The Rise of the Nonna (2024)

A century has passed since Mussolini’s ascent to power, and only a few first-hand witnesses are left standing. My grandmother, at 90 years old, is one of them. Only the Nonna’s of Italy are left to carry a memory of the nation that existed back then: an Italy many contemporary ethnonationalists seek to harken back to. A lot is at stake with regard to the Nonna, and her image has garnered much media appeal in recent times. You may have seen her on “Pasta Grannies,” the YouTube channel with almost one million followers. She kneads away at pasta dough with her calloused hands in her wonderfully old home. Strewn with artifacts and photos of her past, we feel suspended in time, as we watch her craft a wonderfully traditional dish, imagining the smell of garlic wafting through our computer screen.

Or maybe, if you’re Italian, you have heard her referenced in the song Le Tagliatelle di Nonna Pina, released in 2003 for an annual children’s song competition, whose chorus reads:

Long live the tagliatelle of Grandma Pina

Full of energy, the effect of a vitamin

Sensational at lunch, dinner, and believe me

They are even good in the morning instead of coffee!

And now come on! What is the problem?

Grandma Pina is thinking of us to remove the stress!

We all know her, both inside and outside of Italy. The like/life-generating, heartwarming grandmother figure. But her increasing media popularity is not solely due to her appealing recipes and familiar smile (although no doubt that certainly plays a part). Why are we so obsessed with the Italian Nonna as a figure? How and why did the Nonna figure arise? How might we place this obsession in Italy’s larger culinary history, a history that, as established, is deeply linked to the state involvement in domestic life and prescription of female subjectivity? How does the Nonna provide the Italian nation a vessel for its reproduction? What can collective obsession with the Nonna figure tell us about the ways Italy is trying to sustain and maintain itself?

Let’s rewind the clock to March 20th, 1986. A day that for many Italians marked a point of no return. It was the day the first McDonald's opened in Italy, its golden arches beside the splendor of Rome’s Spanish Steps. Many embraced its arrival, but an equally forceful camp denounced its opening with vociferous force. One such critic was Carlo Petrini, a journalist, and member of Italy’s communist party, who in response to the threat of “McDonaldization” wrote the Slow Food Manifesto that opens with the line:

Born and nurtured under the sign of Industrialization, this century first invented the machine and then modeled its lifestyle after it. Speed became our shackles. We fell prey to the same virus: 'the fast life' that fractures our customs and assails us even in our own homes, forcing us to ingest “fast-food.”

How does Petrini hope to achieve tranquil material pleasure? And to whom is he proposing this lifestyle change? Firstly, the Slow Food movement is intended to be an international one. While its origins lie in Italy, Petrini intends for his audience to be the international “gourmand,” not addressing a specific nationality, class position, or gender. One can assume that said person is one with the material means to prioritize pleasure, often costly, over convenience, often cheaper.

Slow Food is a movement that saw its vision as universal as opposed to other movements at the time. Slow Food was not anti-American and embraced new forms of capitalist commerce that emerged from globalization. Slow Food excelled due to its commercial instincts. It reaped excellent profits from distributing Italian gastronomic and wine guides and hosting the annual Salone del Gusto (Taste Fair), Italy’s largest food show (which is still operating to this day). This “postmodern exposition hall” gives space to hundreds of small food producers to sell their goods.

Petrini and the Slow Food movement have been accused by many of being elitist “food snobs.” I tend to agree with this characterization. The person Petrini addresses is implicitly classed, most likely a person with disposable income, the frenetic lifestyle of the late 20th century depriving them of pleasure, tradition, and roots. It is for anyone who has found their environment, their “land and (city) scape” affected by the turn to ‘fast food.’ This audience emerges from Petrini's sparse prose and thin call to action: it is the urban dwelling luddite committed to the “pleasure” of “traditional” cooking and living. This person should liberate themselves from the ‘fast life’ by:

cultivating taste, rather than impoverishing it, by stimulating progress, by encouraging international exchange programs, by endorsing worthwhile projects, by advocating historical food culture and by defending old-fashioned food traditions.

While its propositions seem on the surface to be well-intentioned, certain risks and tensions arise when we begin to consider Slow Food’s evident affinity for “defending old-fashioned food traditions.” In a later address, Petrini affirmed the manifesto’s original intent by saying that the SF movement was about “respect for traditional knowledge resting in the hands of humble people, of farmers, fisherman [and] food producers.”

Kelly Donati, in her piece, The Pleasure of Diversity on Slow Food’s Ethics of Taste, takes a particularly critical stance against Petrini's solicitations for a revival of traditional food practices. To her, Slow Food’s efforts to develop an “ethics of taste” are compromised by its failure to address its elitism and privilege. This privilege, she asserts, is derived from an economic system shaped by imperialism and the nostalgic renderings of the “other.” While well-intentioned, Slow Food runs the risk of fetishizing cultural diversity and sentimentalizing the struggle many face for cultural and/or economic survival.

