Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: A Political History of Italian Food TV

By Francesco Buscemi

This book aims to develop a political history of Italian ‘good food’ on national television, and the central role of food in Italian culture. The focus is highly original and this is a unique interdisciplinary study at the intersection between food studies, media studies and politics.

The three protagonists of Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda are food, television and politics. These are the three main characters that interrelate, collaborate and fight behind the scenes, while in front of the camera the writers, intellectuals and celebrity chefs talk about, prepare or taste the best Italian dishes.

The book retraces the history of Italian food television from a political point of view: the early shows of the pioneers under strict Catholic control in the 1950s and 1960s, the left-wing political twist of the 1970s, the conservative riflusso or resurgence of the 1980s, the disputed Berlusconian era and the rise of the celebrity chefs, which, for better or for worse, makes Italy similar to the other western countries.

The history of Italy since the mid-1950s is retold through the lenses of food television. This lively book demonstrates that cooking spaghetti in a TV studio is a political act, and tries to uncover how it is possible that, while watching on TV how to make pizza, we become citizens.

The primary readership will be an academic audience, including those in the disciplines of food studies, media studies, politics and Italian studies, as well as potentially for those interested in Italian sociology and anthropology. There may be a potential wider readership because of the popularity of Italian food and food television.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789384086

Francesco Buscemi

Fransesco Buscemi is a food and media researcher working at IUAV, University of Venice and at the Catholic University of Milan. In the past, Buscemi taught at Bournemouth, La Sapienza Rome, IULM Milan and Stirling. He has been a journalist and TV writer for many years. His Ph.D., gained at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, is a comparison between Italian and British food culture and food TV. Another strand of research involves meat, cultured meat and their links to the living animal, death, religion, blood, gender and the relationships between nature and culture. In 2012, Buscemi was awarded the Santander Grant Fund for the research Edible Lies: How Nazi Propaganda Represented Meat to Demonise the Jews, and he has also investigated meat representations in the propaganda of the Italian regency of Fiume, Italian Fascism and East Germany regime.

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Introduction

In past years, whenever I found myself in Britain or the United States and came across a cooking show on television, I asked myself the same question: why are cooking shows here so different from those in Italy? It might seem like an irrelevant question, but the differences were radical and inexplicable to my level of knowledge. Thus, when I decided to do a Ph.D., I was in no doubt of the topic: the proposal that I sent to several UK universities was a historical comparison between British and Italian food TV. When the proposal was accepted, I dived into the food culture of the two countries, elaborated my theory beginning from the origins of the two approaches to food, started to write my thesis and, when I was about to finish, discovered that in the meantime the differences had been erased and Italian food TV was now identical that of the Anglosphere.

Reality had run faster than my thesis. Embarrassed, I added a couple of sections to explain what had occurred and how it impacted my theories, benefited from the understanding of the examiners and achieved my goal of earning my doctorate.

Since then, however, I have continued to visit Britain and the United States and have continued to be stupefied by their food shows. The only difference is that I now ask myself why the cooking shows here are so similar to those in Italy. The fact that two such different cultures, which I know very well after my studies, produce the same types of programmes, makes me even more surprised than when I noticed the differences.

This book proceeds from the knowledge gained during my studies and provides a historical account of Italian food TV and how it has changed. In the meantime, I have, however, discovered other factors: first, Italian food TV had not changed as suddenly as I believed at the end of my Ph.D., but had undergone various processes of mutation; second, many of these changes were related to politics; and third, Italian food TV has been underrated in the international academic debate, yet I firmly believe that knowledge of its history would aid in the understanding of media development in Italy and other countries, and this conviction hastened the writing of this book. Italian food and Italian TV have been investigated separately 2by scholars worldwide. Indeed, many studies (Capatti and Montanari 2003; Parasecoli 2004; Petrini 2005) have been published on Italian food culture, the history of Italian food, the Slow Food movement, and the centrality of food in Italian culture, though some have drawn on stereotypes. Similarly, much research has been devoted to Italian TV, especially concerning the Berlusconi years. However, the combination of the two fields, that is, Italian food TV, has never been a hot topic, perhaps because for many years up until the 1980s there were not many cooking shows in Italy.

In linking food and television, this book also adds politics, a field that has very frequently been coupled either with food or with television. In studies on food and politics (Hibberd and Sorrentino 2007; MacDonald 2013), the division between food as a necessity and food as a luxury is fundamental. Italian food TV has told this story precisely, gradually moving from food as a necessity, hunger, to refined unnecessity, that is, appetite. Regarding the link between politics and television, years of British and North American cultural studies, and abundant media sociology research (Hall 1992; Hibberd 1994), have taught us that TV is either directly or indirectly controlled by governments, and often contributes to the diffusion of the dominant ideologies in society, as well as to nation-building in its popular culture form. This perspective is adopted in order to analyse the development of Italian cooking shows over the years.

