Italian pasta has suddenly become very hot in Polish politics (ok, terrible pun, but bear with me…). On Wednesday October 3^rd, Janusz Kowalski, the deputy minister for Agriculture and Rural Development of Poland, posted an infographic on his X account in which he extolled the virtues of Polish pasta (makaron, in Polish), which can be expected from somebody whose job is to support national agricultural production. However, he also argued that it is better than Italian pasta. The post read: “Buy Polish products from Polish processors (sic). Thanks to this, you support Polish farmers. See why Polish pasta made from Polish eggs and Polish flour is definitely better than Italian pasta. If you agree with this, please share.”

Attached was an infographics that supposedly analyzed and compared various aspects of the two products. While Polish makaron is made of Polish soft wheat, Italian pasta is made of durum wheat. The former contains eggs (Polish of course), the latter doesn’t. While Polish makaron is “rolled traditionally”, Italian pasta is “pressed,” possibly meaning industrially extruded. For these reasons, Italian pasta takes a long time to cook and remains hard. However, that is OK with Italians, who, we are told, “choose hard pasta from durum flour” and “mainly use pasta as a second course,” which in Poland indicates the main course following a first course of soup. Poles, instead, “love makaron that grows while cooking and is tender and elastic.” Moreover, “Poles mainly consume makaron for soups.”

The insistence in calling also Italian pasta “makaron” is probably explained by the strategy of comparing two products that growing numbers of Poles now consider quite different, just like the very popular Japanese ramen are also different (the meme right below circulating on Internet, shows Japanese pasta beating both  the Polish and the Italian ones).

The infographic shines for its factual inaccuracies: plenty of Italian pasta is made with soft wheat, and plenty of Italian pasta contains eggs (tagliatelle, anyone?). Nor does the politician seem aware that the Polish word makaron comes from the Italian maccheroni (maccaroni, in some dialects), revealing its foreign origin. Moreover, pasta would be largely considered a primo (first course, a category that also includes soups that follows an appetizer (antipasto) and precedes a secondo (secondo or main course). These distinctions are quite evident to middle class, often urban and cosmopolitan Poles that patronize the numerous Italian restaurants dotting the Polish culinary landscape. The comments to the post overwhelmingly made fun of its content and its author. Old children book illustrations surfaced from the past that could possibly explain the politician’s appreciation for soft pasta that “grows.”

Kowalski mostly let the comments slide, with a few exceptions. When Michał Płociński of the news organization Rzeczpospolita pointed to the denseness of the infographic, the deputy minister shot back: “So I understand that supporting the Polish economy is a source of ridicule for you?” It is likely that Kowalski hoped its audience would be mostly constituted by people who are not frequently exposed to foreign foods and who, in fact, may consider them an expression of elitism that goes together with the lack of respect for the “real” Polish culture caused by negative Western influences.

It is not surprising that on the eve of important elections politicians leverage all sorts of hot-button issues to mobilize their potential voters. Food, with its emotional value and its role in defining individual and communal identity, is not spared from these dynamics. Kowalski’s X post seems to be a good example of what can be defined gastronationalism, the use of a food to promote national identity at the expense of the food of other countries. As food is the third most important import from Italy, behind metals and machineries, it makes sense for the deputy minister to go after such a popular product. So far, the Italian government has not reacted; it is unclear whether they are aware of it at all, or Kowalsi’s declaration is too hilarious to be taken seriously, or the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni does not want to get in a kerfuffle with a government led by a party with which she shares many political perspectives. On other news, Poland has become the world’s leading exporter of wafers and waffles, with a 15% of the global market and positioning itself ahead of Italy (12.8%), Canada (9.3%) and Germany (9.2%).

This is not just gastronationalism. Kowalski’s post also reveal a good dose of what I describe as gastronativism, the use of food as an ideological tool to establish “us” vs “them” oppositions. As Poland will go to the polls on October 15 to elect its new parliament, the public debate is becoming increasingly heated, with the governing conservative coalition led by the PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość , Law and Justice) party trying to stay in power and the oppositions striving to end the PiS rule that started back in 2015. Janusz Kowalski belongs to the Suweranna Polska party, an allied of PiS in the current government. Moreover, this last incident builds on precedents. The government has sided with local farmers to stop the transit on Ukrainian wheat through Polish territory, a measure that has been adopted to support Ukraine export its crops while Russia threatens the ports in the Black Sea. However, it turns out that great quantities of the commodity do not only pass through Poland, but actually are sold within the country, depressing the price of local wheat. Farmers have organized numerous protests and the government, whose base is strongly rural, has sided with them to the point of causing frictions within the European Union. Unsurprisingly, Poland’s position on the matter has been supported by Hungary, led by the populist and anti-EU Viktor Orban, and by Slovakia, where a populist pro-Russian politician came out top in the recent elections. In the past few days, an agreement about Ukrainian wheat has been reached, but the issue has become a major topic in the weeks preceding the elections. Can’t wait to see if anybody will show up on Polish public TV (the voice of the government) eating makaron. In a soup, of course.