While conceived as a movement to fight against the hom*ogenizing powers of global capitalism, Slow Food has a more complex network of problems within its mission and implementation. Donati then discusses how the relationship between:

Slow Food USA and its cultural “other” which is not constituted by a racial difference but through an understanding of class in which European culture is held up as a pinnacle of culinary culture and sophistication, a ‘benchmark of superior lifestyle and consumption practices,’ whereby even the underprivileged are to be envied for their more traditional lives, their authenticity and their diets of high-quality, artisanally produced foods.

The link to the Nonna figure becomes glaringly evident. Even the underprivileged Nonna is lauded for her traditional and authentic lifestyle. To an American, her simple and restrained manner of consumption is idolized by its perceived contrast to their own culture, one marred by overconsumption and cultural deficit. In the fetishization of culinary practices, one loses sight that this lifestyle was born out of scarcity, repression, and unwaged labor.

In his complete omission of women and their relation to traditional food practices, Petrini continues the exploitative agenda of previous Italian governments. The Slow Food manifesto and movement completely gloss over the ever-changing socio-economic and historical construction of ‘tradition’ and returns women to their traditional role as kitchen workers. By promoting and upholding a vision of Italian food culture as defined by the “authenticity and simplicity” of an artisanal class, one continues to overlook the labor of women in the kitchen and the nebulous history of that tradition.

But before continuing with this line of thought – one must interrogate how and why this exaltation of “slow” and “authentic” came to be. In the 1990s many assumed that right-wing nationalism had largely taken a step back from dominant political organizing. From a contemporary standpoint, we can see that ethnonationalism at the time was simply hiding itself and proliferating through other innocuous agents. Although he would probably be disgusted at the proposition, Petrini was one agent this ideology hid within.

Why do I say this? As established, the Slow Food movement is characterized by its nostalgic longing for an idealized time. Petrini’s movement shows us how a globalized society is perceived as a threat. While Slow Food is commonly seen as a grassroots activist movement, it is also a vessel for the resurgence of ethnonational tendencies into the mainstream. The question then, is not is “slow” better than “fast,” but what are we slowing down for? What do we risk when we are willing to slow down so fast?

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We begin to see the outline of the Nonna emerge from Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Manifesto and its appraisal of traditional foodways. It’s a call that originates from the turn of the 21st century but persists strongly to this day. Slowness and a return to a more “authentic time” seem to arise in reaction to flows of cross-national capital that rearrange modern notions of place and narrative.

Since the start of the 21st century, national character, for those with ethnonationalist affinities (conscious or subconscious), is defined by a striving for authenticity as a defensive reaction to globalization and spatio-temporal reorganization of postmodernity. We can see this materialize on an economic level in the late 20th century. At this moment, the Italian economy increasingly shifted its attention from a national to a global market. “Authenticity” began to play a crucial role in helping industries, such as food and tourism, secure profits in a changing economic landscape.

An example of this phenomenon is in the codification of quality stamps in Italy. Originally implemented by the Italian government in 1954, the D.O.C stamp (Denomination of Certified Origin) “certifies the denomination of specific food in geographically delimited areas, produced in observance of local and constant customs.”

In 1992 the D.O.C stamp was overruled by the D.O.P (Denomination of Protected Origin) and the I.G.P (Indicazione Geografica Protetta), two certifications ratified and implemented by Europe-wide regulation, as opposed to the D.O.C, which was solely Italian. These two labels intend to define and protect a food’s ‘specificity’ if it is “produced by traditional raw material or has a traditional composition or is produced/processed traditionally.” These laws are useful for Italian regional and national economies, helping increase the profitability of both. For example, they ensure that Parmigiano Reggiano, a cheese produced in the Reggio Emilia region of Italy, is afforded a special seal of legal approval. This certification helps boost sales and inflate prices.^,,

For the sake of my argument, these certifications present a trifold significance. Firstly, it is important to note how the Italian-specific D.O.C stamp was overwhelmed and subsumed by the Europe-wide D.O.P stamp. This encroachment speaks to the increasing reliance and integration of the Italian economy into a greater international one.

Secondly, these food certifications show an increasing obsession with food origin, affirming the mounting tendency to prioritize spatial enclosures and geographic delimitation in an age where globalization rendered spatial boundaries increasingly porous. With a mounting global concern for food tracing and sourcing, exemplified by the Slow Food movement and its international success, Italian producers, entrepreneurs, and government officials saw an opportunity to capitalize on Italy's perceived vocation as a producer of 'typical' foods, using the potency of food certifications to bolster lost economic margins (especially after the 2008 global recession).

