Welcome, everyone! My name is Brian J Griffith
and I'll be the host of today's virtual book talk
event. I am the inaugural Eugen and
Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar
in European History at UC Los Angeles. This
book talk is being hosted in conjunction with
a course that I'm currently teaching at UCLA
titled "Interwar Crisis: Europe, 1918 and 1939".
If you'd like to watch any of the other
video recordings of the book talks that I
posted before during last year's version
of this course, you can take a look at
the book talks web page, that I put together on our
course website. I'm going to go ahead and
send that to the chat right now:
www.brianjgriffith.com/interwarcrisis/about/book-talks/.
I'd like to acknowledge this book talk's
co-sponsors, which are UCLA Center for
European and Russian Studies, and the
Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles.
I thank both of them very much for their
co-sponsorship and helping us promote this event.
If you'd like to reach any of them on social
media, you can find UCLA Center for European and
Russian Studies on Twitter under the handle
@uclacers, and the Italian Cultural Institute
can be found on Twitter under
the handle @iiclosangeles.
Okay, so I'll begin by providing an introduction
for today's speaker, which will be followed by
about a 30-minute presentation by Dr Diana Garvin
herself on her recently published book.
After that we'll be doing a Q&A for
about the remaining half an hour or so.
So please feel free to use the chat dialogue
here in Zoom to submit your questions and/or
comments. I will be taking them in the order
in which they're submitted following
Dr Garvin's presentation.
If you submit your entire question
to the chat dialogue, I will read that on your
behalf for Dr Diana Garvin to respond to.
However, if you would like to ask your question
on video or just on the audio segment yourself,
please indicate your desire to do so, and I will
call upon you when it's your turn to speak.
Finally, as a courtesy to our speaker
and to the other attendees here today,
I'd like to ask kindly that you mute
your microphones until it's your turn
to speak during the Q&A
portion of today's meeting.
Okay, so please allow me to introduce
today's speaker, Dr Diana Garvin.
Dr Garvin is a social, cultural and political
historian of fascist Italy and its colonial
territories in East Africa, with a special
emphasis on the history of food production,
consumerism, and gender dynamics under Benito
Mussolini's 20-year dictatorship.
Diana earned her doctorate in Romance Studies at
Cornell University, and is currently serving as an
Assistant Professor of Italian and Mediterranean
Studies at the University of Oregon.
Dr Garvin has been the recipient of a number
of really prestigious grants and fellowships,
including a Julia Child Foundation
Scholarship, a CLIR Mellon Foundation
Fellowship for Dissertation Research
and Original Sources, a Wolfsonian-FIU
Fellowship, and the prestigious Rome Prize
Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies at the
American Academy in Rome. And most recently,
a Fulbright Global Scholar Award in support
of her ongoing research on the topic
of coffee culture in modern Italy.
Diana is the author of really just
an impressive number of journal
articles and book chapters and more,
including articles published in the journals:
Critical Inquiry, Signs, the Journal of Modern
Italian Studies, Food and Foodways, Modern Italy,
and Annali d'Italianistica.
In addition to these publications,
Dr Garvin's research has appeared in
a number of scholarly anthologies including -
just naming a few of them -
Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Culture
published by Amsterdam University Press,
The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism
published, of course, by the Routledge,
Representing Italy Through Food published
by Bloomsbury Academic, and Food and
Material Culture published by Prospect
Books. And that was just a few among the
publications on her impressive CV.
On top of this impressive list of publications,
Diana's monograph "Feeding Fascism: The Politics
of Women's Food Work" - here in my
possession - was recently published by
University of Toronto Press, and will serve
as the topic of today's presentation.
If you'd like to purchase a discounted copy of
Dr Garvin's book - I believe, at 35% off - you can
do so via the following URL and discount
code that I've just inserted into the chat dialogue here.
Without further due, please
join me in welcoming Dr Diana Garvin.
Thank you so much, Dr Griffith,
for that very generous introduction.
I also want to echo your thanks to the UCLA
Center for European and Russian Studies,
and the Italian Cultural
Institute of Los Angeles,
and particularly your Interwar Crisis
course. Again, all of this is helmed
by Dr Brian Griffith. Dr Griffith
isn't just a fearless researcher,
and a great writer and teacher,
he is also an awesome friend.
So thank you so much for this invitation. I am
really grateful to be here with you guys today.
