UNESCO recognition is generally a good idea, bringing attention to the small ways people sustain cultures through daily practices. Yet, while there’s some evidence that recognition could boost economic activity, the announcement doesn’t do much to directly support people who produce food in Italy.
“This is cultural recognition as vibes,” says Rome-based Eater contributor Katie Parla. “The announcement is so broad that you could swap Italy out for Mexico, Korea, Peru, or literally any other country and the statement would still read as true. It does not safeguard endangered practices, support precarious foodways, or even define what exactly is being preserved beyond a fuzzy feeling of togetherness.”
The announcement also landed in the middle of a larger debate within Italy about identitarian gastronationalism.
“There are two main principles involving Italian gastronationalism: The notion that the country’s culinary traditions must be protected from ‘foreign contamination,’ and that its recipes must be enshrined to prevent any ‘tinkering,’” writes researcher Andrea Carlo in Politico. “The effects of this gastronationalism now stretch from [the] political realm all the way to the world of social media ‘rage-bait,’ with a deluge of TikTok and Instagram content lambasting ‘culinary sins’ like adding cream to carbonara or putting pineapple on pizza.”
This policing of cultural boundaries through food ranges from silly — social media accounts like Italians mad at food or Lionfield — to politically combative. Meloni’s hard-right administration, which also pushes restrictive anti-immigrant policies, has fought EU nutrition labeling and lab-grown meat. Meloni’s agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, has engaged in fear mongering over immigrants “ethnically replacing” native-born Italians and “Italian-sounding” products that diverge from a fixed vision of “traditional” cuisine.
“I’m sure, in the first place, the idea of the UNESCO application was done in good faith. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, I think it was a way to find strength,” Margo Schächter, an Italian food journalist who previously worked at La Cucina Italiana, told me. “After the election of this government in 2022, the submission turned into a political statement.”
While many American travelers may not care much about Italian political debates, gastronationalist narratives flatten the history and nuances that make Italian cuisine so rich for visitors.
“Too often, all things Italian, food included, risk being reduced to stereotypes,” says Jaclyn DeGiorgio, another Eater contributor, in Milan. “It’s easy to forget that Italy, as we know it, is younger than America. It wasn’t unified until the late 19th century, and parts of northeast Italy only joined after World War I. Before that, much of the peninsula was under foreign rule, and these influences, along with trade, helped shape the cuisine.”
Entire books have been written about famous “Italian” dishes actually cobbled together from ingredients from around the world. Food historian Alberto Grandi — whose latest book is titled La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn't Exist) — regularly lands in hot water for arguing iconic Italian dishes like carbonara may actually have American roots. While UNESCO could have weighed in, “There is no hint in the UNESCO announcement of how famine, trade, industrialization, or colonial encounters shaped what Italians eat,” Parla adds.
UNESCO recognition isn't intrinsically bad, but it fails to grapple with the real challenges facing Italian food — like a warming climate changing what ingredients can grow in Italian soil, or anti-immigrant rhetoric that threatens the migrant labor the farming industry relies on.
It also misses the ways Italian cuisine — broadly defined — is thriving elsewhere around the world — and in Italy. We included Milan in our annual Where to Eat package exactly because, as DeGiorgio writes, the city’s leading chefs creatively reinvent Italian food, and the Olympics could bring more attention to how they break the confines of “traditional” cuisine.
Countries compete for tourism dollars like they do for podium placement, but cooking is too complex for the sports analogy to hold. “The UNESCO application was just about being recognized, achieving the goal, and winning the medal,” Schächter says. “But this is not a championship. After the bragging, what’s the plan now?”
What do you think? Should we be celebrating national cuisines? Or are there other ways to preserve food cultures? Let us know at newsletters@eater.com.