In this book, the points of convergence between food TV and politics are concepts such as ‘good’ food, ‘good’ cooks, top chefs, etiquette, in which ‘good’ does not mean food that is good to eat, or food that is tasty or healthy, but food that is designated ‘good’ for reasons that are extraneous to nourishment and instead linked to politics. Given the relationship between TV and politics, I have investigated cases where TV shows have suggested a specific type of food, or a particular method of preparation or eating, or of being a cook, and have argued that these suggestions hide political motives, supporting traditional or innovative social roles, values or cultural views. Obviously, this is not true of a single ingredient or dish, but of wider themes, such as ‘sacred’ food in the 1950s–70s, eating at home in the 1980s, food cooked by ‘celebrity housewives’ in the 2000s and on the global taste of the last ten years. This angle of analysis prefigured the investigation of ‘bad’ food, that is, food that has been branded as negative or somehow dangerous and to be avoided. Consequently, this book is certainly incomplete, as it focuses on the relationships between food TV shows and their practices of guided consumption, and on how it has changed through the years, ignoring other aspects that a straight history of food TV might address.

Hence, the necessity of Bourdieu (1984, 1993, 2003, 2005). The French sociologist, as it is clear in my theoretical framework outlined in Chapter 1, was interested in the way that fields of cultural production build power by legitimizing and 3delegitimizing cultural goods, by promoting some kinds of consumption and discouraging others, and by including some professional roles and excluding others. This is exactly the type of investigation that I carry out in this book by considering what kinds of food, cooks, cooking methods and eating are encouraged by a specific TV show, and conversely what is advised against. Moreover, a group of scholars (Stringfellow et al. 2013) following on from Bourdieu generated the theory of ‘tastemaker’, which I apply to the role of the presenters and chefs participating in these shows. To conclude my analysis, I relate my findings to the political sphere in order to uncover the intrinsic reasons behind the positive or negative positions taken by certain TV food shows.

Yet, this book attempts to investigate a mutual rather than a unidirectional relationship. This means departing slightly from Bourdieu (1990, 1991), who was led by a more unidirectional view, though he often underlined that all cultural fields work relationally. I consider the dynamics between food TV and politics to be inter-relational. On the one hand, food TV shows have repeated the dominant ideologies; on the other hand, they have introduced challenging innovations that have become political issues. Thus, like politics, food TV has become embroiled in the eternal fight between novelty and tradition.

In any case, the focus remains on politics. In fact, through representing what we eat in particular ways, food TV shows convey either traditional or innovative views on a variety of issues, such as social relationships, gender perspectives, cultural values and so on, in a politically charged way. Celebrating or mocking the food culture of another country; describing nations as rooted in their food culture, which thus functions as a marker of their superiority or inferiority; showing women cooking because that is their job or because it is their duty, and so on, are all political choices, and this book zeroes in on these choices in relation to the corresponding Italian political contexts.

This approach allows me to explain what ‘political history’ means in the context of food TV, that is, connecting representations on food TV shows to the political context in which those representations were broadcast. Thus, in Chapter 1, I delineate the Italian political context from 1954, the year when TV originated in Italy, to the present. Moreover, the term ‘political’ here has different degrees, in the sense that sometimes food TV feeds or is fed by values or ideologies that belong precisely to a specific political party, while at other times the term refers to a general political and cultural mood.

The book is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the literature concerning the principal themes, including Italian politics, food culture, television and food TV. Moreover, the chapter develops the theoretical framework that has guided this book, based on Bourdieu’s (1990, 1993, 2010) sociological and cultural studies theories linking television to political power. Finally, the ‘Methodology’ section 4ends the chapter, explaining how Italian food TV shows have been analysed using Bourdieusian field analysis and multimodal research.

Chapter 2 focuses on the period 1954–70 and thus on one of the very few food TV shows broadcast during this period by Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI), the public service broadcaster and sole television channel permitted to transmit at the time. The TV show is Alla Ricerca dei Cibi Genuini: Viaggio nella Valle del Po (‘In search of genuine foods: Journey to the River Po Valley’) (1957–58), the first Italian food travelogue created, directed and presented by the novelist Mario Soldati. The programme contributed to the construction of the Italian nation around the unifying concept of food, and presents interesting case studies that link to gender and ideology. In addition, another programme, Linea contro Linea (‘Line against line') (1967) helps contextualize the political approach to food during those years and was strongly influenced by the Catholic presence in the government of both the nation and the public service broadcaster.