So let's get to it. How did women negotiate the
politics of Italy's fascist regime in their daily
lives? This talk, drawn from my book "Feeding
Fascism", tackles this question with a new body of
evidence that's drawn from food and foodways.
Over the past decade, I've tracked down cookbooks,
kitchen utensils, cafeteria plans,
and culinary propaganda.
So this talk aims to connect
women's political beliefs
with the places that they lived and worked, and
the objects that they owned and borrowed.
These examples illustrate how
women and the fascist state
vied for control over the national diet across
many manifestations. So cooking, feeding, and eating -
all to assert and negotiate their authority.
In taking this distinctive approach,
"Feeding Fascism" attests to the power of food.
The focus in this story is highly specific in
terms of place, and in terms of time.
In terms of place, it looks
primarily at North and Central
Italy: Lombardy, Piedmont, and Emilia-Romagna.
Milan, Turin, and Genoa create an industrial triangle,
so a powerhouse of factory work.
And, along with Bologna, these
cities crackled with communism. Their
long labor history was pockmarked by strikes,
and yet the opposite political polls stood in
same location. Mussolini was born in a small town
of Predappio, in Emilia Romagna.
So these were at once the zones of
great adherence to and greatest
resistance against the regime.
In terms of time, we're talking about
the 20 odd years of fascist rule
stretching from 1922 to 1945.
And this period provides a particularly clear
lens for thinking about women's food work.
It's not so much representative of Italian
cultural history as it is hyper-representative.
It blows up violent tendencies that are always
there, but in inactive or ineffective forms.
So the bombast of dictatorial politics
amplifies general tendencies engendered in food
work that are often too subtle to see.
The fascist period thus provides a key for
unlocking other historical periods. Historian
Benedetto Croce was wrong. Fascism
isn't a parenthesis, it's a magnifying glass.
So you might be asking yourself: What's unique
about food under fascism? After all, during
the interwar period, democratic and dictatorial
governments alike demonstrate a profound concern
for how food powered and shaped the body.
But the fascist regime went further. It tried to
harness the biopolitical power of food to prepare
for military dominance. First, farming more food in
Italy promised economic self-sufficiency, and that
was the first step towards diplomatic immunity.
This was part of the regime's broader push for
autarky, and that's a key word for this talk.
It means producing and consuming
only Italian products.
Second, birthing more infants today meant more
fascists to support state ambitions tomorrow.
Pronatalism, a fascist policy that was
promoting high birth rates, was part of this.
Autarky and pronatalism work together.
Under fascism, you could say that Italian
babies are the ultimate national products.
At stake in this blend of women's food work
and their reproductive work is a new way
of looking at the history of fascism.
Private industry and entrepreneurs translated
fascist doctrine into practice. I argue that
they were more successful in integrating fascism
into everyday life than the regime was itself.
So here's a table of contents for today's talk,
and how it fits in with the larger book project.
Today we're going to take essentially a
walking tour of a model fascist kitchen.
First, we're going to look at an
early 19th century farmhouse cucina
to understand what things looked like before.
Next, we're going to look at larger fascist
building projects to understand
the rise of rationalist style.
Then we're going to zoom in on fascist period
Martha Stewart to understand how these big trends
the level of the city also shaped the kitchen
table where you chopped your onions.
And then finally, we're going to zoom back out to
look at how these changes to kitchen architecture
supported fascism's push
for autarky as a whole.
This talk is just one section of the book. In
fact it's Chapter 4: Model Fascist Kitchens,
but the book also covers women's food work
in a broad sense - in farms, and in factories,
and even through breastfeeding - so there's
so much that I wish we could cover today.
But if you'd like to learn more about Perugina
Chocolate Factory, culinary protest songs and
food theft, or the cooking fire riots of Rome,
I hope you will ask your library for a copy.
Fascism was a total regime. It fused public and
private life through its goal of high productivity.
More Italian food, more Italian babies.
And these interventions were aimed
at women even in the home.
Under fascism, kitchen design - its size, its layout,
even the color of its walls - became politicized.
For much of Italian history,
the kitchen was the house.
Most Italian homes consisted of
one large, multi-purpose room.
Because in the days before central heating, warmth
was the key concern for kitchen design and use.
People, cows, chickens - everything and
everyone gathered around hearth fire.
Because kitchens house many bodies, both
animal and human, they held negative
associations as dark, dirty places.
In the 1920s and 30s the regime built
much smaller kitchens throughout their new
public housing projects. Only one person
could fit and that person was a woman.
