Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work

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.