Lastly, these food stamps exemplify a temporal transition. As opposed to previous moments in Italian History, such as the fascist period, the Italian nation tries to “conserve” itself through the conservation of its food and its traditions. “Conservation,” in this context, implies a temporality characterized by stasis and nostalgic longing. This stands in direct contrast with “conservation” in the fascist period where the word denoted extension of food rations, a future-oriented mindset. Contemporary conservation is marked by an affinity for the past, as opposed to the future. The Italian national project is not tied to what Italy can become, but rather what supposedly once was. It is about ensuring the sanctity of space and not so much about moving through time. Conservation, in this case, stands directly in opposition to the modern time, characterized by progressive change. Change, ultimately, is a threat to conservation.

At the turn of the 21st century, food authenticity became a key component to the construction of an Italian national identity: both symbolically and economically, by increasing the flow of capital for the Italian state. In their book Shopping for Identity, Marilyn Halter writes:

The search for authenticity is very much related to nostalgia for an idealized and fixed point in time when folk culture was supposedly untouched by the corruption that is automatically associated with commercial development. Hence, the more artificiality, anonymity, and uncertainty apparent in a postmodern world, the more driven the quests for authentic experiences and the more people long to feel connected to localized traditions seeking out the timeless and true.

With emergent globalized flows of capital, authenticity itself becomes a commodity, a hyper-profitable one at that. For the Italian state to secure international capital, it must attempt to “fix” a point in time for the tourist that evokes an idealized authenticity and nostalgia. The easiest way to do this is by way of space and place. The delimitation of a place and terroir can be seen as a transmitter of authenticity, especially concerning food.

Frequently this enclosed space is the home, the kitchen, the place where the Nonna works. In this way, the woman is still enclosed in a similar manner that she was in fascist times, and her ability to remain within that enclosure ensures the authentic sanctity of the food she creates and the credibility and profitability of the Italian nation. If in contemporary Italy the government strives to capitalize on the production of typical foods, then Italian women are appraised if they remain bound to the enclosure of the kitchen. Nonna’s are the determining factor in Italy’s ability to thrive into the future. They produce both cultural capital and actual capital by heightening tourism and the nation-state’s export capacity.

Doreen Massey, in the “Place called Home” chapter of her book Space, Place, and Gender, postulates that the postmodern reconfiguration of global space, shifts in capital flow, and new technologies of communication have undermined the sense of ‘a place-called-home’ leaving the citizens of a globalized world placeless and disorientated. As a reaction to this placelessness, the nation is increasingly reliant on ethnicity and gender to serve as guideposts in inhabiting this new postmodern time-space compression since the nation-state and the structures of identity through which it orders itself are historical entities.

Given these contemporary anxieties of placelessness and community dissolution, many nations will try to re-establish a sense of place by developing policies and movements to reconnect place, identity, and belonging. The result is a nationalism obsessed with re-tracing enclosures, defining space to market it for investment or tourism. The negative implications of this spatial obsession are manifold. Firstly, creating boundaries and enclosures invariably establishes a counter position with an imagined “other,” someone outside those spaces.

Additionally, contemporary ethnonationalist movements are problematic, because, as Massey states, they “seek the identity of a place by laying claim to some particular moment/location in time-space when the definition of the area and the social relations dominant within it were to the advantage of that particular claimant group.” The moment in time and space that is being recreated, at least in the Italian sense, is a moment before urbanization. A moment Italians lived a simple and uncorrupted way of life, farming plots of land with their family and creating community out of local parishes and festivals. This frozen time benefits the “particular claimant group,” in this case white Italian men, who had liberties and freedom at that moment in time-space. It’s an ironic and misinformed image, considering that during this illusive time/space, the people on the Italian peninsula did not yet see themselves as a nation.

In this lost national time, the Nonna is pictured as a proto-peasant, informed by prior mythology attaching womanhood to parsimony and sacrificiality. Umberto Eco, in his piece Travels in Hyperreality, writes “there is a tendency to romanticize working-class communal sensibilities, especially the dynamics of lower-class racial and ethnic groups. The simple assumption is that those who are working-class are more genuinely ethnic.” It can be said that within the more “genuinely ethnic” working class, women are romanticized even more than their male counterparts. As the working class within the working class, female domestic “labor of love” is imagined as a haven in an increasingly capitalist world. Women are idolized as the foundation of an ethnic community that stands against a hom*ogenous capitalist world.^,

There is an added layer of racial nuance regarding the Italian Nonna that should not be overlooked. In her book Strange Encounters, postcolonial studies scholar Sarah Ahmed writes:

Differences that can be consumed are the ones that are valued: difference is valued insofar as it can be incorporated into, not only the nation space, but also the individual body, the body-at-home (this body does not have to leave home to ‘eat’ difference). By implication, differences that cannot be assimilated into the nation or body through the process of consumption have no value.