So this move not only adds more gender to
the kitchen, but it also turns it
into a specialized workplace.
And that specialization and that
approach - shrinking to specialize -
was concurrent with other moves by the regime.
Private bedrooms for parents are introduced to
public housing for the first time.
After all, having a large family moved
you up the waitlist for these new
regime-approved housing blocks.
In parallel, the kitchen becomes
a small sanitary factory with
one purpose: to produce as much food as
possible with speed and with hygiene.
With workers moving from the
country to the city for factory work,
urban periphery swell during this period.
The regime introduced contests for architectural
firms to build these new
public housing projects.
Over and over rationalist buildings won.
So you've probably seen rationalist buildings
and you probably didn't like them. It's
every parking garage that has ever been built, so
think reinforced concrete, grids, right angles...
It's often criticized for being very cold and
modern. And this style thrived under fascism,
and celebrated logic, not lyricism. The point was
supposedly to increase airflow and sunlight -
making things more hygienic -
but it could actually lead to wasted space.
Because of this gap between
the architectural theory and how the buildings
were actually used, I often think of it as
irrational rationalism.
But it was really common
in functional spaces, so clinics in public,
but kitchens and bathrooms in private.
On the pages of magazines like
Domus, Abitare, and Casa Bella,
Triennale, architects like
Piero Bottoni and Ignazio Gardella debated
what the new rationalist housing projects
and their model kitchens should look like.
So their names were public knowledge,
but it wasn't because the average
person was reading these glossies.
Rather, people knew about them
because of recommendations of
domestic experts like Lidia Morelli.
I wish we had a photo of her.
Her book that you see here "From the Kitchen
to the Salon" was a blockbuster hit. By 1935,
it had already appeared in five editions and
sold over 50,000 copies. And that's a huge number,
given that the Italian population at
that time was just under 43 million.
In this book, Morelli promoted
her favorite Bottoni and Gardella
regime-approved kitchen designs,
all ready in the public housing projects.
Middle class fans then adopted these
ideas, like how to arrange the kitchen
and what pots and pans to buy for home use.
Morelli's books show us how kitchens changed
under fascism. They show how the average woman
experienced fascism in her day-to-day life.
Not in an obviously political setting, like
a public rally, but instead in the kitchen,
while she was feeling potato.
After all, most people didn't
experience fascist modernity in a grand public
display at a car race, or an airplane show.
For most people, all those ideas - speed, technology,
hygiene, and even war - didn't slam into existence.
Instead, they arrived as quickly and as
quietly as a kitchen drawer sliding open.
Here's an example of one of Morelli's favorite
kitchen designs. This one's from Bottoni.
Standing at the kitchen entrance, we see a small,
white-tiled room, arranged in a Taylorist work
triangle. So there's a prep area - the table,
a cooking area - the stove, and a cleaning area -
the sink. And you'll notice the photographer
centers two key additions, that you wouldn't
have found in a kitchen before. There's a
clock, and there's an electric stove.
It's a quarter to two, and the three-
burner stove has a double boiler going,
and what appears to be an apple crostata
waiting to be put into the oven.
To the right, we see a sink filled with dishes,
and two white towels hung from dedicated hooks.
On the table, we see a half-
peeled apple on a napkin,
a small serrated knife, a white ceramic plate,
plus a black mixing bowl filled with flour.
Against the wall, glass cabinets open to reveal
immaculate white dishware and shining aluminum
pans. Just below, the countertop holds the
ingredients and machines for preparing espresso -
sugar, coffee, and a coffee grinder - a new
appliance for this time period.
And a black cord snakes between
the grinder and the wall,
marking an otherwise visible innovation -
this kitchen is wired for electricity.
Electricity and hydraulics were new additions
to public housing for this time period.
In the kitchen,
they radically changed cooking
habits and hygiene levels.
Less obviously, they also reshaped the female body.
So let's say I want to toast a piece of bread.
In the 19th century Italian kitchen,
there's an open fireplace, so I need to
lean over the flames, I need to
manipulate a heavy iron grill.
Over time, that's going to redden and roughen
my face, my hands, my arms. It's also going to
build out my biceps, but with my new aluminum
ItalToast toaster, I just push a button.
The kitchen stays cleaner - there's
no ash, there's no wood smoke -
plus I have that sink for easy cleanup. And all
those highly-visible body parts stay delicate,
white, unmuscled. All the markers of female,
upper class status in Northern Italy at this time.