The decade of the 1970s is at the centre of the third chapter. The period was marked by radical movements that deeply influenced television in general and food TV in particular. Indeed, RAI was reorganized during a reformation initiated in 1975, although the general atmosphere of change had begun to affect a variety of TV programmes well before then. The food TV show A Tavola alle 7 (‘At the table at 7pm’) (1974–76) is a useful example of the new national sentiments, with its hints at a progressive society thanks to the dynamics developed between its presenters Luigi Veronelli and Ave Ninchi. Another food TV show mentioned in this chapter, Dimmi come Mangi (‘Tell me how you eat’) (1978–79), foreshadows the commercial and hedonistic turn of the 1980s, forming a bridge to the next chapter.

Chapter 4 analyses the 1980s and 1990s, twenty years that may not at first appear to have been influential in the history of Italian food TV, but that prepared the ground for the next age, the Berlusconian one. The innovative trends of the previous decade came to a halt in order to give voice to more conservative ideologies and governments, and to the cultural context aptly named riflusso (‘reflux’), or ‘the return home’. The shows principally analysed here are those presented by the singer Wilma De Angelis, which perfectly mirrored the spirit of the times. Importantly, this is also the stage when food TV became a genre, with RAI and the first commercial channels creating many shows on producing, cooking and eating food.

Cooking shows broadcast in the period 2000–12, Berlusconian TV and the nation of Italy are the main focus of the fifth chapter. Actually, Berlusconi became Prime Minister in 1994, but the effects of his presence on food TV emerged later. Specifically this chapter looks at the new female presenters of food TV shows and terms them as ‘celebrity housewives’. These shows prefigure a new idea of woman as a combination of a housewife and a professional, empowered but also 5stereotyped. However, the context here is fundamental, as Berlusconi impressed a strong political stamp on television. He, in fact, activated a sort of neo-liberalism à la Italienne, mediating the primacy of the money and the financial motivation of that ideology with more traditional views. In addition, during this period, news bulletins very often talked about food, gastronomic traditions and local recipes in an entertaining way.

The final chapter, the sixth, deals with the many, too many for someone, cooking shows broadcast from 2012 to the present. In these years, food TV shows invaded public and commercial TV channels, and mainstream and niche channels, gradually becoming similar to the many food TV shows of Anglosphere broadcasters. Despite a political scenario that has become more fluid and non-ideological, the genre continues to contain political elements and connections. TV chefs have proliferated everywhere, relying on performance and style, with an unprecedented variety of approaches analysed in this book through the Bourdieusian concept of habitus. The chapter also investigates programmes that are too close to the present to be yet historicized, but looking at them through political lenses allows the researcher to situate them in the general context of this book.

Finally, the Conclusion attempts to sum up a conclusive reading of the political history of Italian food TV.

1

Literature Review, Theoretical Framework and Methodology

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first reviews the literature on Italian politics, food and TV, respectively, evidencing studies that link each field where possible. Although many scholars (Grasso 2000; Parasecoli 2004) have noted the links between Italian politics and TV, especially in the 1950s and during the Berlusconi years, only a few shed light on the relationships between food and TV, or between food and politics. Moreover, no exhaustive literature exists on Italian food TV programmes, nor on the Italian food TV genre as considered from a political or historical perspective. This book aims to bridge this gap. The second section outlines the theoretical framework. It centres on Bourdieu (1984, 1993, 2003, 2005) and his theories on the field of cultural production and its dynamics. The framework also builds on cultural studies perspectives addressing the reciprocal relationship between politics and the media. The third section describes the methodology that I adopted in order to carry out this research. This also begins with Bourdieu, applying field analysis to Italian food TV, which is here considered as a field of cultural production, as I clarify below. The final part of the methodology regards the techniques used to gather the data and sample the programmes.

Politics, television and food in Italy: Dangerous liaisons

Politics in Italy after the Second World War

This section does not aim to give the reader an exhaustive insight into Italian politics, a highly complex system that certainly would deserve more space and deeper analysis. Rather, it reviews the literature concerning the different stages in Italian political history to orientate the reader through the next chapters, which take periodization and political changes almost for granted. Even though this book analyses Italian food TV since 1954, it is necessary to explain Italian politics 7post-Second World War, as Italy was established as a democratic republic in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

After Fascism and the Second World War, the political development of Italy was significantly different from that of other European democracies. In particular, the government had long lacked the alternation of two different parties, usually one conservative and the other progressive (Scoppola 1997), which was commonplace in other western democracies. Leonzi (2010) clarifies that the shift from a Fascist to a democratic national identity in Italy was troubled. At the end of the dictatorship, it was difficult to put forward another paradigm and re-create the nation around a different idea of Italy, because the various political components were unable to find a common pathway.