To Ahmed, in a culture defined by globalization, the Western subject is invited to consume the “exotic” stranger. The identity of the consuming subject is created and confirmed in relation to the stranger, but only strangers who can be “assimilated into the nation or body.”

The Italian Nonna is one such stranger, due to her proximity to the Western subject: her whiteness is just different enough to be seen as “exotic” by the non-Italian white consumer but similar enough to pose no racial illegibility and tension. The place she inhabits is palatable in large part because of the ways the Western consumer can locate their own recent past within her narrative. She is desirable because she is representative of their own estranged homeland.

The ethnic and class-based differences of the Nonna, as Ahmed notes, are both valuable and consumable. She is easily integrated into both the Italian nation space and the bodies that consume her food. However, the labor the tourist imagines the Nonna performing has been outsourced to other “others,” namely the racialized migrant subjects arriving from neighboring African countries. Those whose differences cannot “be assimilated into the nation or body” and therefore have no consumptive “value.” The olives and grapes picked by the hand of white peasant Italians are now largely being outsourced to migrants, exploited for cheaper labor. The idyllic and romanticized version of Italian peasantry is memorialized as a form of contemporary erasure. So while Italianness is defined by the external global gaze which conjures images of white peasantry, old women with linen kerchiefs in their hair, Italianness becomes internally defined once more in opposition to a racial other.

Fixing oneself too heavily to the trappings of the Nonna figure, one risks glorifying an image of Italianness that is outdated and problematic. Through her idolization, other identifications are deemed undesirable, inauthentic, un-Italian, or simply nonexistent. The labor of racialized migrants goes unnoticed and exploited. The Italian women who do not promote and uphold an image of idealized love, care, and proper domestic production, are deemed threatening (mainly by right-wing traditionalists) to national cohesion.

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The problematics and histories of the Nonna figure raise many questions: Is there a way the Nonna can be liberated from the shackles of authenticity? An authenticity that ties her to systems of exploitation and oppression? In his piece “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin highlights the concept of authenticity and aura, specifically with relation to the re-production and veneration of art. I believe that his argument can also be extended to the production of food.

Benjamin writes “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Even in the most perfect reproduction of a recipe, it lacks the time and space in which it was created. It is an impossible task to reproduce the food made by a Nonna. Taste completely evades visual and written capture. Even the most meticulous reproduction of a grandmother’s dish will never compare to the original (though the originality of a recipe is contestable on principle). Given this irreplicability, the Nonna becomes a sort of gatekeeper of authenticity. And since Italian nationhood is so predicated on its ties to an authentic food tradition, the Nonna becomes a contemporary gatekeeper for national identity as well.

But does this attribution of authenticity in Benjamin’s sense of the word ultimately afford power to the Nonna? When we invoke the authentic and glorify the Nonna, do we ultimately re-inscribe masculinist and nationalist enclosures? Whose vision of Italy are we advancing? If the Nonna figure is produced by reactionary ethnonationalist sentiment, how might we reconcile all that we love about our Nonna without carrying the baggage attached to her?

The answers to these questions are beyond the scope of my present analysis, and by focusing too much on these big questions one can also risk losing sight of other things. In my case, those are the very personal motivators that prompted the start of this inquiry: the effect evoked by the act of cooking my family’s recipes. The love I have for my own mother and grandmother.

How does one walk the fine line between highlighting space/place as integral to history and politics without producing a reactionary nostalgia, holding the kitchen space hostage by masculinist longing for tradition. How might we highlight the importance of our Nonna’s kitchens in a manner that doesn’t re-enclose her in an idealized past? Perhaps there is no time better than the present.

The power of food production should not be undervalued as a mode of praxis, a mode of resistance. When one cooks one can escape and evade social prescriptions of space and time. In their piece “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, and Lateral Agency)” Lauren Berlant writes

Eating is a form of ballast against wearing out; but it is also a counter dissipation in that, like other small pleasures, it can produce an experience of self-abeyance, of floating sideways. In this view it’s not synonymous with agency in the tactical or effectual sense dedicated to self-negation or self-extension, but self-suspension.

“Slow Food” in Berlant’s usage, occupies a different meaning than Carlo Petrini’s. Slowness here is a pause, a suspension. It’s a relief from the speeds of capitalism and state interests. Eating becomes a space of possibility through intermission. Taking pleasure in eating can be seen as an act that interrupts the liberal and capitalist subject. While eating is very much an embodied practice, at the table, we also suspend ourselves from the realities we inhabit during the rest of the day (that, at least, is the hope).

The force food holds is its ability to help us live in the “overwhelming present.” This presence, engendered by the kitchen, is powerful in its own right. It tames chaos and change and it is chaos and change. While we cannot and should not ignore the histories of the food we eat, and the people making it, eating can still be a space of “lateral agency.” We can understand the implications of the Nonna, and her constructed authenticity while allowing ourselves the relief of eating at her table.