Culinary muddles at UNESCO: Italian cuisine as intangible cultural heritage

Does Italian cuisine exist? Not according to Alberto Grandi, daring food historian and professor of economic history at the University of Parma. With much dedication, he has focused on myth demolition in the business, spraying traditional culinary targets with such works as Denominazione di Origine Inventata (Invented Designation of Origin: The Lies of Marketing on Typical Italian Products) and his DOI podcast begun at the insistence of his friend Daniele Soffiati.

A running theme in his work is a familiar one to anyone in the business of finding the purported lineage of a dish. Look more closely, and you find a dish of more recent invention, not ancient, ceremonial derivation. Grandi does take a leaf out of the work of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who was most alert to the point that seemingly ancient traditions were matters of more recent provenance inscribed and instituted by circumstance. (On this score, the edited collection by Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, covering such topics as the pageantry of British Monarchy, Colonial Africa and the mass production of tradition in Europe between 1870-1914 is saliently impressive.)

In 2019, Grandi was taken to task by the Italian ambassador to Turkey for mocking Italy's 800 protected designations linking food products to geographical areas. In 2023, he touched a nerve in telling the Financial Times that pasta alla carbonara was a World War Two invention aided by US Army provisions. Necessity is maternally inventive: poverty, desperation and availability are great spurs of fecund nature. Begone aesthetics and plate presentation: people have to eat and will make do with what they have.

Much in food is political. This is particularly so in Italy, when a politician such as agriculture minister Francesco Lollabrigida can abominate the "unacceptable" sale of bogus food products in the European Parliament supermarket or demand the establishment of a task force to police the quality standards of Italian restaurants served internationally. A corollary of this is seeing food as a racket, staffed by hagiographers rather than honest experts, paid to sustain myths rather than challenge them. The racket extends to international bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), whose designations should never go without a challenge. What is clear is that the officials of the body's Intergovernmental Committee did not have Grandi's prodding claims in mind when they added Italian cuisine to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Given that even individual dishes can be questioned regarding their sacred origins, this was bold if terribly misplaced.

The campaign for including Italian cuisine on the list began in earnest on March 23, 2023, when the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry and the Ministry of Culture committed to the mission in an almost military manner. Three groups added their voices to the chorus of promotion, leaving the impression of a coordinated assault: the Italian Academy of Cuisine, the Casa Artusi Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of "Italia home cooking" and La Cucina Italiana, billed as the world's oldest food magazine still available on newsstands.

With such enthusiastic foot soldiers marching in unison, Grandi was bound to earn the ire of those behind the campaign. Italy's largest farmers' association, Coldiretti, regarded the historian's Financial Times interview as "a surreal attack" against Italian food "precisely at the occasion of its candidacy for intangible heritage." With rage, the organisation went on to tremble at his claims that carbonara had been an American invention while panettone and tiramisu were of more recent commercial origin. "Above all, [the interview] goes so far as to hypothesise about parmesan and the one produced in Wisconsin in the US – the homeland of fake 'made in Italy' cheeses." The sheer horror of it.

The UNESCO inscription, entitled Italian cooking, between sustainability and biocultural diversity, reads like a summary of a gastro-nationalism. It also recalls an observation by the semiotician Roland Barthes, who wrote in the 1960s that "food permits a person … to partake each day of the national past".

The inscription stresses the "cultural and social blend of culinary traditions" which are associated with using "raw materials and artisanal food preparation techniques." The communal dimension is emphasised: intimacy, a "respect for ingredients", the "shared moments around the table." Family is linked to community; people spanning all ages and genders engage in exchanging "recipes, suggestions and stories, with grandparents often passing down traditional dishes to their grandchildren." There are other sources of transmission beyond the informal setting of family as well: places of learning such as school and universities.

All the propaganda signifiers of a kitschy populism are there: care, love, cultural roots, and social inclusion. The inscription even goes so far as to say that Italian cuisine "helps safeguard specific cultural expressions, such as language and gestures." One imagines such culinary patriots as Matteo Salvani having penned these starchy sentiments.

The problem with such designations is that they could equally apply to any number of cultural traditions. Furthermore, how these traditions of culinary transmission and engagement survive in a post-industrial age is skirted over. But food, Barthes writes, is a medium through which one "experiences a certain national continuity". Never mind that such a continuity is a heavily worked fable.