So, bringing electric and hydraulic
infrastructure into the home
not only cleans the kitchen, it
also gentrifies the body.
So this isn't to say that the fascist regime
is using a toaster army to dominate the public,
but rather it's an example of how a
private company is making use of the
new, regime-funded infrastructure, as
well as futurist aesthetics of speed
and technology in order to push a product.
And indeed, ad copy for the ItalToast toaster
focuses on the machine's autarkic
materials - aluminum and chrome -
and shows one of the new Milanese housing
block kitchens. It cast fascism as fashion.
This is, the ad copy claims, the most
patriotic way to make a toast.
Model fascist kitchens were built from autarkic
materials. Walls were tiled in blue or white,
creating business for Italy's growing
ceramic business in Emilia-Romagna.
Floors were made from aluminum, which is being
synthesized in Milanese factories, and the
Bialetti Moka Pot born in 1933 was aluminum,
as were so many pots and pans and appliances.
We often talk about how food
changes under fascism, but we
don't often talk about how dishes change.
Moralli celebrated these materials for being
cheap, and easy to use, and easy to clean,
but they also provide direct financial
support for the Italian chemical
industry and for its refineries.
So they help a fascist economy by creating
demand for these new materials.
In addition to supporting autarky, these
materials all share another quality.
They shine, but only
when you wipe them clean.
And that shine is
part of their aesthetic allure,
but they also make dirt really obvious. And that
fact mattered for the public housing projects.
Living here meant that you had very little
money, but you probably had a lot of kids.
After all, it was one of the prerequisites
for getting one of those spaces.
So many women living in these
houses and using these kitchens
had to rely on the fascist-run cafeterias for
mothers, soup kitchens, and milk dispensaries.
Using those services came with strings
attached. Frequent visits from the wives
of fascist officials to make sure that the
hygiene of the kitchen was up to snuff.
After all, hygiene was seen by the regime
as a means to decrease infant mortality and
promote their pronatalist project.
With these materials, visitatrici,
the fascist quote-unquote "visitors" -
could make that judgment at a glance.
In 1939, Italy entered the Pact
of Steel with Nazi Germany.
Italian foods, like tinned tomatoes and
the factory workers who produce them,
flowed northward to Germany, both
voluntarily and through conscription.
Rationing was introduced,
and black markets boomed.
Finding enough food to eat, especially
in the cities, was a difficult task.
During the early 1940s, as Carol Helstosky
has pointed out, each social class' diet fell to
the nutritive levels, the one below.
So that means that school teachers,
pensioners, and government employees all sought
charity and frequented soup kitchens.
Cookbook authors, like Petronilla, the pen
name of Dr Amalia Moretti Foggia, offered
recipes for chicken soup without the chicken.
As war went on, recipes changed. Ingredients
started to come, not in the paragraph form but,
at the top of a recipe, so that if you'd already
used up your ration of rice, you saw it at the
top, you knew not to read any further.
And cooking methods changed. There's a lot more
cold food under the assumption that you have
to ration your gas, as well as your rice.
Middle class foods started to look a lot more
like working class diets. More foraged foods, like
frogs, and birds eggs, and greens from the hills.
People ate things that they didn't
before - more guts like blood soup.
War time pushed women to negotiate
the boundaries of Italian cuisine and the
outer limits of taste and edibility.
This doesn't mean that they engaged
in these projects willingly.
Perhaps Foggia's conclusion to her recipes
is most telling in this regard. Her final
cookbook and her work as an author
concludes with a plea
for peace at the expense of her legacy.
Above the image of a white dove with an
olive branch in its beak, she wishes
for the demise of her life's work.
May the war end, and may my work here become
irrelevant, forever consigned to a dusty shelf.
During World War II, civilian morale is low.
Food shortages were endemic, and hundreds
of thousands fled to the countryside.
Partisan resistance groups in Italy spread
northward, clashing with fascist and
Nazi German troops. Mussolini was shot in April 1945
and his body displayed in Milan. Northern Italian food
factories, including Perugina, were subject
to heavy Ally bombing, especially in 1942 and 1943.
The industrial areas of Milan,
Turin, and Genoa were flattened.
Long after fascism was discredited as a movement,
and Mussolini had met his end, the architectural
and social legacy of these ideas lives on.
In her much cited New Yorker article,
Ruth Ben-Ghiat asked: Why are so many fascist
monuments still standing in Italy?
