played by Marcello Mastroianni, we are also shown interiors where they interact with objects, fixtures, and infrastructure that organize the fabric of their experiences. While the rest of the neighborhood is away at a state parade, the two characters can finally fully live and express themselves in the environment where, otherwise, one would be ignored and the other ostracized.
Diana Garvin’s Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work reminded me of those movies, as they all draw our attention to kitchens as places of not only toil and duty, but also of negotiation with the powers that be (from the head of the family to the government) and at times of direct resistance. And like the movies, Gavin’s work makes clear that we cannot fully understand the feelings, the stories, and the struggles that took place in those kitchen and other locations of food-related activities without understanding their physical, tangible, tactile features. Throughout Gavin’s research, noticeable consideration is dedicated to the material world that supported culinary practices and the discursive elements that both surrounded and shaped them.
Gavin constantly reminds us that the protagonists of these dynamics were women, even when they were barely acknowledged or made nearly invisible. As she aptly quips, “they are actors, interpreters, and critics: they accept, modify, and reject.” And she adds: “Buildings, texts, and objects do not exist in a vacuum: they are processes of signification materialized by women’s use of them… The power of the individual may not be equal to that of the state, but even small choices create moments of independence. Even the smallest assertion of will constitute a form of power” (5). This observation echoes Michel De Certeau’s reflection on the tactics of the seemingly powerless to resist the strategies of those who control the rule of the game. These words also spell out one of the main themes in the book. Looking at a totalitarian regime that aimed at controlling every aspect of its citizens’ lives, literally from birth to death, the idea of resistance is instrumental in exploring how women dealt with propaganda and the more assertive attempts at controlling the way they produced food, they fed their family, they breastfed their children, or even related to food as an expression of the nation and a tool to strengthen it against its enemies.
In the post-conclusion concise “Notes to Future Researchers” (which I recommend to anybody investigating the history of Italian culture’s sensory and tangible aspects), Gavin invites us to consider to “the power of the small” (221). She states: “To get at the feel of women’s experiences of Fascism, we need to rummage through the dented cheese graters, crumpled chocolate wrappers, and scratched matchbooks that they touched every day… Propaganda travels not through textual dictates but through material details. These meanings are so subtle, yet so ubiquitous, that even the designers themselves may be unaware of their presence” (223).
Garvin’s approach builds on theoretical insights and methodologies from gender studies, food studies, and material culture studies. Each of the book’s five chapter focuses on specific aspects of the topic: in the first chapter, the Battle for Grain and the role played by women’s associations that threaded the party line offers a counterpoint to female agricultural workers in the rice field that instead organized themselves as laborers and intentionally embraced socialist ideas, the protagonists of the second chapter. While the first two chapters are centered on working-class women, the third and the fourth scrutinize the activities of middle- and upper-class women with more financial means and cultural capital and how they achieved professional success by bargaining more or less comfortably with the fascist authorities. The most interesting, and probably less studied, among them is Luisa Spagnoli, founder of the Perugina chocolate factory and paternalistic industrialist that nevertheless was concerned with her female employees’ welfare, from canteens to breastfeeding rooms. Gavin also invites us to look closely at the work of food writers and cookbook authors such as Lidia Morelli, Petronilla (pen name of Amalia Moretti Foggia), and Ada Boni, whose Talismano della Felicità, often offered as a gift for weddings, helped honing the cooking skills of generations of brides.
While the whole book is very engaging and well written, the fifth chapter, “Model Fascist Kitchen,” may be the most original in terms of its contribution to the study of Italian foodways during fascism. Through her examination of architectural drawings, interior design magazines, and urban design, Gavin shows us how the policies of autarchy and self-reliance, a necessity for the Fascist government after the sanctions imposed on Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, was interwoven with preexistent and long-terms goals of the regime. In particular, hygiene, education, and the rationality of science, which were supposed to guide nutrition and health for both individuals and the body politics, reveal their connection with the ideals of modernity and the acceleration of daily life that dominated Fascism at its beginnings, aptly translated in the Futurist musings on gastronomy.
Describing kitchen floor plans as an unspoken but effective nudge to make women more effective in their daily chores, Gavin notes: “People (the cook), objects (food, pots, pans, mops, and brooms), and energy (sunlight, air, water, gas) moved through this space. And matter transformed as well: from raw to cooked and from cooked to waste” (180). This, however, was not just a world of drudge: it offers glimpses of the bright future that Fascism kept on promising even when events seemed to suggest otherwise. “Whereas alimentary autarky evoked the dreary cuisine of the poor, rationalist kitchen work was aspirational” (197). Newfangled electric gadgets, all made in Italy, also leveraged the expanding electric grid to bring domestic life into a (literally) brighter future. The apologist of Fascist culture in the design world promoted efficiency to limit the waste of time, which in turn reflected the regime’s emphasis on thrift to reduce food waste. Architectural features, interior design, and furniture were meant to facilitate a flow of movement that would advance such goals. Moreover, the attempts at imposing rationality onto lived spaces worked in a modular fashion and in expanding scales to regulate “the kitchen-apartment relationship, the apartment-neighborhood relationship and the neighborhood-city relationship (191). What women did in their home kitchen was relevant to usher the changes necessary to change the nation for the better.
While Gavin limits her analysis to Fascism, with its particular structures, ideologies, and material world, her constant emphasis on biopolitics and banal nationalism in everyday life reminds us to what extent food is always and inherently political, whether we realize it or not.