Food is a mirror. It reflects our values, our traditions, and the narratives we construct about ourselves and our society. I want to see myself reflected in my food, but I am struggling. I see only impersonal, heavily marketed items that I have no connection to. For 98 percent of the foods I buy, I know nothing about their origin or who produced them; there are no faces to my food. My only hope lies in the fact that change is possible—and inevitable. In an attempt to find my identity in my food, I ponder my home in the United States, my recent residence in Italy, and my vision for a future to which I can truly belong.
The problem: people are not part of the story
In the United States, it is difficult to see ourselves in our food on average. This is because large middle spaces, the huge gaps between food producer and consumer, are creating problems that cause much of our food to be of poor quality, unfair, and unsustainable. These middle spaces leave little room for people or transparency because the players who fill the space (like state actors and transnational corporations) have motives other than nourishing people (Clapp 6). Without a close link to the producer, consumers are left with little except the product. Why is this a problem? It is because people need their food to provide them with stories and a sense of belonging as much as they need sustenance. When we eat our industrially-farmed and processed foods, we know that something vital is lost and that something is not fair; “already today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten in the home goes to someone other than a farmer, which is to say, to industrial cooking and packaging and marketing” (Pollan 653). How can we possibly see a face in our food when that face is not even a part of the story?
Our food also lacks character because “identity only answers when identity is disturbed” (Fischler 288), and many of the foods in the US have had no widespread commotion or crisis. Plus, “identity does not exist without exchange...only when a product is known outside of its zone of production can it become an indicator of a particular identity (Montanari 163-4). Even though the US is known as a melting pot of cultures, people, and food, there are only a few distinctly “American” foods that are known well by most Americans, much less outside of the US. And most of those foods have some tie to immigrants, so they are not even purely American. As a result, it is difficult to craft a sense of “American” food identity.
The Legend of Italian Food
It is important to understand that it is possible to find identity in food. After all, food is laced with meaning, desire, and history—all important components of identity. The collective identity formed by Italian Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries is evidence of this. As recent immigrants to the US, Italian Americans affirmed their ethnicity by cooking and using food as part of their economy when mainstream American culture had nothing to do with the kitchen when it came to economy, culture, or leisure (Costantini 42). Partly from fear of assimilation and partly as good business, Italian-Americans created a new culture of cooking that lifted up Italian food and its use of good-quality ingredients and family-style meals. In Italy they were poor and ate basic staples, but in the US they had access to an increased variety of products like meat, sugar, and coffee that they could use in their modified dishes (Costantini 42, 46). They successfully created romanticized versions of both Italian food and Italy by marketing them to people of all kinds in the US. Even when industrial kitchens and prepackaged meals became popular, Italian-Americans successfully adapted to the change by further building up the myth of Italian food. Now, in our world that offers us hundreds of cooking shows, recipe websites, cookbooks, and celebrity chefs, Italian food has an outsized, timeless, and solid presence in the food world; as Dickie says, “Italian food has charisma” (9) —and an identity.
The success of this story is twofold: first, it shows that a newly planted community of people from all parts of Italy can come together and create a collective identity through food. Second, it shows that this powerful identity of Italian food has transcended time and space to reach a worldwide audience. Italian food has such a powerful identity because it is more than food: almost anyone can conjure up Italian images of convivial family dinners, talking with your hands, cooking with love, cypress trees, and Roman statues. Regardless of whether or not these things are true to Italian culture, is it spectacularly impressive that such an identity was created and can continue to evolve.
