Central to citizens’ physical survival and social identity, food can play a central in role in politics, the organized effort to define, manage, and determine goals for communities at all scales. Ingredient, dishes, and eating customs may end up becoming tools – or weapons – to assess the past, negotiate the present, and imagine the future. Inevitably, things can easily get ugly… Are we witnessing the raise of gastropopulism?
What’s the political significance of food? Can dishes or ingredients be immediately identified with specific ideological positions? Can food be leftist or rightist, progressive or conservative, nativist or globalist? Are there particular ways of producing, cooking, or eating that can be recognized as direct expressions of any political formation?
These are some of the questions discussed at the Political Conference organized by the Department of History, Cultures, and Civilizations of Bologna University and the Gramsci Foundation Emilia Romagna. Scholars from countries as diverse as Canada, Argentina, Portugal and Poland presented research ranging from the middle ages to current events. The common theme was the myriad ways food becomes an expression of political tensions, an arena for ideological negotiations, a propaganda device, or a tool that governments can deploy to measure, control, support, or punish whole populations.
Food constantly acquires political meaning, if by that we refer to politics in its etymological sense: the affairs of the polis, the city in Classical Greece and, later, the body politic in general, whatever its scale and its extension may be. From this point of view, politics is the attempt at managing such community, assessing the past, negotiating the present, and imagining the future. Political practices are often torn between compromise and maximalism, reality and ideals, necessity and values. It is inevitable that food gets entangled in these dynamics.
Fettuccine verdi with prosciutto ragu in Bologna
Some words kept on recurring during the conference: localism, identity, tradition, territory. Eerily, we soon realized that the same set of ideas – or, better, ideals – surfaced in cases of both progressive and conservative policies. Illustrating what she described as gastropopulism, Ilaria Porciani showed contemporary posters from England, Italy, and Germany, where far-right or xenophobic political groups used food as a call to defend one’s cultural identity and traditions, perceived as attacked by external forces ranging from financial elites to migrants and corrupting elements like homosexuality, relativism, or political correctness. The need to defend local communities and the territories they occupy takes the form of virulent nationalisms that perceive any attempt to openness as a threat. I discussed the case of Poland (link to Bialystock). Other participants examined similar occurrences in Soviet Cold War communication and in World War I posters from the US, Germany, and Italy.
However, as I discussed back in 2003 in an article on the Gastronomica journal that assessed the raise of Slow Food and progressive food media in Italy at the end of last century, localism, identity, tradition, and territory are not necessarily conservative rally cries. For instance, they are activated in an international organization like Slow Food that values inclusions and strives for a clean, just, and enjoyable food system, open to all. In a recent blog post I reflected on how food is able to condense symbolic networks that connect heterogeneous elements, which, in their political neutrality, could be inserted into all kinds of discourses and generate very diverse meaning.
For instance, in the late 1980s culinary tradition entered the leftist discourse in Italy through its connections with material culture, territory, and human time, as opposed to the obsessive rhythm of the modern capitalist economy that deprives us of our leisure time. At times this approach can generate expressions of Culinary Luddism, whose goal would be, according to Rachel Laudan, “to turn back the flood tide of industrialized food in the First World, and to prevent such foods from engulfing traditional ethnic foods elsewhere.” In a progressive framework, the manual skills and know-how of food producers, as well as their ties with a historically determined material culture, can be connected to the concept of use-value and the emphasis on labor. Labor cannot, however, be isolated from exchange-values: a local product exists as such only when it leaves its territory and is brought to different places, i.e., when it enters the market. Thus identity, once again, is neither fixed nor definitive.
Tomatoes with mozzarella and olives
Localism, tradition, identity, and territory reveal their nature of “floating signifiers:” while in a progressive context they can contribute to multiculturalism and openness to difference, they also risk to also turn into trademarks of conservative projects. In fact, it would seem that in recent years progressive politics have abandoned these concepts, maybe because of their fraught pedigree, allowing conservative thinkers and demagogues to leverage and – to a certain extent – own them. They have become calls to arms for nativist movements from Brazil to the Philippines, from India to Hungary. These movements often generate virulent nationalist governments that often adopt policies inspired less by the need for social and economic change than by cultural wars, at time with disastrous consequences precisely on those who support these movements.
It is not surprising that those who feel left out from the advantages of these transformation resent those privileged, networked elites that instead have been able to thrive in the new condition through social connections, education, and access to financial opportunities. However, this resentment more often expresses itself in attacks against the weakest, the victims that can be further victimized when they try to move elsewhere. The focus on “us” and the fear of the different and other can be interpreted as an understandable reaction to modes of globalization that have been dominated since the 1980s by neoliberal policies. They include the dismantling of government instruments to control their own imports and exports, the expansion of free trade and production delocalization that have created new armies of exploited labor, financial deregulation, and privatizations that have worsened social and economic inequalities while increasing a widespread sense of crisis and insecurity about the future.
Homemade cannelloni
It is not surprising that the concept of sovereignty has now become the object of very different uses and interpretations. In the case of “food sovereignty,” as defined in the 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, the word refers to “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers and users.” This is how the concept is applied, for instance, by the agrarian movement Via Campesina which, not so paradoxically, operate globally, providing a forum for local organizations to meet and cooperate.
At the same time, sovranism is a neologism that is now often used in Europe to refer to those movements that support the end of international relations as we know them, a greater focus on the interests of single state-nations over the possibility of cooperation, and the desire to shift towards mechanisms of political life that reassure populations about who they are and their role in the world. Brexit is the perfect exemplification of such trends. he centrality of auto-determination and autonomy from supranational powers can easily absorbed in opposite narratives. To support one or the other position, the myth of the origins of culinary cultures quite frequently becomes particularly relevant, providing a sense of rootedness and embeddedness. Nevertheless, as food historian Massimo Montanari states in his new book Il mito delle origini: breve storia degli spaghetti al pomodoro (The myth of the origins: a short history of spaghetti with tomato sauce), origins are far from being a precise and identifiable point in the past that explains everything. Identities derive instead from historical processes and ongoing shifts, through encounters and clashes that both serendipitous and fateful.
Tables unite and divide. We can only hope progressive forces around the world will figure out ways to leverage identities, traditions, and origins in projects that aim to usher modes of globalization in which wealth and wellbeing are not exclusively enjoyed by few. Food could definitely provide a good starting point.