How pasta became political in Italy

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘How pasta became political in Italy’

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is going to sound a little bit crazy, but there was a period of time this spring when the people of Italy thought that we, the Financial Times, were coming after Italian food.

Marianna Giusti
All these headlines were saying Financial Times newspaper slams Italian foods. And then I was reading this long-form analysis of my article written by people that clearly hadn’t read it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s my colleague Marianna Giusti. The article that she’s talking about came out at the end of March in the FT Weekend Magazine, and it was called, “Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong”. Her piece explored the history of Italian food, and it profiled the man that you hear agreeing with her in the background. His name is Alberto Grandi. He’s an economist and a food historian.

Alberto Grandi
The problem is that now in Italy, people try to freeze the identity. And so we see that that this is the pizza and that is always the kind of pizza in the history without the history, without change, without evolution. This is wrong. It’s dangerous, too. And for the future.

Lilah Raptopoulos
For the past few years, Mari has been living abroad and she’s noticed this attitude both in Italy, where she’s from and in London where she lives. The attitude is this Italians: are the best cooks in the world. They are cooking ancient recipes. And there’s really only one right recipe for each Italian dish.

Marianna Giusti
Italians are taught that they’re inherently special and inherently better than other people when it comes to food. I’ve always had the feeling that it was something extremely reductive, hugely superficial, slightly fetishising, and I never fully bought what people said about food just from things I heard basically about my grandparents.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So when Mari found Alberto’s work, she was hooked because Alberto is trying to spread the real history of Italian food, which is that it’s really only become the cuisine as we know it today in recent history, just since World War 2. He says that pizza and carbonara aren’t ancient at all. And that’s what’s gotten him and Mari in trouble.

Marianna Giusti
I get the impression that the reason why Alberto’s research is found so insidious by Italians is because food has become so deeply associated with Italians sense of selves since after the economic boom in the 1960s. But there, he says, they invented a culinary tradition that didn’t really exist because they had to compensate for the loss of a sense of self that they had lost during the historical trauma of the world wars.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, Mari and Alberto are coming home to the FT to explain the controversy they’ve stepped into. Food has become extremely political in the last few years in Italy. As Italy’s politics has moved further to the right, a kind of culture war has built around it. And the big debate is: what’s really Italian? This is FT Weekend. I’m Lila Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Alberto and Mari, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Alberto Grandi
Thank you.

Marianna Giusti
Thank you, Lilah. It’s so great to be back.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We are here to talk about your viral and kind of controversial interview about Italian food that ran in the Financial Times back in March. When I say controversial, I mean it’s gotten the reaction of some very prominent Italian politicians. It’s been picked up by media in many languages. It’s become the most read FT Weekend piece of the year so far. And my first question is just, Mari, did this surprise you? Did you think that this is going to get so much attention?

Marianna Giusti
Oh my God, not at all. I was extremely surprised the day after publication to see how well received it had been in the Anglophone media bubble. But then it was really when the Italian government reacted that the viral level of the piece went beyond any sort of expectations. And I also wasn’t expecting to get trolled for the first time in my life for a story about pasta. That was crazy. Some people told me, you deserve to rot in the kitchen of a McDonald’s in Nebraska. And I was like, wow, that’s so imaginative. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
(laughter) Yeah, that was a good hate mail. What about you, Alberto? I feel like you may have had more of an idea of how this would land in Italy.

Alberto Grandi
At first I’m not surprised them for their reaction because it is normal. Every time that they speak about Italian food, We meet a lot of people that is very made angry with me, against me, and so on. This is not a surprise for me. But maybe the first the surprise is from the politicians that every reaction about this interview.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Before we get into the details of that, can you tell me, Alberto, a little bit about your work in general?

Alberto Grandi
Yes. My work is as a historian. I am historian. And so I don’t speak about the quality of the Italian food. My study is about the history. And the pasta is the centre of my study.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Study, research.

Alberto Grandi
Study. Yes. It’s that just until 60 years ago, 70 years ago at maximum, the Italian food is not very, very good. And the reputation of the Italian food is not that (inaudible) today.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. As a historian, Alberto started his research from a place of serious doubt that there was just one way to make each Italian dish. Partly because Italy wasn’t actually a unified country until the 1870s. There were a lot of states, and they spoke a ton of different dialects. So Italian cuisine was, of course, completely regional. How could there just be one way of doing things? Alberto is also sceptical that the rich meat-filled recipes that we associate with Italian food could have possibly made it through generations of hardship. Italy was extremely poor for a very long time. Around the turn of the century, more than 25mn Italians left. The ones who stayed mostly ate beans and vegetables.

