List of Illustrations

Introduction: Tabletop Politics

1. Towards an Autarkic Italy

2. Agricultural Labour and the Fight for Taste

3. Raising Children on the Factory Line

4. Recipes for Exceptional Times

5. Model Fascist Kitchens

Conclusion: From Feeding Fascism to Eating Mussolini

TABLETOP POLITICS

The Italian table provides an intimate stage for national politics. Whether in a public trattoria or in a private kitchen, the table resonates deeply with Italian culture and society; it is the centre of everyday life in Italy. In the pre-Fascist period, the table had been the site of ancient Roman excess amongst the elite and intense privation for the poor; during the Fascist period, it was the site of initiatives to nationalize and Italianize. From the economic boom to the contemporary period, the Italian table has remained a vital component of public policy debates that ask what it means to be Italian today. The concept itself is a convivial one, building connections between the national and the regional, the government and the individual, the abstract and the concrete, the public and the private. Food provides the means to invite these disparate concepts into a cohesive conversation. Put another way, the Italian table encompasses not only the polenta and couscous served on it, but also the political debate that occurs above it.

Food matters: how food is produced, purchased, cooked, eaten, and represented illustrates social norms as well as personal choices. Further, food constitutes the point at which politics physically touch the individual through the material reality of everyday life. It can connect women’s political lives with the places where they lived and worked and the objects they owned and borrowed. It also points to new archives and materials for historical analysis. Culinary ephemera can provide concrete evidence to investigate abstract ideas, a method that food studies scholars refer to as using “food as a lens.”