Food and Politics

Apr 2, 2023 | Dead Water, Sugar, Ah Honey Honey

For those following my encounter with Type-2 diabetes, I posted an update here:

18. March 2023 Update

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I read a fascinating article in the Financial Times a couple of days ago. It’s paywalled, but I somehow got to it via a Substack link. The piece is by Marianna Giusti and titled Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong.

Responses were covered briefly in the Guardian.

The focus of the article is the modern invention of Italian food and is built around an interview with Alberto Grandi (Marxist academic, reluctant podcast celebrity and judge at this year’s Tiramisu World Cup in Treviso.) The paragraph that caught my attention was this one,

“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention oftradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says.

The article goes on to tease out the role of America and the Italian diaspora in creating dishes and culinary traditions. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the ‘journey’ of panetone from an obscure food of the impoverished through reinvention and industrialisation to its destination as an artisanal product. When reading, though, I was struck by other parallel processes. The most obvious is the invention of Irishness centred on St Patrick’s Day. The contrast between how the day is marked in Ireland and the incontinent paddywhackery in the US is both stark and laughable.

More relevant to me is the invention of Scottishness. I once went to a ‘Scottish’ bar in Oshawa, Ontario that celebrated an identity that I didn’t recognise – but what did I know, I just live here. I wrote here too last year about going to the Michigan Renaissance Festival and Highland Fling:

The Way of the Mouse and the Dragon

Nor did it have a lot to do with Scotland: sure, there were many kilts on display, but there was also that curious American confusion between Scottish and Irish, and the historical costumes were influenced more by Mel Gibson than authenticity.

The interplay between cuisine and politics that Giusti highlights is relevant in Scotland too. On the one hand there is the international triumph of malt whisky when, until very recently, it was more usual to enjoy blended whisky in Scotland; on the other hand there is the faux Scottishness of Braveheart – a film made in Ireland by an Australian – in which our hero manages a quick shag with Princess Isabella of France before embracing glorious martyrdom. All bollocks, and shot through with colonialist tropes of the Noble Savage, but the resonances of that nonsensical piece of fiction still pulse through Scottish political life as the fiction is taken for a version of reality that goes beyond misguided metaphor: the reification of a fantasy.