Alberto Grandi
I say every time, if the Italian people eat very well 100 years ago, no one leave the Italy to go in America, in Argentina and Brazil, or in French or in England, too.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alberto theorised that today’s Italian cuisine mostly developed after World War 2, when the economy finally boomed. So we decided to trace back a few specific dishes, starting with the most iconic. One of them is pizza, which I think is interesting because if you live in America, a lot of people know that pizza is largely American. There’s a pizza shop on every corner. But how is the actual history of this different from sort of the traditional mythos of the history in Italy?

Marianna Giusti
Yeah, absolutely. Pizza was one of the things that really made me see Alberto’s work as hugely liberating because according to Alberto, pizza in some form is something that has been extremely pervasive around the Mediterranean for centuries, right? He even made an etymological link between sort of different disks of dough that were served with various seasoning, condiments and toppings.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Pita and yeah.

Marianna Giusti
Exactly. Pita. Pita. Pizza. There were basically all the same things. Not many outside Italy know that in Naples, pizza is commonly served wrapped. People call it in a portfolio, in a wallet, closed, wrapped up, which is basically like a pizza wrap. It used to be made not with tomato sauce, but with raw tomatoes. So it was an extremely poor sort of street food thing in the south of Italy before Italian immigrants in the United States returned and sort of popularised what in North America, especially on the East Coast, had been turned into restaurant food by previously poor migrants from the south of Italy that had made money and had decided to sort of dignify these extremely poor street foods that they used to eat back home. Right, Alberto?

Alberto Grandi
Yeah, that’s perfect. (laughter)

Marianna Giusti [
And many people disagree. I received a lot of letters with people trying to disprove this after the piece.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what happens when you ask Italians where they think pizza came from?

Marianna Giusti
Well, if you ask any Italian in the streets, they will just blabber the story of the Queen Margherita, for whom a Neapolitan chef concocted this invention. I don’t even know what year that was in, but that’s a myth. But that’s, everyone will repeat it, right Alberto?

Alberto Grandi
Yes. That, I think, the same history, the Italian now believed that the lie that the (speaks in Italian).

Marianna Giusti
Yeah. He’s saying Italians at the moment like to believe their own lies, but mostly they don’t know they’re lies. These are, according to Alberto’s research, myths that have become popular during marketing. Yeah. As a marketing invention, starting in the 1970s.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alberto has done this kind of research on other dishes, too. Like, take pasta carbonara. Many people think it came from the Middle Ages, but the first recipe that he could find of it written down is from 1953. His theory is that actually at the end of World War 2, American soldiers created it with the eggs and bacon from their rations. Tiramisu, that coffee-soaked biscuit dessert, only appeared in the 1980s. It’s made using cookies that didn’t exist until 1948. What’s weird about all this is that when you ask old Italians, they know that carbonara and pizza weren’t around when they were young. They remember their diet as different.

Marianna Giusti
This is something I cite in the piece that my grandma hadn’t seen a mozzarella before the 1960s, before supermarket chains started opening in her village. And she saw her first pizza when she was 20. In the 50s.

Alberto Grandi
Yes. I remember my father in the 1975. He considered the pizza as the sushi, as the Thai food is a very exotic kind of food. My father is not that old now. Yes, but in 1975 it’s normal.

Marianna Giusti
Exactly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So how does a cuisine that people actually remember as one way is shaped into something else and then sold back to people as an ancient identity? One answer is that Italians wanted a shared identity. And that’s not all bad. Italians love and connect around this cuisine that they’ve created. And actually, it’s a beautiful thing. But there’s been something else at play more recently, and that’s really what’s led to the controversy around Mari’s piece. The country’s rightwing politicians have claimed Italian food as a cause. That includes the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. OK. So I would love to hear, sort of, the article goes out on March 23rd. That same week, you get pushback from the deputy prime minister of Italy, Matteo Salvini, from a number of other very notable Italians. Can you tell me a little bit? Set the scene for listeners who don’t know what’s going on in Italy right now. Who is the right wing in power and what do they stand for and why are they so upset at Alberto?

Alberto Grandi
(laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
For talking about pasta.

Marianna Giusti
Yeah, absolutely. I would say there was a line in the piece that I thought encapsulated really well what food is to the Italian government today. And that was with a comparison with a really globally popular politician who recently died, who is Silvio Berlusconi. And I think he said something along the lines of food is to Salvini and to Italy’s government today what football and young, beautiful women were to the Berlusconi administration. But that is really to say, a hugely powerful propaganda industry and a way to really make their images relatable and accessible and closer to Italians everywhere.

Lilah Raptopoulos
If I understand Salvini correctly, he’s sort of one of the masterminds of Italy’s populist movements, right? He’s one of the reasons that Italy has moved so far to the right.

Marianna Giusti
Yeah, absolutely.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And he’s using food as a kind of way to manipulate.

