Anti-Pasta

 Anti-Pasta

Many of us in the USA are familiar with Mary Ann Esposito. 

TV Celebrity and Author
Mary Ann Esposito

She is the host of the longest-running television cooking program in America, "Ciao Italia," now in its 32^nd year.  Esposito has taught in numerous cooking schools throughout Italy.  Additionally, she is the recipient of many awards including the “Order of the Star of Italy Cavaliere” award from the President of the Italian Republic as well as the “Premio Artusi Award” for her work in teaching and promoting Italian food.  At last count, she is the author of thirteen cookbooks.  Mary Ann graduated from of University of New Hampshire (UNH) where she earned a master's degree in Food History.  She recently returned to her alma mater to spend a day as part of UNH Dining Services' Great Chefs on Campus Series.  Her visit offered me an opportunity to join a webinar, one of those teaching seminars streaming on the Internet.  What piqued my interest was the advertised title of her presentation, “There Is No Such Thing as Italian Food.”  Right off, I was intrigued.  How could that possibly be the case, I reasoned, when Italian food is celebrated worldwide?  Could it be so universal that it has lost its unique Italian identity?  This I had to hear out of fear she may have lost it.  Thirty years on TV just might do that.

Although I’d set an alarm to be sure to remind myself well before she’d begin, I was still late joining in via Zoom.  Zoom was something in this age of COVID I’d heard of but never actually tried.  Once I’d downloaded the Zoom software, I was on, although about five minutes late.  I caught up though and her point soon became clear to me as she addressed the diversity of Italian regional foods, region by region.  I hadn’t interpreted her choice of title correctly.  Her reasoning was that the all-encompassing term ‘Italian Food’ is actually not hard and fast but regional, spread across numerous gastronomic centers throughout Italy.  One cookbook did not serve all.  How aConcetta might make fresh pasta up north in Asti would not match how Lucia made her dough in Naples.  The forces that created food traditions where also factors that complicated matters, let’s say “stirred the pot” further.  Climate and the influence of neighboring seas had their effects as well on the foods that could successfully be used to feed local inhabitants.  Essentially, you worked with what was on hand, and when there was little to nothing available, you improvised however you could season-to-season, right down to using the internal organs and entrails of butchered animals.  Nothing waisted, they refer to it as “offal” which feature ingredients like blood, brains, jowls, intestines, feet, hearts, tails, lungs, hooves,

Behold Guanciale, a Distant Cousin
of Prosciutto

eyes, horns, and stomachs.  I’m sure I missed a few, but taken together, I’d estimate the mélange would be on the order of Scottish haggis, seemingly ‘awful’ too but then who can honestly say what goes into hotdogs!  I recall once trying what I now suspect was something approaching offal, if not the real thing, at a Calitri festival.  I waited in line beside a mobile, street-side concession all lite up with strings of white lights seeking to attract the evening crowd like moths to light.  I was waiting to try hunks of what looked like white meat, thinking pork, being served on glossy, napkin-sized sheets of paper along with half a lemon, evidently for squeezing.  From the numbers being meted out, it seemed popular and worth a try.  Well, the long and short of it, at least for me, was once was enough.  Maybe, like grappa, it takes more than a wee dram or two to acquire the taste.  If I have it right, it was pork all right, something called guanciale, a name derived from guancia, the Italian word for cheek.  It was cured pork jowl that for me, a rookie, was like eating stiffened lard, nothing close to sinking your teeth into something solid.  In a flashback, it ranked with a pie I was once served by cheek-pinching, well-intentioned aunts on my mother’s French side.  They called it tarte au viniagre.  The thought of it glistens my eyes.  Yes, it was vinegar pie, something they had concocted during the Great Depression and again something I’d indulged in but once.  They may have called it pie but ‘awful’ would have better described it.  

Out of necessity, regional differences emerged.  For instance, while wines, cheeses, olives, and tomatoes thrive throughout Italy, they gained legendary status in particular regions.  I could see her point, the idea of “Italian Food” was more a mosaic with pieces here and there forming an overall image with no single benchmark to its cuisine.  Differences ranged from an emphasis on seafood and olive oil in Puglia while Campania showcased tomatoes.  Bistecca and wine heralded Tuscany, and while pasta dominated the south, rice reigned in Lombardy and Piedmont due to water being so abundant.  Geological factors, like the Apennine Mountains running down the center of the Italian peninsula, like a spine, had masterfully functioned to isolate regions, inhibiting transportation, limiting communications, in essence sequestering them from time and in the process created regions each with distinctive cuisines with variations in preparation.  Huh, this just might help explain Mary Ann’s portfolio of thirteen Italian cookbooks!  