Because fascism coincided with and encouraged
industrialization, it left its traces in
farms and in factories, and in the way
that many people cook and eat today.
And in many ways, fascist moves, like the
industrialization of the food industry,
its speed, and its total
invasion of private life,
actually gained greater ground
after the fall of the regime.
Out of the post-war rebel of the late 1940s,
larger, more modern food factories were built.
Filled with gleaming metal machinery,
they pumped out new lab-borne foods.
You could almost feel Marinetti
in the futurist nodding along.
Everything suggested speed,
hygiene, and hyper productivity.
Extensions to the highway and railway
system meant that food traveled greater
distances than ever before.
And the American Marshall Plan,
together with Italian industry, introduced
a number of new industrial treats.
Frozen ravioli that never went bad, powdered juice,
geometric cheeses with no need for a knife.
Now clearly, these foods did not take over Italian
cuisine. Far from it. Italian cuisine is itself
famously conservative, slow to take on
new ingredients and preparations.
But it does change over time. Bit by bit. After
all, for most of the peninsula's history, tomatoes,
a classic ingredient, were considered poisonous.
So this is a period where not only food changes,
but the way people buy, store,
and cook food also changes.
The Italian economic boom with the 1950s
and 60s brought large social shifts,
mass migration from South to North, urban
periphery swelling with new arrivals.
And more kitchens, like the ones pioneered under
the fascist model, were built. With more cash on
hand, many Italians were eating more and better
food. More meat, more cheese, more milk, more pasta.
You can check out those enormous steaks in
this new Kelvinator refrigerator add.
And those foods would have come from new
places, from the new supermarket
chains, like Esselunga designed by Gio Ponti,
one of the many architects with regime ties, who
continued to work during the post-war period.
So did Luisa Spagnoli of the
Perugina Chocolate Factory, so
did Delia Notari, so did Lidia Morelli.
Many Italians called it, the joke of ”gioco delle sedie",
or musical chairs. In this time of huge
changes, the people, domestic experts who everyone
took advice from, actually stayed the same.
This is why this project matters. Fascism
coincided with industrialization,
meaning that a lot of buildings were set
up in a period marked by its goals.
It's not that food changed all that
much under fascism, it's that the rules
surrounding food factory work - who works
for how long and under what conditions -
and home design and use were put into place in
a period that had dictatorial goals in mind,
and then forgotten. Italy never had
a Nuremberg. No national reckoning
with the dictatorship, in part because it
was so entrenched in everyday life.
Italian food companies, especially those
whose industrial history extends back to
the "ventennio", are now in a unique position.
Whether due to product names, recipes, or previous
government ties, they can tell a certain story
about Italian history and national identity.
So we might place consumable products, like pasta,
within the context of debates regarding monuments and
museums. They become all the
more important in the face of
political movements that attempt to resurrect
idealized versions of the national past.
Objects like toasters and candy bars are
scripts that prompt us to act in different ways.
If we can understand their historical origins,
then we have the opportunity to use them
or intentionally misuse them
as we choose.
Kitchens matter because they're the
places where memory gets written.
Thank you so much. And I would be happy
to answer any questions you might have.
Great! Thank you so much, Dr Garvin, for that
really intriguing and stimulating presentation.
Just as a reminder to all of
the attendees we have here
on Zoom - if you have a question and
you would like to ask it yourself,
you can indicate so in the chat dialog,
just putting your name in, so that I can
keep track of the order in which questions are
being asked. And if you would prefer that I read
your question for you, go ahead and type
it out completely in the chat dialogue
and I'll read that for you on your behalf.
I might just get us started if you don't mind, Diana,
with a couple of
questions of my own.
I want to start with your use of
material culture as a source material.
I think the way in which you do it is so
interesting. I wonder if you could tell us,
maybe a particular moment during
your global trotting of archival
trips and visits, if there was a particular
moment and a particular object of material
culture that really helped get the
project going in your mind,
shaped the direction that the book
was taking as you were putting
the manuscript together. Was there a
particular collection, or particular object
that really spoke to you and then
kind of sent you on your way?
This project actually popped
out of that toaster I showed you,
so you guys are going to think I am absolutely
obsessed with appliances and it is true.
I ran into that toaster very early on, and
it really was the start of the project.
It was from the Wolfsonian Museum in South Beach,
Florida, which is itself an Art Deco jewel box,
and they specialize in dictatorial kitsch.
So I was there. I was taking a class with the
wonderful professor, who became my advisor, Medina
Lasansky, who was doing some architectural history research.
