“YES TO POLENTA, NO TO COUSCOUS!: Constructed Identities and Contested Boundaries Between Local and Global in Northern Italy‟s Gastronomic Landscape” Luke McKinley Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies Departmental Honors Thesis Spring 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.........................................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: The Literature ............................................................................................................................8 A Theoretical Framework of Culinary Anthropology.....................................................................8 The Slow Food Movement ...............................................................................................................14 The Lega Nord....................................................................................................................................23 Immigration Literature.......................................................................................................................30 Research Methodology.......................................................................................................................38 Chapter Two: A Local Culinary Identity.......................................................................................................41 The Slow Food Headquarters...........................................................................................................42 Slow Food Editore..............................................................................................................................45 The University of Gastronomic Sciences........................................................................................49 Slow Food Manifestations in the Culinary Everyday....................................................................51 Tradition at La Cascata.......................................................................................................................53 Culinary Ambivalence: Global Incursions into the Local in the Langhe...................................59 Lega Nord Presence in the Slow Food Sphere...............................................................................63 Section Conclusion.............................................................................................................................66 Chapter Three: A Legacy of Exclusion.........................................................................................................67 A Conversation on the Train.............................................................................................................68 The Legacy of Place-Based Identity Making...................................................................................69 Porous Boundaries..............................................................................................................................74 Section Conclusion.............................................................................................................................75 Chapter Four: The Globalized Underneath..................................................................................................77 Il Mondo in Una Piazza/The World in a Square...............................................................................78 Kebab Shops: Culinary (Con)fusion.................................................................................................84 Co-Ethnic Catering and a Shakedown at the Asia-Africa Store..................................................88 More Lega Nord Posters: A Backdrop of Exclusion....................................................................91 From Porta Palazzo to Eataly...........................................................................................................93 Section Conclusion.............................................................................................................................97 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................................98 Bibliography.....................................................................................................................................................103 INTRODUCTION he cherry tomatoes fell from my soiled hands and landed with a soft thud into the crate T beside me. Like most mornings, when the late-August sun was well on its determined march across the blue sky, I squatted amid the vegetable plants in the dry earth of the Langhe and harvested produce. I stood up to stretch my legs and looked around. The sun began to paint golden- green swathes upon the surrounding hills in Piedmont, Italy, their rolling contours striped with vineyards and brushed with hazelnut groves. In my more immediate vicinity, a great variety of plants bore fruits and vegetables from the fertile soil. Green bean stalks snaked their way up a wire lattice. Bell peppers, sweet and colorful, abounded in a row that adjoined their spicier cousins. Perfume from several rows of basil filled the air when the breeze stirred the leaves. A massive carpet of broad leaves, rough vines, and emergent blossoms veiled bright green zucchini. Bulbous trombetta squash, shaped like French horns, sat several paces away from the deep purple bulbs of eggplants. Everywhere on this small farm in Northern Italy, beautiful foodstuffs emerged from the earth. I carried my crate of ciliegine tomatoes up the hill to the farmhouse, where “Sarbre”1 stirred a massive stockpot full of the bright red little gems on the stove. The simmering tomatoes were central in many of the traditional Piedmontese dishes she cooked: sauces that adorned feathery strands of handmade tagliatelle pasta or squished in between layers of lasagna or mixed with red wine to braise a whole rabbit. The ingredients she used to create her traditional Northern Italian recipes 1 All names of my interlocutors have been changed in this thesis. were borne from the earth just a tomato‟s throw from her kitchen. It was in this gastronomic milieu, on an organic farm in the province of Cuneo, that I lived and worked for a month as I gathered ethnographic data about broader tensions in the region. In addition to its focus on food and foodways2 in the area, this thesis is about immigration in Italy. From a historical standpoint, the country has recently experienced a fundamental transformation in population dynamics. Long a country that exported its citizens across the world, especially to the Western Hemisphere, Italy has become a country of large-scale immigration since the 1970s. The presence of foreign immigrants from across the globe has materialized as a problematic issue in Italy‟s sociopolitical landscape. As a general trend, foreign immigrants who arrive in Italy both legally and illegally are greeted by forces of economic, political, and sociocultural exclusion. As in other Western European countries, these new hostilities in an increasingly globalized Italy have drawn attention from scholars in a range of disciplines. I fell into this boiling stew of immigration tensions in the summer of 2009, armed with theories of culinary anthropology and migration and in search of how I could understand the situation from a gastronomic perspective. I was inspired by ways in which notions of food, identity, and locality intersected to exclude immigrants. At a 2002 anti-immigration rally, for example, one protestor‟s sign read, “YES TO POLENTA, NO TO COUSCOUS!” in order to simultaneously promote local food traditions and disparage immigrants. Just last year in the city of Lucca, the municipal government banned any new ethnic restaurants from opening in the city center. La Stampa, a daily newspaper published in Turin, declared the decree akin to “a new Lombard Crusade against the Saracens.”3 Traditional cuisine, it seemed, was a marker of a “pure” Italian identity rooted 2 Foodways are defined as the cultural practices relating to the production and consumption of food. 3 Owen, Richard. “Italy Bans Kebabs and Foreign Food from Cities.” The Times Online. (January 31, 2009). “Italy Bans Kebabs and Foreign Food from Cities.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article5622156.ece [accessed April 10, 2009] in the local landscape, and “authentic” foodways have had tremendous implications in the processes of boundary-making that have cordoned off foreign immigrants as unequivocally “other.” In this work, I question why and in which ways food has manifested as such a powerful articulation of a local, “authentic” identity in Italy vis-à-vis the perception of an immigrant invasion. But as I problematize this culturally-constructed identity, I move beyond a simple reification of “the local” to question the very integrity of this construction itself and the boundaries that separate it from immigrant otherness. Like Sarbre‟s cooking, this project combines a number of central ingredients. To hold them together, I specifically limit my geographic scope to Northern Italy, despite the fact that tensions in regard to immigration have surfaced in all parts of the country. In the uneven historical development of the Italian regional geography, the country‟s northern region is the nexus of a historical trajectory of migration. I purport that the current immigration tensions are part and parcel of a historically- rooted legacy of immigration