There was one comment in particular that especially caught my attention.  She made a remark about Benito Mussolini (Italian Prime Minister 1922-43), known as Il Duce (The Leader).  In Calitri, I’d heard stories about him, as for instance how parents who named their child ‘Benito’, were given Lira cash rewards.  In fact, a Benito I knew in Calitri related how his parents received a stipend large enough to build their family home.  So, this “Name Your Male Children Benito” program was definitely on the up and up.  It recently repeated itself on a much smaller scale.  In 2008, Reuters reported that the Fiamma Tricolore party, the descendant of Mussolini’s fascist party, coaxed parents with an offer of 1,500 Euros ($1,930 then) to name their babies after wartime dictator Benito Mussolini or his wife Rachele, saying their names were under threat of disappearing.  Talk about a long-lasting cancel culture.  I can appreciate why their popularity had evaporated.  The program applied to babies born in

Il Duce

five villages in southern Basilicata where the birth rate was especially low.  There was no later follow-up on how successful the program had been, but I’ve not noticed a spurt in Benitos lately although I’d have bet the name Rachele may have fared much better.  Another Mussolini tale concerned the tunnel in and out of the Borgo we pass through each time we walk to town.  The building it passes through was once part of a convent and today makes up part of the town office.  Supposedly, Benito played some role in having it built.  Likely, he was “the money.”

When he became Prime Minister, one of Mussolini’s goals was to make Italy self-sufficient and free from foreign interference.  There was purpose behind this dream.  Il Duce's vision encompassed a return to the lost glory of the Roman Empire.  To achieve this, the Italian nation needed to transform into a powerful, self-reliant state.  He realized that to accomplish this, Italy needed to expand and that meant the possibility of war.  Once war began, it was inevitable that trade blockades and embargoes would follow. Thus, it was important for Mussolini

Alberto Sordi in a
Pro-Pasta Moment

to make Italy independent of trade.  Their reliance on foreign sources for essential supplies was promulgated as a form of slavery.  Beyond a need for oil, iron ore, and coal, their dependence extended to agriculture as well.  By the mid-20s, his goal to revamp the Italian diet took aim at increasing bread and cereal production at home in order to reduce their dependence on foreign imports of grain.  By then this amounted to one-third of the national demand.  This initiative had many parts.  One in particular impacted that everyday essential, wheat, a fundamental ingredient in making not only bread but also pasta.  It essentially put crosshairs on Italy’s most beloved food.  Bread intake, while a problem, did not approach the level of consumption that pasta enjoyed since the type of wheat used to make bread was far more abundant.  A different type of wheat, durum wheat, was needed to produce semolina flour, the primary ingredient used to make pasta.  Since durum wheat grew well only in a few regions of southern Italy, satisfying the national appetite for pasta was a big problem.  For a long time, in fact, Italy had out-eaten its durum wheat production which accounted for its heavy reliance on wheat from abroad to fill its bowls with pasta.

With such huge amounts of imported grain needed to keep up with the demand, the idea was to encourage Italians to use less of it and thus reduce Italy’s dependence on imports.  Mussolini moved to stop the entry of foreign grain products by imposing controls on imported bread and by raising the

Benito Helps with the 
Wheat Harvest

import fees associated with grain.  To offset the resultant drop in supply and the higher costs, Italians had to be convinced to move away from and eat less pasta, whether that be spaghetti right down to the last imaginable type of pasta noodle.  Since pasta was a mainstay of Italy’s diet, you would think that it was an uphill battle, a swim against a ferocious current, and it was.  He was not simply manipulating their diets but threatening traditions, livelihoods, and national culture.  A propaganda campaign ensued to encourage only consumption of foods produced in Italy and those made from home-grown grains.  The problem for Italy was that while this gambit initially resulted in an uptick in homegrown wheat, where even Il Duce took off his shirt and helped in the fields, threshing wheat, demand continued to outstrip supply.  Especially for the poor, the quality of their lives diminished further.  In the southern area around Calitri, for instance, the wheat shortage wreaked havoc.  Lacking a grain substitute, they reverted to chestnuts which were abundant and still are along the mountainsides of nearby places like Bagnoli.  Flour ground from dried chestnuts earned the name "bread of tree."  It may not

Bagnoli Castagne (Chestnuts)

have bothered Benito much.  He was not known as a food connoisseur since he suffered from chronic ulcers that reportedly limited him to a milk and fruit diet.  Unfortunately, for the people affected and his glorious vision of an Italian revival, he’d picked the wrong country to attempt to lure its populous away from their beloved pasta.  He’d have had a better chance trying to convince his fellow countrymen that three was nearer to two than four.