We had been studying the regime's big projects,
so the railways, the monumental Casa del Fascio,
anything where there is a hundred or
more people in the buildings.
And all of those aesthetics - the shine, the
chrome, the geometric patterns - all of that
was in my brain. And when I went to
the Wolfsonian, they opened a drawer,
and it was the exact same aesthetics. It
was all of the silver gleam, and all of the
hexagons, all of the stars
in miniature.
That toaster was among all of these other objects.
It looked like a parking lot for rocket ships.
It was just visually stunning. And it occurred
to me that everything that was happening on this
grand public scale, was also happening in private.
And that was the start of the projects.
That's incredible. I love that.
As I mentioned, one of the things I
love about your research is the incorporation of
so much material culture, which tends
not to be in our textual discipline,
right? It tends not to be things that
we see as primary sources, but they very
much are. And as you, I think rightly pointed out,
they inscribe history in their
designs and in their purposes.
We have a question from Jonathan Morris, who would
like to ask it himself. Jonathan, do you want to
take the stage? Yeah,
I was hoping I already had.
Am I there?
You are there.
You are. Great.
Sorry, I can't see on this.
I just wanted to ask about the contrast
between the city and the countryside
in this period, Diana. I was looking at
your first slide there - which is great -
that picture of the kitchen, which is
very much a rural picture. I love
the donkey in there. I will pull that up.
Here we go.
Fantastic! I mean on the left
there, that big picture is very
much a rural kitchen. And obviously, the one on the
right, as you said, is a public housing one.
And I wondered about the tensions between city
and countryside - the food work that
was being done, but also, if
you like, the food fashion
or the kitchen fashion,
because obviously if you're in the
countryside, it's a totally different line.
A lot of the things that you talked about - the
electricity and so forth,
I would like to get the extent of that.
But also when you went on
to talk about World War II,
it just made me think: Well, this is a bit
of speed in the countryside,
right? I mean it's going to be pretty
difficult from a public housing to go
out and gather yourself some frogs.
So I just wondered if you could talk to that a bit -
about those tensions, and maybe what you see
of those during the period, and also have a
move into that post-war period.
Thank you for that great question.
The tension between the countryside
and the city is absolutely fascinating in
this period, because you see the regime
heralding both. On one hand, they are celebrating
the speed, crowds, and hyper-productivity of an
urban realm, and at the same time, Mussolini
himself says: ”Bisogna ruralizzare l'Italia”,
so "Italy must be ruralized".
I think what they share is there is a push
to speed and electrifying the countryside, and
in the city to have the country
side's booming food productivity.
So in the city, women are encouraged
to use the courtile, to have small
courtyard gardens to build their
own rabbit hutches and chicken coops.
In a weird way, this period really breaks
down the dichotomy of the country and the
city by bringing in speed to the country,
and food production to the city.
I was most struck by a group of
women called the "mondine" - the rice weeders -
in terms of embodying some
of the contradictions of the regime. On one hand,
they are celebrated by the fascist party there.
Robust, they are florid, they are fertile they are
everything an ideal fascist woman
should be. The only problem is that
most of them identify with the Communist Party.
At the furthest right, most of them are anarchist,
socialist. And then there are very famous work
songs they sing of their dislike of the regime.
I wish we had more time
to get into the countryside,
but you're right in that those tensions
very much come into the kitchen
management of the period.
All right, very good. Next question is from
Donna Martinez. I'll go ahead and read it for
Donna. It says: Is there a food creation
we're still eating today that originated
during World War II in Italy?
For example, meatloaf was popular
in the US during that time, because it
extended a limited amount of meat.
What's interesting about the dishes themselves
is they don't change very much. They are retitled.
So fascism tends to recast poverty as
patriotism. It's largely the same minestrone,
largely the same big pots of polenta,
it's just referred to in a different way,
Something that does date from the period, are
the Italianization of some of the terms.
The Futurist Cookbook written by FT Marinetti,
posited poets and painters as
artists and cooks, but it was also a nationalist
project. The back of the book includes a
dictionary translating what had been American
and French culinary terms into Italian ones.
So a bar becomes a ”quisibeve”, and the barman
becomes a "barista". That's his invention.
And the cocktail to “polibibita”.
Yeah, the multi-drink.
Right, so a lot of the Italianization of
some of the Italian cultural hegemony and food
in some ways is a legacy of this period.
