Start Date
26-5-2020 3:15 PM
End Date
26-5-2020 3:30 PM
Description
Emilio Lusso (2014, pp.127–128), in his WWI memoir of the Italian southern front, remembers his orderly telling him: ‘I like eating all those little birds with polenta, don’t get me wrong. Fig peckers are tasty. But, no offense to the Veneto, I prefer roasted blackbirds and thrushes.’ The birds, he insists, must be roasted on a wooden spit, never metal: ‘You have to use soft wood. Chew on it a little and check the flavor.’ Encounters over food customs, choices, and preferences are consequences of war’s disruption. This disruption of foodways is most immediately felt in terms of shortages, rationing, and starvation, and food shortages can also be drivers of war (Collingham, 2012, p.16). Here, however, we examine how the disruption and dislocation of war triggers encounters between people of different culinary identities, which are potentially sites for cultural transfer. Cultural transfer is a mutual restructuring involving cultural interactions and mutual adaptations (Manz and Panayi, 2012, p.132), which may involve explicit knowledge transfer as described above, but also the development of sensory predispositions to new foods through smell, appearance, or taste. The vast mobilization of soldiers from different regions of this young Italian nation exposed soldiers of diverse culinary and linguistic traditions to food they had never eaten before. WWI forged a ‘national diet’ contributing to what is now known as la cucina italiana (Sonenfeld, 2003, p.xi). Using letters, diaries, and memoirs, this paper describes Italian soldiers’ encounters with different culinary traditions and their role in an emergent national culinary identity. World War I saw the mobilization of soldiers
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/n40g-yp46
Included in
Italian Soldiers in WWI and the Emergence of a National Culinary Identity
Emilio Lusso (2014, pp.127–128), in his WWI memoir of the Italian southern front, remembers his orderly telling him: ‘I like eating all those little birds with polenta, don’t get me wrong. Fig peckers are tasty. But, no offense to the Veneto, I prefer roasted blackbirds and thrushes.’ The birds, he insists, must be roasted on a wooden spit, never metal: ‘You have to use soft wood. Chew on it a little and check the flavor.’ Encounters over food customs, choices, and preferences are consequences of war’s disruption. This disruption of foodways is most immediately felt in terms of shortages, rationing, and starvation, and food shortages can also be drivers of war (Collingham, 2012, p.16). Here, however, we examine how the disruption and dislocation of war triggers encounters between people of different culinary identities, which are potentially sites for cultural transfer. Cultural transfer is a mutual restructuring involving cultural interactions and mutual adaptations (Manz and Panayi, 2012, p.132), which may involve explicit knowledge transfer as described above, but also the development of sensory predispositions to new foods through smell, appearance, or taste. The vast mobilization of soldiers from different regions of this young Italian nation exposed soldiers of diverse culinary and linguistic traditions to food they had never eaten before. WWI forged a ‘national diet’ contributing to what is now known as la cucina italiana (Sonenfeld, 2003, p.xi). Using letters, diaries, and memoirs, this paper describes Italian soldiers’ encounters with different culinary traditions and their role in an emergent national culinary identity. World War I saw the mobilization of soldiers