Marianna Giusti
He basically embodies what Alberto really cleverly terms gastro-nationalism. He applies political notions of populism and nationalism to Italy’s food culture. And this has resulted in that really deeply altering the factual truth of Italy’s culinary history. And this is where Alberto intervenes. But broadly, Salvini and Meloni’s policies are more on the exclusionary side of food. And this is something that, for example, is very well exemplified by the tortellini saga.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The tortellini saga, a cliffs notes version is this: a few years ago, there was a city holiday in Bologna, and its archbishop suggested that the city make its traditional tortellini with chicken instead of pork. The idea was that Muslims could come and they could eat it, too. In fact, Alberto was even able to show that that’s how tortellini used to be made in Bologna -- with chicken. It probably won’t surprise you which politician took to Facebook to protest.

Alberto Grand
Salvini had a very strong reaction. And the said this is the attempt to . . . 

Marianna Giusti
Destroy our tradition.

Alberto Grandi
Destroy our tradition.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, well, Alberto, you know, some people could say that we’re just talking about food. These politicians are making stuff up, but it’s not a big deal. You can just ignore them. But I can feel that you’re taking this very seriously.

Alberto Grandi
Yeah, (speaks in Italian) .

Marianna Giusti
I’m convinced that this debate will be decisive for Italy’s future.

Alberto Grandi
Yes, for the future of Italy is important to separate the identity with the roots, because this is the problem now, not only for the food about for the east or for the national, and therefore every aspect of Italian culture. We (speaks in Italian).

Lilah Raptopoulos
Confused.

Alberto Grandi
Confused identity, but the identity change everyday. And the roots is our history. It’s impossible to say that the identity is the equal of the rules.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Like the identity and the history and the identity and the facts are not the same?

Alberto Grandi
Yes. It’s not the same, it’s not the same. This is the point. The story of Italian food is a and the story of link the cross across the meet with different culture and different traditions.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Its links across the meeting of different cultures and traditions.

Alberto Grandi
But now it’s completely changed. And the food is an instrument to divide people.

Marianna Giusti
Yeah. Agreed.

Alberto Grandi
To close the nation.

Marianna Giusti
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, it’s funny, there are many kind of quotes that you could read in Mari’s article that sound provocative, but when I hear you talk about it, it doesn’t feel that you’re doing this to be provocative. It feels like you’re doing this because you’re very interested in this history, that actually the fact that these traditions have moved and changed is valuable and important and adds... it’s exciting to learn these things. Do you feel that way?

Alberto Grandi
Yes. (Speaks in Italian)

Marianna Giusti
Yeah. Alberto understandably finds being perceived as a contrarian really frustrating because what he’s trying to talk about is something that has wide historical context and is very well verified.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Alberto Grandi
Because a lot of people think that I am an enemy of Italian food, but I love Italian food. And I think that that is a miracle. Only in 50 years we build the legendary food, a legendary cuisine. This is, I think, it is unbelievable for the rest of the world. The China cuisine, have a thousand years of history. French have 200, no, 400-year history. Italy only 50 years and in 50 years we go and we built that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And iconic.

Alberto Grandi
Yes. Iconic. Yes. For the rest of the world is one of the most important music in the world, they think. (speaks in Italian).

Marianna Giusti
With simplicity.

Alberto Grandi
Simplicity. Yes. This is the most important aspect of Italian cuisine, the simplicity.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Alberto Grandi
Our recipe is very easy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, yes.

Alberto Grandi
Water, salt and pasta. Very easy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mari and Alberto, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for explaining this to us. This has been such a fascinating conversation. Appreciate you being here.

Alberto Grandi
Thank you. I apologise for my English, but this is not my . . . 

Marianna Giusti
Alberto, you’re great. I wish I had known earlier. Lilah, thank you so much. It’s always such a pleasure to be on the podcast with you.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life and Arts podcast of the Financial Times. Next week we are going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to learn how to experience museums better and how to look at art. I’m so excited about this one. We are getting a tour from Patrick Bringley, who was a guard at the Met for ten years. He wrote a memoir about it called, All the Beauty in the World. Links to everything mentioned this week are in the show notes, and they will get you past the paywall on FT.com. But if you want to explore more on the site, we have really great trial and subscription offers for you. Those are at FT.com/weekendpodcast. You should also get your tickets to the FT Weekend Festival. It is on Saturday, September 2nd at Kenwood House in London. I’m going to be there. Tons of incredible guests will be there. We have links and a special discount for you in the show notes. Let me know if you’re coming. As you know, we love chatting with you. The show is on Twitter @FTWeekendPod. And I am on Instagram and Twitter, but mostly talking to you on Instagram @LilahRap. I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Monique Malema is our intern. And our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.