Marxist historian pisses off 
by exposing them to reality
Grandi has made himself unpopular in some quarters by criticising Italy’s mighty food and drink sector, which, by some estimates, accounts for a quarter of GDP. On the podcast, he jokes he should only leave his house “with personal security guards, like Salman Rushdie”. In 2019, the Italian ambassador to Turkey reprimanded Grandi at a conference in Ankara after Grandi ridiculed Italy’s 800 protected designations, products whose quality is recognised by the EU as inextricably linked to their area. At Les Mots literary festival in Aosta in 2018, he was attacked by a Roman presenter who, offended by Grandi’s claims about carbonara, “called [him] every name in the book” in front of a dumbfounded live audience.
Read this to piss off the Italian in your life
There’s a dark side to Italy’s often ludicrous attitude towards culinary purity. In 2019, the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggested adding some pork-free “welcome tortellini” to the menu at the city’s San Petronio feast. It was intended as a gesture of inclusion, inviting Muslim citizens to participate in the celebrations of the city’s patron saint. Far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini wasn’t on board. “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture,” he said.
When Grandi intervened to clarify that, until the late 19th century, tortellini filling didn’t contain pork, the president of Bologna’s tortellini consortium (a real job title) confirmed that Grandi was right. In the oldest recipes, tortellini filling is made from poultry. “This is the reason why I do what I do,” Grandi says. “To show that what we hail as tradition isn’t, in fact, tradition.”
Had some lib tell me of some “European” recipe that had been made “since the dawn of time.” It had potatoes in it. Since then, I’m generally distrustful of any European “tradition” that would have required every single person from that country to know how to read and have ample access to the resources to do it, let alone all the other cultures that also happened to live in those same countries and probably did things differently.
The Dutch say black pete is tradition too, but it’s fairly recent lol
Yeah where I am from it was turnips all day, every day until potatoes arrived. And barley as they grain.
This month, Meloni’s minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, suggested establishing a task force to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world. He fears that chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian. (Officially listed “traditional food products” now number a staggering 4,820.)
The EU after decades of financial imperialism hollowed out Italian heavy industries in favor of Germany and France. Italians have to now trademark their food to survive instead of sharing their culture freely with the rest of the world. The EU shall never be forgiven for this.
But Dr. Pagliacci, I am the Italian in my life
someone please hit me with a non-paywalled link so I can piss myself off a bit (and learn something, I’m kinda curious now)
TLDR most Italian “traditional foods” were just made up in the 1950s
Yea, after reading, this is really most of it, though the particulars are pretty interesting and the American influence a lot stronger than I was aware. Also, that bit about parmesan is hilarious, how the most traditionally prepared parmesan these days comes from Wisconsin because they never changed their recipe whereas parmesan in Italy became a harder cheese over the years. It’s one of the few actual old things in italian cuisine and it totally changed throughout the centuries, disproving the whole ‘tradition means never changing’ thing
Also, Gastronationalism is a baller wordCool little article overall, though I’m not really pissed off.
What pissed me off more, was learning those cool little stove top espresso kettles are made from aluminium because the fascists made it the national metal
Replaced with an archive link: https://archive.li/fOzXf
So italian cuisine is made up? Very interesting subject, I hope to learn more about it.
If you like this, wait until you learn that practically every other thing that a European claims is traditional was invented in the years 1800-1950
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You idiot. The traditional way is to hold the spaghetti stick above an open flame until it chars. Any real pasta lover knows that.
European cuisine before the introduction of New World crops (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, corn, beans) must have been a fucking wasteland. If you’re interested in food stuff for the common peasant in Europe, read the first volume of Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism. Spoiler: most people had some kind of gruel (oatmeal basically) and ocassionally a few veggies except on feast days, “recipes” by and large were for the wealthy elite.