In addition to raising the fees associated with importing grains, Mussolini insisted that Italians transition to eating rice instead of pasta.  The average Italian had to wonder if the guy was Italian at heart.  After all, even then, what was more Italian than pasta?  I’d heard of Italians who returned to Italy from the US because they missed their mother’s pasta so much, staying wasn’t worth it.  With such deep cravings, it would take some convincing.  To stem the tide of consumption, Benito would need some persuasive pasta arguments worthy of a Madison Avenue marketing campaign.  

Regarding this “public enemy number one” pasta policy, Mussolini had support from the up-and-coming Italian Futurism art movement.  They derided anything that wasn’t on the cutting edge of modern.  They believed only in the future and were keen on a technological tomorrow based on science.  The belief that new structures and institutions could only rise from the complete destruction of earlier forms dominated their ideology.  To them history was anathema, serving no purpose when only innovation, invention, and modernity mattered.   In a reverse effect of any tonic or vitamin, they preached that pasta weighed you down, promoted weakness, laziness, pessimism, and an overall lack of passion.  These are all traits I personally never imagine as I fork into a comforting bowl of spaghetti any time I can.  They taught that while it tasted great and satisfied, it did not foster an image of virility, not the “right stuff” for fighters of the modern nation-state they championed.  Meanwhile, in a full-court press, other forms of propaganda maintained that eating pasta diminished speed, stemmed aggression, and virility, which contradicted the concept of the ideal modern Italian man.  This “not modern enough” pasta, that Italians clung to and a cornerstone of their diets, was seen as just another thing holding the entire country back.  Doing his part, beyond helping with a wheat harvest, Il Duce composed a poem in 1929 entitled “Amate il Pane,” “Love Bread" where he encouraged his countrymen not to waste this precious product as his program encouraged them to consume less of it.

Love bread, the heart of the house,

the scent of the table, the joy of the hearth.

 

Respect the bread, the sweat of the brow,

the pride of work, the poem of sacrifice.

 

Honor the bread, glory of the fields,

fragrance of the earth, feast of life.

 

Do not waste bread, wealth of the Fatherland,

the sweetest gift of God,

the blessed reward for human fatigue.

It had a love it but leave it tone and if you couldn’t leave it entirely, then you shouldn’t eat too much of it.  If it had been technically possible, early TV might have seen Il Duce playing futurist chef on his own food network to help overturn ingrained eating patterns for the cause.  Mimicking an early Emeril Lagasse, or Mario Batali for that matter, he could have promoted utopian fascist recipes showcasing clever ways to stretch their durum wheat supplies, and when gone, substitute unusual combinations and exotic ingredients.  For example, and I kid you not, why not try mortadella with nougat or pineapples with sardines?  It would certainly have been enough to cause Mary Ann Esposito to turn green.  In an

Sienese Dystopia - A Symbolic Portrayal of 
Bad Government

appeal for their new cuisine, Futurists went so far as to craft a Manifesto of Futurist Cooking.  It proposed how meals should be served where basically a meal’s purpose was fundamentally altered.  Can you imagine the average Italian buying into the size of the perfect meal being only a few mouthfuls?  What about meals intended more for eye appeal than consumption?  I guess today’s modernist vogue, evident not in mom’s kitchen but high-end restaurants and known for exotic presentations, minuscule portions, and beyond torches for crème brulee the use of freezing nitrogen, confirm its delayed implementation.  For Italians of that day, there was instead pushback.  They would press on as best they could.  In passive resistance, they tolerated the situation without accepting it. Petitions emerged where they refused to try the dishes the Futurists put forward in an attempt to get them to forget their beloved pasta.  No one was buying it as well as their cookbooks if any.  They did not see a fascist diet as the way to a fascist utopia.  Instead, many eked out a dystopian existence as food became harder and harder to come by.

    Ground zero in Benito’s ideological war, the front in his battle against pasta, thus became the Italian kitchen.  In an orchestrated effort, propaganda, the news media, and the arts all carried messages intent on swaying Italian opinion.  I recall similar

Why Not Light up?  Doctors Do.

appeals in the States when I was a child … how “9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes” or “more doctors smoke Camels,” before I’d run off to the corner store to buy packs for my dad.  These were early precursors of the incessant bombardment of adverts on American TV and costly Super Bowl ads years later that we’d talk about for days afterward.  These forms of influence were well before the debut of so-called Artificial Intelligence “bot” phone calls.  These robot calls try to sell us on something via what the newspaper cartoons once imagined as Dick Tracy’s sci-fi two-way wrist radio.  That ability is now an everyday event on that Apple bling we refer to as a “Smart Watch”.  While Benito’s efforts may have hobbled a nation, ours fuels an economy.  Thankfully, the best-laid plans of “The Leader” never stuck.  Not without trying, they nevertheless became unglued. 