Very good. Alright, next we have Joan Saverino. She
writes: Very interesting talk. Can
you comment at all on what and how,
if any, of these trends took hold in the South
and Sicily, whether in city or countryside?
Oh, you know I would be a bad historian if I
said I was an expert on the South. To tell you the
truth, I really studied the North.
I wish I could answer the question. I will say
that if you're looking for some wonderful history
on the topic, Nelson Moe is considered one
of the field experts. And his book,
"The View from Vesuvius,"
would probably have some of those
stories if you're interested in learning more.
And if you are perhaps a PhD student,
soon to be a PhD student who's looking for
a dissertation topic, perhaps a food history
of the Italian South under fascism might be
a good place to start.
There's a lot of research
to be done. It would be great to
see more people working on it.
Indeed! Next we have Lili Zach:
Thank you for the fascinating presentation.
Do you have any favorite recipes
you came across during your research
that you can share with us? Do any of
them stand out in terms of their oddity?
I haven't made it, but there was a recipe for
boiled frogs and it really caught my attention.
I didn't realize that you had to skin them. That
was new. I've never tried to boil frogs,
but I was fascinated that there's this whole type
of preparation that never really occurred to me.
That's another rice weeder recipe, because they
were out in the fields catching those guys.
So some of the recipes really are
extraordinary and they really do
push the bounds of what's edible.
One thing that I do find interesting is
where different ingredients are assigned to
the menu shifts during this period. So because
eggs are a cheap and easy protein
that everyone has access to,
the dessert menu is suddenly covered in meringue.
Eggs end up everywhere. I have tried some of
those egg dishes, and they're not bad for a student,
or an academic on a budget. They're doable.
As a follow up to that answer,
I would say if you're looking for
anything bizarre in the realm of food
and drink recipes under fascism, look
no further than "La cucina futurista",
which is packed full
of the most bizarre recipes, and even
circumstances during which you're consuming
under fascism. Alright, Irene Hatzopoulos writes:
How much of the fascist aesthetic of the new
urban housing remains in the construction of
the INA-case during the post-war period?
INA-case.
Sorry, I wasn't sure what that was. Very good.
That is a wonderful question and a fair deal
remains there. Some I know that there
were some protests against it even in the
fascist period. We sadly didn't have
time to get to this, but some of these designs
were highly contested by women using them.
An early design that was quickly
scrapped was the use of communal kitchens
as in the Soviet housing style.
And it resulted in what was, oddly
underreported event, the cooking fire
riots of Rome, in Garbatella,
so some of the then
newly built garden districts. Women
decided not to use the shared kitchens,
because they said it went against human
dignity. Instead, they started building cooking
fires in their courtyards, which accidentally
raged out of control on a regular basis.
So the regime was actually
forced to start building
more kitchens for individual families. I
believe a lot of these public housing,
a lot of these projects are still in existence,
particularly in the excerpts of Milan.
Interesting. Okay, Margaret asks: Was the fascist
period when industrialization of pasta developed?
It doesn't look like the
city kitchen had much counter space
to work with for making pasta by hand.
That is a very solid question. That's a
good observation. Yeah, you're right.
There was definitely less space. I had not thought about
that before and I will cite you if that comes up.
That actually would
encourage you to buy more
of the industrial pasta that's being made.
So the Italian pasta industry goes back to
Naples in the 1700s. That's when they started
building some of the big establishments.
And it's during this period that some
of the Northern groups ascend.
So for example Barilla and Buitoni both really
build up their factories during this period.
I think I showed you a colonial advertisement from
Barilla towards the end. My apologies.
Here we go.
So these factories
really did increase their production of dry
pasta for sale during this period. So there
was a precedent for it in the South, but yes,
these companies really get going in the 1930s.
Very good. And while we're still on the slide,
before I get to Laurie Hart's question,
now that we have the
La Molisana pasta up,
I wonder if you could maybe explain the "abissine rigate"
reference here in terms of how it's being
cast, what that reference is and
how that relates to the pasta shape.
Yes, pasta companies in the 1930s would use
politics - again, fascism as fashion.
They would often pick up on political trends. Today
we discussed autarky and pronatalism, but they
were also heavily involved in colonial projects.
Barilla, for example, had partial ownership,
along with the Galbani Cheese Company, over
the new rail network in Eritrea, for example.
And pasta shapes often took
African names, so this is Abissine rigate.