There is a reason that this identity exists. Most stereotypes generally come from truth, so in my three months of living in central Italy, I wanted to get a sense of that truth. I saw how tradition is at the forefront of everything Italians do, especially in family-run businesses that produce products like olive oil, wine, saffron, and truffles. Not only is quality highly valued in the eyes of both producer and consumer, but so are the faces behind those who products—Italians often know exactly where their oil and wine come from. The link between product and place is especially important, as it not only serves to strengthen the ties of belonging between food and people, but it also creates an identity and name for that product and those who produce it. Even when I went to the supermarket, most products I purchased advertised that they were 100% Italian. The pride of being Italian is in the grocery aisles, in the bars, and even in the law: strict quality-control certifications like DOC (Controlled Designation of Origin) and DOCG (Denomination of Controlled and Guaranteed Origin) put place-product links into writing and labels. The identity of a particular wine can be regulated, just as Italians seem to regulate their own sense of identity through tradition and stories.
Italy is a country that appears to have a deeply-embedded food culture. It even seems as if every part of life revolves around food; from a morning cappuccino to an evening aperitivo, life flows from sip to bite. But, how deeply do these roots run? The more I learn about Italian food history, the more I realize just how powerfully and quickly these food stories have taken hold. The narrative has been constructed to make us believe that this way of life stretches a long way back when in reality our notion of Italian food is a recent phenomenon. Until the 1960s, Italians ate very badly (Dickie 6), and as Marcella Hazan wrote in her book “The Classic Italian Cook Book” published in 1973, “the first useful thing to know about Italian cooking is that, as such, it actually doesn’t exist. The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of its regions, regions that until 1861 were separate, independent, and usually hostile states” (Sen). This is not the narrative that dominates in the pervasive rhetoric of tradition, tradition, tradition! Parasecoli writes the following:
Italians seem happy to play along with the apparently harmless myths and stereotypes about their food, partly out of sincere pride and attachment to their culinary customs, partly as a way to bask in the whole globe’s admiration for this particular aspect of their heritage and partly as good business (17).
While the regionality of food in Italy shines, the overarching identity of “Italian food” as a set of unified values is more prominent. The identity of Italian food, whether in Italy or abroad, has become a legend.
How to Tell (and Listen to) Stories
Food is beautiful because people express their identities through what they eat, how they eat, and why they eat what they eat. Food can unite people and strengthen a collective identity, but it can also be used to distance groups of people: we are the bread-eaters and they are the barbarians (Montanari 6-7). Throughout history, people have served up story after story to strengthen their identity and place in the world. Without tradition and stories, who are we? As long as you recognize them as partial myths, the stories serve a good purpose. But, there is an issue if we romanticize food cultures (like Italy’s) without acknowledging the less savory parts of history. Food history is often one of exploitation (Nowak, “Against Terroir” 100) and we should not omit the unpleasant (Nowak, “Italian Stuffed” 104) because it is convenient. In looking back at our roots, we should fill in our stories of the past to include a more holistic and inclusive perspective. While we cannot change our roots, we can try to tell the whole story while actively creating and living our nuanced, evolving identity today.
Today, in our culture of distraction, attentiveness is what matters most (Montanari 105). Let’s slow down a little and consider who we are and what we want to be remembered for. Since we tend to define ourselves in terms of consumption, let’s consume with care toward the planet and toward our bodies. Let’s try to see the people in our food, and let’s use food as a way to start talking about larger issues. We should promote the ideals of Slow Food (good, clean, and fair) because they stand up for the human dimensions that are being lost in our world of machinery and marketing. Change starts with people—it starts with you.
How To Find Yourself in Your Food
Commit to moderation: buy the things you feel good about.
Strive to buy local whenever possible: look for the farmer, look for the producer.
Lean into and revive the sensual aspects of food: let our physicality and sensations be our guide to more fully experiencing the world.
Let taste and nutrition decide what’s good to eat, not culinary mythology (Nowak, “Against Terroir 103).
Pay attention: use Slow Living and Italian pacing as a guide. Follow the seasons, find beauty in the small things, and slow down.
Use food as a vehicle for connection: who you eat with is as important as what you eat. Change only happens with dialogue and movement.
Use food as a disrupter and storyteller: identity is only created through commotion, and stories make people act.
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