The push toward self-sufficiency in wheat production was furthered by a land reclamation program to expand acreage for cultivation.  This included draining swamps like the malaria-ridden Pontine marshes in the coastal area south of Rome and converting unproductive or abandoned acres to wheat production.  Beyond the costly expense needed to salvage these infertile areas, till them, and their need for fertilizers, there were added costs in the form of unexpected side effects.  Today, we might

Pasta, More Powerful
than the Sword?

refer to these as perverse effects, some attendant unexpected downstream consequences that blindside even the best of planners.  When you squeeze a balloon, it inflates somewhere else and so it went when tinkering with agriculture.  As farmland, formerly used for other purposes, was converted to wheatfields, production of other food items decreased.  This effect was apparent in the conversion of productive orchards, vineyards, and pastureland into grain fields.  The availability of these foodstuffs dropped off for both the Italian consumer and for export.  These reductions in supply meant soaring grain prices for an already financially troubled nation that further fueled dissent.  Moneyless small peasant landowners were forced to sell their land cheaply as wheat supply diminished and prices skyrocketed, especially during the Depression years.  As prices rose and wages stagnated, the nutritional intake of Italian urban workers slumped, with much of southern Italy’s rural poor surviving on subsistence-level diets.  Additionally, as farmers became over-dependent to the import controls for survival, it allowed them to remain static and continue their traditional methods without the need to modernize or become competitive.

Admittedly, my choice of title, “Anti-Pasta,” used ‘anti’ not in the sense it is used in the word antipasto.  In the case of antipasto, the ‘anti,’ call it a prefix, means anticipation of the meal to follow, or colloquially, a mistranslation of “before the pasta.”  My take on ‘anti’ is old school, and with Mussolini in mind, its implication infers opposition.  As John Steinbeck put it, pulling from a poem by Robert Burns, and here I paraphrase, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”  Murphy's 

The Appeal and Power
of Pasta

Law summarizes it this way: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”  In relation to war, there is an equivalent expression.  Helmuth von Moltke, a brilliant planner like Napoleon and disciple of Clausewitz, expressed it this way: “One cannot be at all sure that any operational plan will survive the first encounter with the main body of the enemy.”  Cutting to the quick, this compresses to: “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.”  With projects large and small, things indeed go “awry” usually at the most inopportune time.  In Mussolini’s case, where initially there may have been little bloodshed beyond blisters, I’m not really sure whether he saw his anti-pasta initiative as an economic scheme in a prelude to war or as a move toward pure self-reliance during hard times.  He could have taken Moltke’s advice in a business sense where “No business plan survives first contact with the customer.”  While he may have won some skirmishes, in the end Il Duce lost this war.  It was a rather slow bleed in an orderly declension - he was losing, he would lose, he had lost.  Thankfully, it had been an attempted lineage with the briefest of history.  Whatever his thinking, he took on the wrong opponent, be they enemy or recalcitrant customer.  His was no cakewalk for he’d taken on none other than the Italian housewife, gatekeeper of the Italian diet.  Mama, even nonna, would see to it that they’d have their pasta.

Eating pasta was and remains just too great a part of the Italian psyche, bordering on a tribal fetish.  I doubt there is an Italian equivalent to the American turn of phrase, “Don’t mess with Texas.”  I’m not aware of Italy having a counterpart expression for the Eternal City, Milan, or Naples.  For instance, I do not find a national fervor like the identity and solidarity the Sienese show during their Palio.  What I do see is a national love of pasta in all its forms that has cemented its place as Italy’s national food.  Even Mary Ann Esposito would agree.  Thankfully, this anti-pasta war had been lost and today, pasta serves as a steadfast symbol of not only Italy but of what unites Italians.  Fortunately, Mussolini’s anti-pasta war was lost and today, as proof of something that unites Italians, it is definitely pasta.  Just imagine, if only Mussolini had made pasta, not war!  If there exists an idiom on par with that American expression about Texas, some turn of phrase to give Italy and pasta an artful distinction, I’d go with a catchphrase made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, but just a mite modified. “Pasta la Vista, Baby.”  Ooh, ooh, I think I may have struck on the makings of a new cookbook title.  What do you think Mary Ann?

From that Rogue Tourist,
Paolo