Ope Pardon, No. 29: Cacio e Patrimony

One of my most cherished unpopular opinions is that the U.S. has an incredible cuisine. American food rules, and I am taking the U.S. in any “you can only eat food from three countries for the rest of your life” game.

Now, the pillar of anyone’s counter argument against American food is that the U.S. does not have any good food of its own invention. This is obviously false — how dare you erase the existence of soul food, Tex-Mex, certain casseroles and the entirety of the Thanksgiving menu not to mention the American art form of the dip — but even if it was true, I disagree with the premise that invention should be the bedrock of gastro-national affiliation.

Personally, I believe if the preparation of the dish originated or can only be found in that country, it counts as food “from” or “of” that country, even if its origins come from a different country.

We all consider pizza and pasta Italian food, despite the oft-repeated “well, actually” trivia that both were brought back from China by Marco Polo.

However, my logic also introduces and allows for the nuance that pizza and pasta may be Italian food but square pan pizza with carmelized cheese corners from Detroit and the breadsticks from Olive Garden are American food. (Italian-American, if we want to get into hyphenate identities, but ask any Italian and they will tell you Italian-Americans and their food aren’t Italian. More on this irony shortly!)

If it is prepared exactly the same way but better/worse than in the home country of origin, it still belongs to that cuisine. For example, when I get halfway decent mac and cheese in Paris, that mac is still American food because it’s prepared as it would be in the U.S., perhaps with the some creative liberties taken with respect to cheese.

On the other hand, the hate crime that is the French taco is French food because there is no other country in the world that has interpreted the word taco like that.

Somewhere in the middle for me is the French kebab. Sometimes called a Berliner kebab, it is theoretically a Turkish dish prepared in the style of Turkish immigrants in Germany, and it is incredibly popular in France.

(For Americans, the name can also be a bit confusing. What we call a kebab is an abbreviation of shish-kebab, shish denoting it is served on a skewer, whereas the French kebab is an abbreviation of doner kebab, where doner indicates it comes in a breaded vehicle.)

I cannot speak to whether the Berliner kebab you get in Paris resembles the doner kebab you can get in Berlin or in Istanbul — and for this reason, I will not go to bat for it being French food — however it is food that I can get here and I cannot get in the U.S. and one that I have come to strongly associate with French culture. TBD — unclassified for me.

Bref, if the food I am eating is any way specific to a country, no matter its origins, I consider it to be of that country.

Anyways! What was a half-baked justification for an ice-breaker question evolved into a full-fledged personal philosophy a couple weeks ago when my friend sent me an article about how “traditional Italian cuisine doesn’t exist.” (It is paywalled and in French here, but I found an English version that sometimes is, sometimes is not paywalled here.)

Now, first before I use this as a jumping off point for my own thing, let me be clear that I agree with the article’s broader point about the fallacy of “gastronationalism” and the hypocrisy in the abuse of (fabricated) food tradition for fascist ends. The author writes that “Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era” and that cannot be ignored. Much like with tradwifes and classical architecture enthusiasts, we must acknowledge that a lot of the time “tradition” is a smokescreen and a dog whistle.

That said… I still feel compelled to defend the Italian-ness of these famous Italian dishes!

The gist of the article, which relies heavily on an interview with an Italian Marxist academic named Alberto Grandi who seems rad and quite smart, no shade to Grandi, is that celebrated Italian food culture is actually a LIE and NOT ITALIAN AT ALL.

According to Grandi, after World War 2, but more specifically between 1958 and 63, Italians in Italy were in desperate need of an identity to forget their gnarly past so they consecrated certain foods to form foundational myths and traditions to build community around. Meanwhile, Italians immigrating to America also embraced these new myths of tradition to “give dignity to their modest origins.” Thus, certain foods eaten in Italy became traditional Italian cuisine and decades later, Italians losing their minds over recipe adjustments is its own genre of comedy.

In reality, according to Grandi, the Americans (and World War 2, and Americans in Italy because of World War 2) are to credit for most of what we think of as traditional Italian cuisine. Pizza only became widely accessible after Italian-American soldiers wondered where all the pizzerias were — assuming, given their prevalence in their Little Italy’s back home, they would be everywhere in Big Italy.

Similarly, the Italian food that went mainstream (cannoli, eggplant parmigiana) was largely Sicilian because Sicilians migrated the most to America. Carbonara was invented on a military base because the American military had the good pork and rich cream (the rest of Italy was too poor for that during the war). Panettone and tiramisu may be legit Italian inventions, but they were invented in the ‘60s and ‘80s so Grandi is remiss to call them pillars of tradition.

(My favorite gotcha-reveal in the article is that the preparation and recipe of Parmesan, as made in Parma, has evolved over time — as things do. However, the Italian immigrants who moved to Wisconsin (!!) did not get the memo, so the most “traditional” tasting Parmesan you can find is actually in Wisconsin. Midwest supremacy!!)

(Ironically, this article is huge for my case for American food given that it posits that most Italian food was invented by Americans but that would require redefining my terms of engagement and betraying my principles.)

Anyways, this is all fun trivia and nice to have in the arsenal should you find yourself in an argument with an Italian fascist, but as an argument, it also infuriates me a little because, well, who cares!! Let the Italians have pizzerias!! They do pizza so well!!

(The fascists care, and thus we must care too.)

But I honestly don’t care if Wisconsin Parmesan is more “Italian” than Parma Parmesan. By nature of their ingredients, preparation and/or the culture of dining and food appreciation around them, these things are Italian to me.

There is a parallel here, to immigration and assimilation — of course there is, otherwise the right wing would not have latched on to it so strongly — and just as the invention of tradition to exclude certain groups is fucked up, I also worry that the erasure of tradition throws the cultural identity baby out with the bathwater, if you will.

Declaring that no food (or no one) is Italian because Italian tradition doesn’t exist does eliminate that particular argument from those who would use it to discriminate and gate-keep, but it also erases access to that culture and identity from the people who have developed their own sense of what it means to be Italian and may feel shaped, made by and a part of that patrimony regardless of their origins.

Declaring that certain traditions aren’t meaningful because tradition as a concept is a myth ignores the fact that, as Grandi himself says, traditions are just innovations that were successful. So who decides when an innovation becomes a “real” tradition? If tiramisu was born in Italy in 1980 and has been Italian for 43 years, at what point does it become “traditionally” Italian?

It’s one thing when your case against recency is used to poke holes in fascist bullshit, quite another when it prevents the evolution of culture or access to that culture — which is going to exist whether you label it tradition or not.

Tradition is invented for a reason and the creation of community boundaries is not always bad. We have to let traditions form, even if their invention was in the recent past. We have to let people form communities, even if there is risk.

It seems both ineffective and petty to go scorched Earth on traditions like food, even when they are associated with the toxic terminology of the nation state. The goal, I would think, should not be to limit who or what can be seen as of or from somewhere, but to embrace how a particular place and its people can create something wonderfully, wholly their own no matter its origins.

That said, I would kindly ask the French to take a step back from innovating the hot dog.