This was part of a scandal in 2021
when it was advertised as having, I believe
quote "lictorial flavor", "licrorial" referring
to the lictor, the symbol of fascism.
Barilla had produced tiny pasta fascists during
the 1930s, so these can seem like
historical oddities, but because there
has been less of a formal reckoning,
they sometimes burst into public consciousness,
as happened with the Molisana company last year.
Very good. All right, next we have Laurie Hart's
question. She writes: Thank you for this. If I
heard correctly, you mentioned that tomatoes
had been considered poisonous. Could you say more
about the life of the tomato in Italy generally,
and under futurism and fascism specifically?
Happy to. So there's a wonderful
book, if you're really curious,
called "Pomodoro" from
the scholar's last name, I believe,
is Gentilcuore, which in itself
is actually a type of tomato.
The tomato came in with the Colombian
exchange, so in the 1500s. So the exchange of
ingredients, but also sickness and
disease between Old World and New,
between the Americas and between Europe. When
the tomato first arrived, it came with its buddy,
the potato. And they had radically
different receptions in Italy.
The tomato was red and juicy, and it looked for all
the world like the forbidden fruit of paradise.
So it was roundly rejected as being a not only
poisonous, but potentially satanic fruit.
The potato, with its blandness and it's easy
portability and its ability
to fill the belly, was embraced by the elite
classes as a wonderful food for the poor.
Problem was they couldn't get the poor to
eat it right away. It was popularized by
French agronomer Parmentier whose name is now obviously
part of the famous potato recipe "Potatoes Parmentier".
So, in France, they planted potato
fields, kept them under armed guard,
then remove the armed guard for a day.
All the poor rushed and stole the potatoes
and that was how potatoes actually became
promulgated from France down to Italy.
So potatoes do a little bit
better, especially because the
word from the New World for potato
was "papa" which sounds a lot like pope
in Italian. So it was the godly food.
Little by little, tomatoes did catch on and the
first recipe that we have with tomatoes in it is
tomato sauce quote "in the Spanish style". So as with
a lot of Italian cuisine, there's so much inter
mixing and borrowing from nearby neighbors.
Very good. Thank you for that response.
I just want to acknowledge that Laurie Hart
is the Director of the UCLA Center for
European and Russian Studies, so thank
you, Laurie, for your co-sponsorship of this event.
It looks like the last question, unless there's any
final word out there about to trickle into
the chat dialogue, will be from Esther Claudio
and they write: Do you know if one of the
reasons for these factories blooming during the
fascist period - these food factories - was the use of
political prisoners as cheap sources of labor?
I am looking at a slightly
earlier part of the fascist period,
and I have not come across that.
However, I do know that in Germany,
large numbers of Italians were conscripted
for their labor in the food factories.
Generally speaking, what I've
seen in terms of who is working
in these factories, it's working class women -
in some cases newly arrived from the countryside.
For Perugina for example, by 1932 they
have 400 workers, 300 of them are women.
And, in some ways, they are part of the migrant
labor force in that they will come in for a while
and then leave. Let me make
a giant exception to this.
In the colonies - yes, there is definitely
forced labor, particularly in the agricultural
fields, and in the factories. Also in the
oil business and in the salt mining
business. There is lots of forced labor
in both of those types
of factories in the colonies.
And one would assume that the
forced labor in the colonies is of
colonial subjects, and not Italian. Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so it looks like we have one final question.
It's from Suzi in Spain. She says:
Was it a tomato sauce in the Spanish
style? This is causing considerable
confusion here in Spain.
Unfortunately, I don't have this
recipe right in front of me because
it dates back to, I think, the 1600s.
So it's a little bit beyond the bounds of this
talk. What I remember of the recipe is, it looks
to not all that dissimilar from Marcella
Hazan's famous 8-hour tomato recipe.
So it's very simple. It's largely tomatoes, oil,
salt, pepper and then lots and lots of time.
Great. Thank you. There's a couple
of thank yous and grazies in
the chat dialogue for you there, Diana.
We're just about out of time, so I will say
thank you so much for your time here today, for
giving us a kind of glimpse into this new book.
Everyone should have a link to the place
where you could purchase a discounted copy
of the book, if you so desire.
I believe that's set to expire in the next week, so
there's not a whole lot of time. And, of course, if
you don't purchase your own copy, do encourage
your university library to buy one for your
campus community. Thank you, Diana, so much
for your time. And thank you to everyone
who came and joined us here today.
Thank you so much, everyone.
This is really a pleasure.