The new democratic republic, which resulted from a referendum in 1946, was governed without interruption by the Catholic party Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy) (DC) from 1948 to 1993, first alone and later in coalitions with other parties. Capperucci (2014) advances that DC governed for 45 years in the name of two ideals: anti-communism and anti-fascism, underlining its central and moderate position. Weinberg (1995: 20) points out that ‘as a consequence of this exclusion, many observers have described the Italian system as blocked’. Orsina (2014) challenges this view and suggests that DC’s anti-fascism and anti-communism were actually flexible entities that allowed the party to accept external support from the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement) and the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party) (PCI), which became necessary in order to continue to rule the nation in coalition. Related to this, Santomassimo (2003) argues that a monolithic anti-Fascist culture in Italy did not actually exist, as the political groups that had defeated the dictatorship diverged greatly and struggled to find a common view of the nation. DC, thus, governed by imposing its Catholic values while remaining equally extraneous to the other ideologies. In the next chapters, I clarify how this approach is evident in Italian culture and even on TV cooking shows.

Certainly, the blocked system governed by DC prevented politics from culturally modernizing the country and competing with the advanced European democracies, such as the United Kingdom and France. Moreover, Pratt (1996) argues that the power of the Catholic Church was reinforced by a robust Catholic pedagogical system that continuously reaffirmed Catholic principles and values. However, we must also take into account that alternatives to this frozen model of power were scarce. On the one hand, the PCI, especially until the 1960s, was still bound to the dictatorship of the Soviet Union, and this terrified both the Catholics and the liberals (Acocella 2013). On the other hand, the Italian right-wing was actually far-right, unable and unwilling to detach from Mussolini’s totalitarian Fascism, and composed of members who were even involved in acts of terrorism (Weinberg 1986). 8In this light, DC can be seen as preserving the equilibrium of Italian political and social life through a paternalistic form of leadership that averted both extreme and violent turns, while stalling social and cultural progression. The party aimed to provide reassurance to the Italian people through promoting moderate Catholic values, which among other avenues were mediated through television and, as this book aims to demonstrate, through televisual representations of food.

Scoppola (2003) argues that this first stage of the democratic republic ended in the early 1970s, when a new, more volatile period began. On the one hand, extremism, terrorism and violence exacerbated political life and strongly reduced social and cultural opportunities for the Italian people; on the other hand, the slow but continuing activity of the PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer dissociated the PCI from the Soviet Union, and opened new ground for social rights and progress. In a short time, a more trusted left-wing became involved in the management of the State, externally supporting the government and, importantly for this book, participating in the management of public service television, initiating a new era for Italian broadcasting (Chiarenza 2002). However, as Gentiloni Silveri (2003) points out, this change was problematic when seen from abroad; in particular, the United States expressed concern that the ‘new’ Italy was walking on a tightrope towards the unknown.

Signorelli (2006) highlights the role of women and the feminist movement in these changes. Despite enduring discrimination, even within the left-wing and student movements, women played a decisive role in shifting the dominant discourse in Italy towards more progressive and libertarian views, such as on divorce and abortion, and the reformation of the civil and penal codes, which in some areas still adhered to Fascist laws. Gilpin (2003) adds that the 1970s was a decade of huge economic crisis in the western world after about twenty years of growth, particularly in Italy. The discontent emerging in various social classes also boosted the desire for novelty and the willingness to break with the past. Cento Bull and Giorgio (2006) suggest that the support of the government by PCI, and the politically relevant responsibilities they were then given, implied the party no longer worked as opposition and might have been involved in political decisions. As Ignazi (2006) points out, two successful referendums held in the 1970s – one on the right to divorce and the other on the right to abortion – demonstrated that progressive views had penetrated the majority of Italian society. Throughout the western world, the 1980s were a decade of conservative politics exemplified by the leadership of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States (Savoie 1994). However, Italy’s version of this changing tide was moderate, quiet and, as ever, mediated by the paternalistic approach of DC (Camaiora 2014). Even though neo-liberalism had also started to grow in Italy during these years, Italian workers did not pay the same price as the British miners, 9for example, or the around 11,000 air traffic controllers who lost their jobs under Reagan’s administration. The major change in 1980s Italy was cultural rather than political: termed riflusso (‘reflux’), or ‘the return home’, the trend consisted of a detachment from politics and a new interest in private life. Italians found refuge in the concept of the home as a cosy nest in contrast to the disquiet of the external social world. As a result, the traditional political parties gradually became extraneous to people’s everyday lives (Colarizi et al. 2004) and television was key to the birth of new political leaders more concerned with their public image than with the ideology of their parties. This development, along with the political relevance of riflusso, will be developed in more depth in Chapter 4.

Caldwell (2006: 69) observes ‘the interrelation of the political and the personal arenas’ in